The Perceptions of the Public Sphere and the Early and Late Cinema

The renowned film historian, Miriam Hansen, wrote an article entitled Early cinema, late cinema: Permutations of the Public sphere in the year 1993. In this article she highlighted the changes that occurred in the cinematic entertainment industry and how the concept of public sphere transformed within this period of time. Hansen identifies key economic and technological changes that occurred in the 1970s setting a new pace for cinematic films. These included, cable systems, video playbacks and satellites. Additionally, when people could now have televisions in their homes, it put an end to the dominance of state own cinema halls as the only means to access visual entertainment.  As a result, cinema viewers demanded to see a difference between theatre film and the films they were watching from their homes.  This saw the birth of blockbuster films. These films captured diverse themes and cultures, and just as Hansen points out, they ‘had something to offer for everyone’ and were appealing to viewers of different interests. To achieve this Hansen observes that blockbuster films used ‘diversity of attractions and multiple levels of textuality’. With a shift occurring in the ‘film-spectator relations’, change in the public sphere became inevitable.

Hansen notes that new forms of mass culture began to emerge as well as transnational corporate networks. New genres of diasporic and imported culture found their way in the society through the ‘highest forms of reception’. To understand the concept of public sphere and how it impacted cinema, Hansen explores Jurgen Habermas (1962) The structural Transformational of the Public sphere. According to Habermas, the public sphere is formed through disintegration and decline. The public acts as the mediator between the state, the market place and the family. It offers an open forum for interaction leading to ‘radically democratic politics’.

Oskar Neget and Alexander Kluge work, Public sphere and Experience refute Haberman’s ideology that public sphere emerged in the 18^th Century. They also add that public sphere is defined by photographic and electronic media rather than disintegration and decline. Public sphere is much more than the institutions, the activities, public relations but the ‘entire context of living’ as Neget and Kluge hold. This context includes experience of production, second systematic blockage, that is, the viewers are separated from the systems of public expression and lastly, response to the blockage.  The industrial commercial publics get into alliances with the bourgeoisies in the society such as ‘factory communities and spaces of commerce and consumption’ in order to make it through the context of living. These alliances are based on economic gains and they make the bourgeoisies more powerful.

Hansen’s study, early Cinema, late cinema: permutations of the public sphere is a rich source of filming history and the transformations that occurred in the 20^th Century. It is highlights the challenges that the modern filming industry had to overcome to get where they are today. Today for instance there are no bourgeoisies per say controlling what type of films are released to the public.