This essay argues that a sustained, consistent, and ambitious argument underlies Annette Michelson's writings on art and film across the 1970s and 1980s. Working in relation to modernist discourses of the 1960s, Michelson sets out a complex and dense account of time and temporal organization in cinema that she links to a developmental model of film spectatorship. Read in this way, Michelson’s writing represents an alternate and overlooked strand of film theory and criticism that took shape in these years, one that provides a radical way to understand and evaluate cinematic avant-gardes—and an alternative model of spectatorship, grounded in the logic of cognitive maturity, in contrast to what I call the infantile tendencies in film theory. 

Workshop 14:00, gleicher Ort