ABSTRACT

When does postmodernity begin? And why do women love to shop? And what does any of this have to do with the cinema? In Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg, associate professor of Film Studies at the University of California, turns her gaze upon the nineteenth century for an answer, and argues that the architecture of the city, consumerism and photography produced the decentered, dehistoricized, detemporalized subjectivity often called the ‘postmodern condition’. She argues for the need to ‘reintroduce history into the debate about postmodernism’ (p. 5). Providing an often fascinating account of how the everyday experiences of the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of the consumer culture, department-store shopping, packaged tourism, and photography led to a ‘mobilized visuality’, and a new sense of distance and time, Friedberg argues that a ‘prehistory of postmodernity’ was thus already ‘present at the beginnings of the break into the “modern”’ (p. 6). Also present, she argues, were women gaining a new freedom and power within the formerly male-dominated public space. Her analysis is a productive and entertaining journey through a variety of texts, from modernist writings to contemporary films, as well as through architecture and cinematic apparatuses. Central to Friedberg’s concerns are the many contemporary debates and ‘potentially conflicting discourses’ of feminist studies, and the ‘often warring methodologies of film history and film theory’ (p. 5). Growing out of a series of lectures dating to 1988, Window Shopping’s four chapters thus present several lines of argument, though the effects of visual culture on subjectivity via film and architecture ground each. Friedberg negotiates the disjunctions between the four chapters (and arguments) primarily in two ways: first with the Introduction, in which she sets out her argument (s) and key terms-which she quite helpfully defines (including the now much reviled ‘postmodern’, or ‘P’ word, as she calls it); and secondly with what she calls ‘passages’, or ‘transitional texts designed to illustrate the movement’ of her argument through ‘a range of interdisciplinary examples from literature, architecture, and film’ (p. 11). The seams of the book are therefore fairly wide, though the general features for her argument are present in each chapter. But there is considerable overlap, so as a whole the book is often curiously disjointed yet repetitive. This is unfortunate since, as a cultural study, the convergence of theoretical and historical inquiry combined with the material (and virtual) circumstances of everyday life has a lot to offer. Friedberg’s reading of modernity, postmodernity, and feminism is nevertheless

compelling, and often more provocative, especially in her move toward ‘pursuing a corrective to previously gender-blind work’ in relation to ‘accounts of modernity’ (p. 9).