ABSTRACT
Film began at the same time as depth psychology, at the end of the nineteenth century. The crowd, the notion of a mass audience, had become an entity. Sociologists wrote about the disturbing increase in nervous stimulation and bodily peril, the increase in crime, the loss of traditional values and morality. The film opens with an aerial shot ranging over Iowa cornfields. The camera is like death’s inevitability: it is as near as death is near, yet impersonal, high, uncaring, then predatory. Current film ushers the reader into subjectivities the people would not have dreamt of entering a few years ago. Film uses disorder to create order of another sort, uses the lack of singular identity to explore multiple identities, uses the loss of sure-footed reality to explore other kinds of reality, other modes. Film’s response to modernity a century ago was to bind its chaos into form by crafting it. Our response a century later is identical.
