Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, 288 pp.

In his Eye of the Century: Film, Experience and Modernity (originally published in Italian in 2005 as L’occhio del Novecento. Cinema, esperienza, modernità, translated into English by Erin Larkin, with Jennifer Pranolo), Francesco Casetti studies the role cinema played in negotiating the complex experiences of modernity. The first decades of the twentieth century mark the introduction of new urban environments, modes of transportation, communication, industry and social norms which transformed a sense of time, space and self-understanding. While this new environment gave rise to new, exciting opportunities and sensations, it also brought conflicting and disorienting experiences. Casetti argues that cinema filters these experiences and reproduces them in ways that reconcile the contradictory effects, constructing a negotiating “gaze” that the spectator appropriates and employs in his or her own ordinary life. A complex synthesis of theory, history and expressive prose, Eye of the Century offers a unique experience, mirroring in some ways the subject of the book; at times it disorients as much as it clarifies, producing a challenging readership position that evokes the early encounter between audience, cinema and modernity. It is a work that requires self-reflection, interpretation and significant attention to appreciate fully, but which inevitably leads to a novel understanding of the first decades of cinema and the exciting possibilities for film scholarship. Although Eye of the Century includes material from the first six decades of the twentieth century, special attention is accorded to the 1920s, given their status as a transitional period between a moment of “utopian euphoria” about cinema and its “subsequent systematization” (p. 11). The debate surrounding cinema and modernity in this era became distilled through a number of important authors across Europe and the United States. Several of cinema’s attributes justify its unique place in modernity, which Casetti introduces in the opening chapter, “The Gaze of Its Age.” Casetti finds in cinema a form that manages to absorb and represent the multitude of diverse experiences of the time, although this does not necessarily mean film functioned strictly as a passive recorder; rather, Casetti conceives of the relationship between cinema and modernity as a dialectic, back and forth process, exemplified in the key concept of “gaze” constituting the central concern of the study. Aside from this quality of “synchronicity” (being “in tune” with its time), three other features of film are presented as essential: its communicative, accessible dimension (that is, its status as a medium, not just art); the cultural myths represented in film narratives which “reflect the issues of emerging social orders” (p. 3); and, most significantly, its ability to “negotiate” the paradoxes of modernity by uniting “conflicting stimuli in an age torn by strife and dilemma” and then “offering them up in their mundane, yet at times touching and magical, everydayness” (p. 3). Film’s “gaze” incorporates each of these three features of cinema, though the latter function, as “negotiator,” emerges as the most essential in Casetti’s argument. In fact, there is not one, but five “gazes”—partial, composite, penetrating, excited and immersive—that cinema constructs, which can also be spoken of as a single, complex gaze. A chapter is dedicated to each these constituent gazes, the discussion following more or less the same argumentative structure. A fact about modernity, usually in connection with some aspect of cinema, is brought to light, through an array of evidence, including “reviews, analyses, essays, prophecies, political speeches, ironic reporting, drafts of laws, literary pieces and so on” (p. 170). Once the network of social discourses “that extend in and around cinema” (p. 170) is charted, illustrating the “synchronicity” between cinema and modernity, Casetti identifies in these discourses, and …