Captivating motion: Late-silent film sequences of perception in the modern urban environment

A number of films made between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s contain remarkable sequences depicting modern urban spaces and utilize avant-garde or experimental techniques such as extended camera movements, superimpositions, and rhythmic editing patterns in those depictions. Beyond visualizing urban modernity, these sequences work to recreate the intense perceptual experience produced by various spaces of display. The history of perceptual psychology provides concrete examples of modern perceptual conditions that underlie the changing modes of vision displayed in these films. Focusing on three spaces of display--the amusement park, the department store, and the street--this dissertation centers on sequences set in these spaces where the perceptual conditions of modernity are used for spectacular effect. This dissertation incorporates the histories of visual display, exhibition culture, and the senses, in an appeal to historians of cinema, art, and perception in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It intervenes in both traditional art-historical understandings of these spaces and the history of late-silent-era film aesthetics.;The first chapter focuses on Maurice Elvey's Hindle Wakes, whose Blackpool sequence provides an opportunity to discuss the perceptual effects of the amusement park on the individual through the history of research into vertigo and proprioception. Using Julien Duvivier's adaptation of Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames as the primary example, the second chapter examines the role of "detail" in the department store, in particular the novel perceptual experience engendered by the demanding visual stimuli of this commercial space as captured on film and the perceptual condition of agnosia. The third chapter investigates Asphalt's emphasis on two main features of urban modernity in the 1920s as a means of understanding the impact on perception of the city's experiential excess. The final chapter reassesses F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), which involves all three of the spaces under discussion, in a culmination of how these late silent film aesthetics interact with movement, in particular the phenomenon of dynamogeny. Taken together, these four chapters provide new insight into the relationship between cinema and changing modes of perception in the urban environment.