1118 Book Reviews

than the character, the actor, or the icon. As Iwamura argues, this
hyperreality ultimately creates new arrangements of intimacy and
understanding.
Framing her argument with Said’s theory of Orientalism, Iwam-
ura comments that conceptions of the Orient appearing in the
Western world actually reveal much more about the subjectivity of
the West than any essential understanding of Asian culture or reli-
gions. Consequently, Iwamura sees visual representations of the
Oriental Monk as key to highlighting the United States’ changing
geopolitical relationship with the Asian world. Images of the Orien-
tal Monk serve as a measure of these relations as people mapped
beliefs and fears on to the icon through aspects of race, class, gender,
and nationality.
Iwamura’s interdisciplinary study provides a compelling, engag-
ing, and thoughtful account of an oft under-analyzed aspect of
American popular culture. Her prose is clear and succinct and the
generous amount of images included in the book helps to make her
arguments accessible and persuasive. Her balance of productive the-
ory and innovative close readings of texts creates a robust argument
that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. Most importantly,
however, Virtual Orientalism offers a stellar and much-needed exam-
ple of quality scholarship addressing the relationship between non-
Christian American religions and popular culture and aptly and use-
fully highlights the significance of this topic in the larger landscape
of American public life.

Kate Netzler Burch

Indiana University – Bloomington

Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and

Theodor W Adorno. Miriam Hansen. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012. 408 pp. $79 cloth; $29.90 paperback.

Cinema and Experience—Miriam Hansen’s posthumously published

work that engages the film writings of Kracauer, Benjamin, and
Adorno is an indisputable reaffirmation of her theoretical virtuosity
embodied in prose that keeps opening new conceptual landscapes for
Book Reviews 1119

the reader to explore. Hansen responds to each of the three Frankfurt

School thinkers and puts them in conversations with each other in a
way that traces the history of film theory and gestures towards its
future.
The project of the book, Hansen’s main motivational engine in
writing it, is to propose models for transcending the long-standing
divide between political and social perspectives of film analysis on one
hand and formal and aesthetic inquiries on the other. In resolving this
tension, the notion of experience is of central significance. In the pre-
face of the book Hansen discusses Negt and Kluge’s response to Haber-
mas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). In a
volume entitled Public Sphere and Experience, Negt and Kluge pushed
the boundaries of Habermas’ public sphere to include the new social
movements of the 1970s and defined this new space as a “social horizon
of experience” (qtd. in Hansen xiv). Negt and Kluge seem to have
inspired Hansen to apply a similar rhetorical move in the realm of film
theory. She contends that in its classical formulation Frankfurt School
critical theory tends to view film as embedded in the consumer frame-
work of the culture industries and focus on its role in the reification of
commodities and the reproduction of the individual as a worker and a
consumer. Film is thus seen as a manifestation of modernity and sub-
sumed in the critique of it. Within that model the spectator is
assumed to have a limited role as a passive recipient of filmic content
that keeps him/her distracted from the true conditions of his existence.
Analysis in the Frankfurt critical tradition, however, Hansen seems to
suggest, elides an important aspect of film in the modern period—that
the medium is bound up in profound changes in sensory perception
and the nature of subjectivity. The audience can therefore appropriate
film in alternative ways unanticipated by critical analysis (as Hansen’s
seminal essay on Rudolph Valentino demonstrated). To account for
that change of the “social horizon of experience” of cinema, critical the-
ory must push its boundaries to include concerns of style and aesthet-
ics. Hansen suggests that this is key to bringing critical theory up to
date to the present moment and to expanding its relevance to a broader
range of topics such as digital cinema and new media. Cinema contin-
gencies on the institutional and socio-political apparatus have to be
balanced with its role in the “evolving phenomenology of modernity”
(Hansen xvii).
1120 Book Reviews

The book is organized in four parts: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno,

and Kracauer in Exile. Hansen seems to take most interest in
Kracauer as evidenced by the extra chapter she dedicates to him.
This could be due to Kracauer’s late arrival in academic scholarship
(he was not subject to academic interest until the 1980s) but also
because she finds him to be uniquely positioned with respect to the
direction of film theory that she points to. Her reading of his works
is redemptive suggesting that earlier analyses that dismissed his The-
ory of Film for its “naive realism” (qtd. in Hansen 254) were errone-
ous. Instead, Hansen argues, Theory of Film offers a “theory of film
experience,” (255) which encompasses aesthetics to account for the
mimetic, embodied, lived experience of cinema. It is in Kracauer
that Hansen finds the cues for re-envisioning and re-imagining film
theory in a more complex and multifarious way that allows it to
stake a larger territory of the filmic experience and open it for exam-
ination. This is necessary because the filmic experience takes the
viewer into a “dimension” beyond what semiotics, new historicism
or cultural studies have been able to inhabit, which Hansen terms
“realm of experience” (277).
Surveying Benjamin’s writings, Hansen finds similar themes to
those found in Kracauer that gesture towards the importance of
experience. Similarly to Kracauer, Benjamin advances the notion of
room-for-play (or Spielraum) or cinema as a medium for play that
presents the viewer with a point of departure in appropriating expe-
rience. Of equal importance are the ideas of innervation: the neuro-
physiological mediation between the physical and the machinic and
mimetic faculty (which is also a subject of Adorno’s interest): “the
gift of seeing and producing similarities that unconsciously or
imperceptibly permeate our lives” (Hansen 120). By focusing on
these two concepts of Benjamin, Hansen builds a bridge between the
latter’s critical theory and new media phenomena like internet me-
mes and appropriation of popular content on the web that is charac-
teristic of online visual culture.
Adorno’s writings, Hansen contends are only tangentially related
to film. To illustrate Adorno’s position with respect to cinema, she
quotes Alexander Kluge’s quip about the former: “I love to go to
the cinema; the only thing that bothers me is the image on the
screen” (Hansen, xviii). Yet she does credit Adorno for his sobering
look into the emerging trends in the conglomeration of the culture
Book Reviews 1121

industry although the latter’s “paranoid” (xvii) writings on the

culture industry’s usurpation of the viewer’s mind are less the focus
of her analysis. Yet since cinema was not Adorno’s primary focus of
analysis, his writings on film are episodic and the strands that
Hansen is able to pull out do not amount to a coherent theory of
cinema. The central premise of his perspective on film is that
cinema’s photographic simulation of the world compromised its
role as a transformative medium. Hansen, however, brings aesthet-
ics back into the discourse arguing that Adorno’s real concern is
not so much the ideological proclivities of film as the aesthetic pre-
occupation with its “photographic irreducibility,” which for
Adorno “negat[es]… its own status as art” (220). Even in this pro-
posed shift of interpretation of Adorno, one can discern Hansen’s
larger project of providing a model for replacing the political and
social lens of film analysis with one that includes questions of
aesthetics, a new combined and wider framework that she dubs
cinema experience.
What is perhaps a trickier question, however, than the necessary
inclusion of aesthetics into film theory and reconciling the tension
between the former and social/political critiques is finding the
correct balance between the two. A heavier emphasis on the social
and political perspective could elide important aspects of a specific
cinematic experience that are related to form and style. An emphasis
on aesthetics, on the other hand, could motivate charges of naı̈ve
optimism unhinged from the larger institutional/capitalist apparatus
at work.
While Hansen opens new horizons of film theory where the tradi-
tional limitations of critical theory can be subverted in the direction
of a deeper engagement with filmic material, it is important to note
that she charts the road ahead primarily with respect to critical the-
ory and its recontextualization in the present moment. She does not
engage with other traditions (i.e., feminist film criticism) as that is
not part of her project but that could become problematic since her
survey of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno is ultimately a point of
departure into the possible futures of film, in which feminist criti-
cism appears to be absent.
Nevertheless, Hansen’s work arrests with the depth of her theoret-
ical insight and the steady flow of interpretive slights of hand, with
which she is able to challenge and dislocate accepted readings of
1122 Book Reviews

Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno and place them in a reimagined

context of a cinema of experience.

Dora Valkanova
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular

Music Since 1960. David Ingram. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
278 pp. $79.44 paperback.

The Jukebox in the Garden demonstrates how American popular

music—from folk and country to jazz and hip hop—has given voice to
new questions and insights about wider social, political, and historical
contexts in an age of ecological crisis. Once again leading the study of
popular culture into promising new territory, British scholar David
Ingram investigates a wide range of theoretical and ecophilosophical
approaches to the study of popular music as he speculates on the poten-
tial role of popular music in raising environmental awareness. As in
his previous book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Film
(2000), Ingram provides a comprehensive overview of his subject by
employing concise diction and meticulous organization. One of
Ingram’s great strengths is his ability to summarize and explicate the
musings and ideas of an exhaustive number of musicians and theorists
while maintaining a clear sense of argument and direction throughout
each chapter. Ingram demonstrates this strength in two ways. First,
the book opens with a series of chapters that examine the ecophilo-
sophical claims that have been made about music by John Cage and
other thinkers. These chapters establish the key concepts and theories
that inform the rest of the book and usefully bridge the scholarly dis-
course of ecocriticism with those of musicology and cultural theory.
Ingram offers a compelling justification for this study by connecting
contemporary trends in popular music and musicology to the rise of
the modern environmental movement since the 1960s. Chapter One,
for example, explores the different ethical positions toward popular
music, society, and the natural world taken by humanist-Marxists
Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, postmodern musicologists Susan
McClary and June Boyce Tillman, and poststructuralists Gilles