This dissertation proposes a new theoretical account of spectatorship in a lyric mode in cinema and present case studies of how media actualize self-authentic participation and imagination. My study begins with the 1920s silent cinema and traces a tradition of gestures in the video installations by contemporary artists. Drawing upon spectatorship studies, lyric theory, cultural studies, enunciation theory, theories of gender and performativity, and Frankfurt School media theory, I show how formal techniques such as apostrophe, the address of inanimate objects, and the use of deixis serve as interfaces to animate and transform the subjectivity of the spectator. I argue that this approach necessitates seeing media as “documents” for actualization, performance, translation, and adaptation. Furthermore, the lyric offers a space for self-authentic enunciation in early cinema that resurfaces as the “real” in a post-truth digital age.

Through the ethical potential of invocatory gestures found in lyric poems, this inquiry considers the historical material conjunctures at moments of their recording and projection. It takes an openness and receptivity to be central values of that which the lyric documents and generates. This project seeks to answer the invitation by reaching back towards the 1920s. The chapters hinge on Russian, Soviet readers and spectators, whose viewing practices actualize Weimar Germany and 19th century America. As the poet-spectators sought to translate their experience of watching a film into a poem or a poem into a film, they worked across languages, media, and national contexts, in what are also acts of adaptation. These new works crucially retain “lyric gestures” of address in their contingency upon their immediate environments, enlarging our awareness of immanent existential circumstances.

The resulting effects of this lyric mode in film, I argue, are the construction of a 1) collective interiority – by which I mean, a general atmosphere and tone of longing, quite often elegiac, and 2) an aspectual reflection – a play with rhyme and puns that stand in for points of contact and points of departure between the presence of the image and the absence of words, between the natural world of poetic cycles and structures and the artificial human one of narrative and history.

Poetry, which addresses things, allows us to imagine something other than an “ideal spectator,” interpellated spectator. The address of an object can be an opening for people without the status of the human whether within or because outside of a particular social, cultural, or ideological system of values. It is humanizing because it recognizes speech that is not necessarily usually recognized as “human” within human speech. When objects are animated by intention (cathexis of desire and longing not personified, anthropomorphized), even the commodity becomes particular rather than something with exchange value. The stage of exchange value creates this for the commodity while pointing to the frame in order to change it from situation to circumstance, which the lyric does best. Thinking of a film as a set of objects (even the actors are objects in Brecht’s epic theater) allows for crystallizations and for holding configurations. Sometimes faces hold whole configurations. However, by the last chapter, disfiguration becomes a resistant gesture. The hand over the face.

Autism and empathy, as terms, both arose out of the fertile ground of American mass culture. Although both figured prominently in scientific discourse from the early 1900s on, neither was a focus of either feature film or critical discourse until well into the second half of the century. Genre Disorder argues that reading scientific, popular culture, and filmic treatments of autism together within the larger framework of film genres of mobility (the maternal melodrama, the detective film, and the road movie) exposes the circulation of autism as a way to shore up normative, disembodied, spectatorship.

To support this claim, this project works through how feminist film theory and critical disability theory approach the way spectacle and narrative coalesce around and though the body. By looking at how disability and sentiment intersect in advertising, the project takes up the question of how the concept of the individual as commodity shifts between mass culture and neoliberalism. Following this, it looks closely at how autism and the individual are constructed within popular culture by tracing patterns of generic convention across primary scientific and filmic sources.

Within these analyses, this project argues that, despite the positioning of empathy as objective, narrative framework and point of view work together to maintain the normate against bodies (and minds) of difference: women, people of color, and people with disabilities.

Fryderyk Chopin's fame today is too often taken for granted. Chopin lived in a time when Poland did not exist politically, and the history of his reception must take into consideration the role played by Poland's occupying powers. Prior to 1918, and arguably thereafter as well, Poles saw Chopin as central to their "imagined community." They endowed national meaning to Chopin and his music, but the tendency to glorify the composer was in a constant state of negotiation with the political circumstances of the time. This dissertation investigates the history of Chopin's reception by focusing on several events that would prove essential to preserving and propagating his legacy. Chapter 1 outlines the indispensable role some Russians played in memorializing Chopin, epitomized by Milii Balakirev's initiative to erect a monument in Chopin's birthplace Żelazowa Wola in 1894. Despite their political tension, Russia and Poland came together in the common cause of venerating Chopin. Chapter 2 examines two instances of the Russian-Polish cooperation: Chopin centennial celebrations in 1910 and 1949. These celebrations featured speeches and commemorative concerts that later became the norm. Chapter 3 considers the International Chopin Piano Competition, founded in independent Poland in 1927. As one of the earliest international musical contests of its kind and scale, the Chopin Competition effectively turned Chopin from a national into an international figure. Furthermore, the public nature of the competition led to the engagement of the entire society, involving spectators and the press. Besides the three main chapters, two Interludes survey the representations of Chopin and his music in Russian and Polish literature. In addition to literature, this dissertation analyzes works of visual art and music to consider the process of mythmaking and its implications.