tom gunning

Gunning on Modernity:

It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.

The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.

Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.