Comments on: Teaching Radio’s History http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/06/24/teaching-radios-history/ Responses to Media and Culture Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:35:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 By: Paul J. Marasa http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/06/24/teaching-radios-history/comment-page-1/#comment-442268 Wed, 24 Jun 2015 15:33:24 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=27284#comment-442268 A thought-provoking piece. Back in 2006 I began a blog, The Constant Viewer (now taken down, although I started a New Constant Viewer, one movie per year beginning in 1895), which imagined a single movie-goer who keeps a diary of the films he watches. I began it in 1876 (the diarist visits a camera obscura on the fairgrounds of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition) and ended in the present, more than 600 films total. I didn’t want to write about movies as artifacts but as what Robert Warshow famously called an “immediate experience.” Well, regardless of the effect of this on the reader, in traveling through the silent era I found myself more connected to the pre-1930 movie world in a way I’d never been. In fact, when I arrived at The Jazz Singer I was sorry to see the silents depart.

Short version: I agree with you that knowing the past involves more than a timeline of events/objects but also an exercise of imagination. My immersion in the project helped me break down certain barriers (although at 58, I certainly have much more experience than my own students of the look and feel and experience of the past century) and “to shine a light” into those “messages, meanings, and structures.” Thank you for an enlightening discussion of the challenges of exploring the “undiscovered country” of the past.

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