Mary Ann Doane
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Fall 2016

Mary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard, 2002), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1991), and The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Indiana, 1987). In 2007, she edited a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign.” She has also published a wide range of articles on feminist film theory, sound in the cinema, psychoanalytic theory, sexual and racial difference in film, television, photography, and digital media. She completed her PhD in Speech and Dramatic Art at the University of Iowa, and was the George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

 

Doane’s work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University, among others.

Project Description

“Bigger Than Life”: The Close-up and Scale in the Cinema

At the Academy, Doane worked on completing a book on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the ways in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity. Here she addresses the extraordinary proliferation of screen sizes in contemporary media culture, ranging from smart phones and tablets to television screens and IMAX. Scale, she argues, is a crucial issue due to its repercussions for the spectator’s orientation in and navigation of space. In an increasingly complex media environment, a face in gigantic scale both amplifies the potential power of subjectivity as a concept and simultaneously destabilizes it through its annihilation of the space it inhabits. Large screens and sound systems that invade the space of the theater seek to annihilate the frame and expand the reach of representation, promoting the concept of “immersion.” In this project, Doane investigates media’s complex attempts to orient subjects to spaces, and how subjects respond to a form of dislocation specific to the advent of modernity and its abstraction of time, space, and vision.

Academy Activities

21 Sep 16

Fellow Spotlight: Mary Ann Doane

Mary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley.At the Academy, Doane was completing a book on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the ways in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of t ...

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13 Oct 16

The Close-Up: Cinematic Scale and the Negotiation of Space

Mary Ann Doane examines the concept of scale and its increasing centrality to analysis of the work of the image in contemporary culture. Scale is a concept that crosses disciplines; it is a crucial construct in geography, art history, cartography, and music, among other practices and disciplines. Sp ...

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