The ‘Education of the Eye’: Social aesthetics and Émile Vuillermoz's early film criticism

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1916, the film critic Émile Vuillermoz began one of the earliest regular series of articles on film in a French newspaper. Focusing on the first few years of Vuillermoz's writing on cinema in Le Temps, this essay aims to shed light on how this significant figure in the history of film theory contended with changing social and cinematic contexts in his elaboration of the social potential of film aesthetics. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's writing on aesthetics, politics and ‘the regime of art’, this article traces the ways in which Vuillermoz's early film criticism situated cinema as a privileged site for understanding and fashioning a social sphere through aesthetic form.