Viktor Shklovsky’s Ostrannenie and the ‘Hermeneutics of wonder’

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this conversation, Tom Gunning and Annie van den Oever return to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostrannenie (making strange), a neologism coined in what turned out to become a modern art theory that was developed by the young Shklovsky in the midst of the great popularity of film shows in Russia in 1913. Tom Gunning is a film historian and a theorist who wrote a series of foundational texts about early cinema that helped establish the ‘hermeneutics of wonder’ as a foundational method for a cultural archaeology of media and New Film History.[For more on Gunning’s foundational work on early cinema, see ‘The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, and his co-authored work with André Gaudreault, ‘Early Cinema as a Challenge to Film History’]. Annie van den Oever is a film scholar who published on defamiliarization and edited Ostrannenie (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), which features an excavation of the seminal Shklovsky text, ‘Art as Technique’, reread within the context of early cinema. Both are Shklovsky enthusiasts and for this special issue they address a series of questions concerning the formal and neoformalist methods, ostrannenie as a method in research and teaching, and ‘wonder’ as a heuristic and creative tool in research and educational practices.