"Miriam Bratu Hansen died on February 5, 2011. She had been Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in the Department of English and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, which she founded, shaped and guided for two decades.

 

She was born in Germany in 1949, the daughter of Jewish parents who had met in exile during the war and returned to Germany. Miriam received her PhD in 1975 from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, studying with Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno during a turbulent era. She worked in English and American Literature and wrote a dissertation on Ezra Pound, but soon was drawn to the realm of film, writing on Alexander Kluge, with whom she closely interacted. 

 

Coming to the United States, she worked at the Whitney Humanity Center at Yale and taught at Rutgers University before coming to Chicago in 1990. Her research moved to the history of early American cinema and to the work of the Frankfurt school and its satellites on cinema. Both of these areas were evident in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema published in 1991, a work which gave shape to the research that had been emerging in the eighties on early American cinema, seeing it through the lens of Negt and Kluge’s concept of the public sphere, and providing a magisterial analysis of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance through the criticism of Walter Benjamin, and new work on gender. 

 

Hansen was able to work out an intersection between film history, film analysis and film theory few have ever matched. Her boundless curiosity marked her teaching and writing in the next decade, as she evolved the concept of the "vernacular modernism” through probing the influence of Hollywood on early Asian (especially Chinese) cinema, working with her student Zhen Zhang, and especially extending her research into the Frankfurt school and cinema, producing a series of crucial essays and finishing shortly before her death a large manuscript on cinema and the Frankfurt school. She had also hoped to do a smaller book on one of her favorite directors Max Ophuls, and last year had organized a conference at Chicago on New Media, reflecting a strong belief on her part that New Media, far from putting an end to cinema, continued its project of innervating human perception in new and even utopian ways. 

 

Although she had been battling cancer for the past decade, she continued new scholarly and theoretical work, and to mentor and advise students at the University of Chicago. She was committed both to the intellectual challenge that cinema posed for modern scholars and to its direct engagement with the senses (who else could write about how Jerry Lewis in Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models relates to Clement Greenberg’s writings on American painting?) Her wit, her energy, her insight and rigor not only produced key concepts for our field, but provided the best of models for film studies at the moment that it moved from its pioneering focus on Grand Theory to a broader sense of a field that must include archival research, political perspectives, aesthetic awareness and theoretical ambition. We are devastated by her loss, but we all are better for having had her grace our field with her brilliance, breadth of perspective and elegance for a while. 

 

After long suffering, Miriam, I do wish you peace, but, knowing you, I would more accurately say: rest in your glorious energy."

 

 

To read more about Miriam's life and legacy, please click here.