Early Cinema and pornographies on the internet: a “parallax historiography” of two ‘new’ media?

Abstract

This article traces parallels in the debates sparked by a growing popularity of early cinema as a space of leisure and education around 1907, and by the increasing consumption of pornographies on the internet in the 2010s. Analyzing visual and verbal rhetorics of the early 20th century Kinoreformbewegung in Austria and Germany, and of present-day anglophone anti-pornography feminism, the author shows that both positions rely on a similar set of fantasmatic bourgeois images – the incompetent Other as media user, the Child threatened by abuse, and ‘new media’ space as enabler of undesirable (erotic) education – to communicate their anxieties about early cinema and the internet as ‘new’ media.