Michael Cowan is Professor of film and media history in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. His research, focused on German and European cinema, examines the broader cultural and technological contexts in which film practices emerged and evolved in the early 20th century. His publications have won numerous awards from the Society of Film and Media Studies and the British Association of Film and Television Studies Scholars, as well as the Willy Haas Award (Germany) and the Limina Award (Italy).

Michael Cowan’s deeply researched study contends that film clubs, though often overlooked, were pivotal in articulating ideals of spectatorship, notions of cinema’s identity as a medium, and utopian beliefs in film’s transformative power, thereby challenging us to rethink core assumptions of media studies and rewrite film history. Rielle Navitski, University of Georgia Richly detailed, meticulously researched, and convincingly argued, Michael Cowan's strikingly original study provides an invaluable account of the precursors, aims, activities, and social functions of film societies that operated apart from the theatrical film business in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria. In so doing, Cowan reframes how we should think about the historical import of such groups, whose practices and presumptions testified in vastly different ways to the significant possibilities and manifold utility of cinema. Gregory A. Waller, Editor of Film History "Cowan’s study is an important contribution to German film studies and, luckily, is easily accessible as an open-source download." – Ulrich Plass, German Studies Review, Volume 47, Number 3, October 2024.

• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION – WHAT WAS A FILM SOCIETY? TOWARDS A NEW ARCHAEOLOGY OF SCREEN COMMUNITIES CHAPTER 1 – THE KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY: THE BIRTH OF THE FILM SOCIETY FROM THE SPIRIT OF AMATEUR SCIENCE CHAPTER 2 – THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY: CONCEPTUALIZING THE FILM INDUSTRY IN THE DEUTSCHE KINOTECHNISCHE GESELLSCHAFT CHAPTER 3 – COMMUNITIES OF LOVE: CINEPHILIC FILM CLUBS, MOVIE MAGAZINES AND THE VIENNESE KINOGEMEINDE CHAPTER 4 – THE SKEPTICAL COMMUNITY: LEFT-WING FILM SOCIETIES AND THE MAKING OF THE SUSPICIOUS SPECTATOR AFTERWORD: WHAT’S IN AN ‘IDEA’? BIBLIOGRAPHY