The beginning of this century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. Our own time is a period marked by experiences of fragmentation, sensation, and shock. The essays here are joined by a common concern to chart another side to modernity—precisely after the shock of the new—when the new ceases to be shocking, and when the extraordinary and the sensational become linked to the boring and the everyday. Patrice Petro explores how the mechanisms of modernism, German cinema, and feminist film theory have evolved, and she discusses the directions in which they are headed.

Introduction
The "place" of television in film studies
Feminism and film history
German film theory and Anglo-American film studies
After shock, between boredom and history
Historical ennui, feminist boredom
World weariness, Weimar women, and visual culture
Nazi cinema at the intersection of the classical and the popular
The Hottentot and the Blonde Venus
Film feminism and nostalgia for the seventies

Patrice Petro teaches film studies in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is also the director of the Center for International Education. She is the author of Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, and the editor of Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video.