Showing papers in "Modernist Cultures in 2010"

Hitchcock's Modernism

Abstract: Alfred Hitchcock has been mentioned with increasing frequency in modernist despatches. For the most part, this interest has taken the form of the elaboration of intellectual and cultural contexts for a particular film. The Lodger (1926), for example, has quite often been described as the one British film of the period to absorb fully the consequences of experiment in cinema in France and Germany, of

‘A Hymn to Movement’: The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract: The ‘city symphonies’ of my title refer primarily to a cluster of films made in the United States and Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. The best known, and most frequently imitated, is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1926). Other ‘city symphonies’ of this period include Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Joris Ivens’ Regen [Rain] (1929) and Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). The earliest of the city symphonies was Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921). Manhatta appears to have had a significant influence on the European city symphonies and city films of the later 1920s, and also on less well known American avant-garde films, including Jay Leyda’s AB ronx Morning and Herman Weinberg’s City Symphony and Autumn Fire .C ity and cinema have been inextricably linked from the very first films onwards. The avant-garde city films of the 1920s show the influence of early urban panoramic films and city actualities. They are part of the complex history whereby film-makers in the 1920s sought to renew the medium–and to turn away from commercial and narrative cinema–by returning to cinema’s origins in the documenting of reality, but with the particular twist given by the perspectives and angles of modernism. The ‘city symphonies’ of Sheeler and Strand, Ruttmann, Cavalcanti and Vertov follow the course of a day in the life of the city. Like the one-day novels of the period, they open up the question of ‘modernist dailiness’; the preoccupation with everyday life is combined with the intimation that much greater spans of time and culture are condensed within the diurnal round. Space and time relations–and duration and the passing of time–are some of the central preoccupations of the films, frequently underlain by the perception that ‘plot’ and ‘story’ must be excluded for time and space to become apparent. Rien que les heures, for example, opens with

‘Telling the day’ in Beatrice Potter Webb and Dorothy Richardson: The Temporality of the Working Woman

Abstract: In this article, the concept of ‘telling the day’, taken from the recent work of sociologist Jonathan Gershuny, is used as the starting point for a consideration of two texts which share as one of their key aims the accurate rendering of the working lives of women around the turn of the last century. These texts are Beatrice Webb's ‘Pages from a Work-Girl's Diary’ (1888), and a chapter from The Tunnel (1919), the fourth chapter-novel of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. I pay particular attention to the temporality of the way that these texts ‘tell the day’ of their working women protagonists. Apparently from very different genres (early participant-observation sociology, and literary modernism), this article both takes seriously the status of Webb's text as ‘literary experiment’, and argues for the productivity of seeing Richardson as engaging in kind of feminist sociology.

Breeding Better Babies in the Eugenic Garden City: ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and the (Anti)Cosmopolitan Utopia in the early Twentieth Century

Abstract: Showing how `modernist cosmopolitanism? coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national `body? were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time

Found in Translation: Chaim Soutine and English Art

Abstract: The article is the first to consider the impact of the early work of Chaim Soutine, produced in the South of France around 1920, on a circle of painters working in Britain some 30 years later, notably Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, as well as on the writer David Sylvester who promoted both their work and the key French artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Soutine who seemed to epitomise the new ‘existentialist’ climate. After the war Soutine became a cult figure in London, as he did in contemporary Paris and New York. He embodied the idea of the ‘tragic’ artist in his still-life imagery of flayed animals, his uncompromising, heavily-laden paint surfaces, and in his identity as a Jew who had died in 1943, an indirect victim of the Nazi occupation of France. I try to identify which works in particular were known to the English artists, themselves all Jewish except for Bacon, and to describe the very different ways in which they reacted to Soutine's art and adapted its lesson...

The Entertainments of Late Modernism: Graham Greene and the Career Criminal

Abstract: This essay argues that by responding to the formal experiments of the early modernists without subscribing entirely to their aesthetic aims, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock serves as an exemplary instance of late modernism, offering an account of criminal subjectivity that blends the modernist critique of identity with the narrative conventions of twentieth-century crime and detective fiction. Utilizing the form of the psychological case study to articulate how a career criminal views his identity largely in terms of the conventions of crime fiction, Greene illustrates how late modernism reaffirms the value of a critically maligned popular genre while grappling with the aesthetic paradigms of early modernism.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

Abstract: This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First Wo...

F. T. Marinetti's Experiments with Acoustic and Visual Poetry: A New Semiotic Approach

Abstract: The present paper identifies evidence of proto-semiotic thinking in Italian Futurist manifestoes and in Marinetti's experimental ‘words-in-freedom’ (parole in liberta). A case is made for approaching visual and acoustic modes of signification in Futurist poetry using Peircean semiotic theory. Readings of iconic and indexical sign-aspects explore the value of quasi-semiotic strategies as reflections of modernity and analyse their role in Futurist pro-war propaganda poetry. Particular attention is paid to semiotic aspects of the movement's ‘Typographical Revolution’, its strategies of codification and the rhetoric of self-signification. Peircean exegesis of various innovative effects throws light on the relationship between iconic and indexical features which earlier semiotic approaches fail to recognize.

Cinema, Empire and Transition

Abstract: Literature and history have been the dominant modes of cultural expression in Ireland for a century and more. Their persistence has informed a critical sense of their centrality. It is hard to imagine Ireland now without thinking of an image that derives in some form from a Yeats, Joyce or Heaney. In this sense, the national territory has been mapped as a possible, and not an actual, landscape. This gives the image of Ireland an unfinished quality that can be traced directly to the legacies of political history, as much as to aesthetics. Civil war, partition and the troubles that attended the island’s postimperial divisions have meant that frequently the idea of Ireland has been disconnected from the reality. Perhaps this fact is nowhere better illustrated than in our own bitter moment, the financial crisis a result, and not the cause, of a civic failure that has its own basis in the social malformations of empire and after. This civic failure is expressed in literature in narratives of exile and disappointment, at which we excel. These stories of diminishment are often taken to represent an actual poverty of wealth and opportunity. They may do. But they are symptoms also of a structural malaise that is more often accepted than resisted. This pattern has informed in turn a historiography that is founded in a narrative of boredom, punctured by the repetitive surprise of revolution (and one unfortunate account is called The Long Gestation). Accordingly, the past is understood as a set of key dates arranged around loose narratives of high political change. One outcome of this orchestration has been a historical industry that is committed to the rediscovery of apparently lost individuals and works (and here literary scholars, myself included, are just as guilty). Another has been the near complete critical silence, until recently, concerning forms of cultural expression that are not textual, and so not translatable into the master codes of nation and narration. Art, music and cinema in Ireland have all been marginally understood activities,

Art, Politics and the Kino-Eye: Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera

Abstract: The beginning of Dziga Vertov’s filmmaking career coincided with the end of the First World War and the opening of the revolutionary era in Russia. This historical conjuncture gave him his subject, but it also situated his work within an unsteady, rapidly changing political context and a comparably unsettled artistic milieu. The Man with the Movie Camera appeared in 1929, at the end of the churning decade. It consolidated, revised and finally overturned Vertov’s political aesthetic vigorously developed in the early 1920s. The film’s status as a modernist masterwork and a summit of documentary cinema is now assured; the purpose of this essay is to re-view the work by placing it against the background of wide and vehement dialogue on politics, the avant-garde and cinema. The revolutionary promise of Russia – articulated above all by Lenin – set the terms of Dziga Vertov’s vocation. Indeed Lenin’s death in 1924 was the occasion for Vertov’s early success in film documentary. From the outset of both his filmmaking and his manifesto-writing he insisted on his revolutionary orthodoxy, asserting that he and his comrades were guided only ‘by the decisions of the Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the resolutions of the Kominterm, the decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars, the slogans of the press, the letters of worker correspondents . . . and we do not need other, better scripts’.2 Here and in many other places, Vertov insisted that

The British Hitchcock: Epistemologies of Nation, Gender and Detection

Abstract: From 1929 to 1939, before launching his Hollywood career, Alfred Hitchcock directed sixteen sound films in Britain While Hitchcock fans and film scholars lavish more attention on his later work, many of his themes, motifs, and techniques emanate from this decade Moreover, during this politically pitched era, England collectively suffered from the post-traumatic shock of the First World War, and turned a deaf ear to the growing signs of international upheaval Quite naturally, the country was caught up in the economic and social fallout of the Depression A decline of the Empire and an erosion of a Victorian way of life had begun to sink in By 1935, knowledge of both Germany’s massive rearmament and its atrocities against Jews and other ‘undesirables’ became commonplace Bewailing the ‘unteachability of mankind’, Churchill urged without effect for the House of Commons to work with other European nations ‘to build up an adequate deterrent force’ 1 Danger as well as apathy heightened as the decade went on The fantasy that England was safely insulated persisted alongside the fears of those like Hitchcock who imagined more uncomfortable scenarios, such as violent incursions into the British Isles, from the twin threats of communism and fascism By 1933, Hitchcock rarely travelled outside England until he went to Hollywood 2 This period marked the shift from silent film to the ‘talkies’ In 1924, the British company Gainsborough Pictures sent Hitchcock, a seven-year veteran of the silent era, to Germany to cut his directorial teeth The British film industry was then in a deep financial and aesthetic crisis; its ticket sales lagged far behind those of American and German productions 3 In Munich as an assistant director in the same studio as the Expressionist FW Murnau, Hitchcock watched the fi lming ofThe Last Laugh (1924), which he considered ‘an almost perfect film’ There he also absorbed the techniques of, among others,

The Art of Making-Up: Ibsen, Ireland, and Metropolitan Performance

Abstract: The economies of theatre and performance in Ireland in the 1890s depended on various intersections of cultural and nationalist politics, but they also depended on Ireland's position within the wider circulation of English, European, and U.S. touring companies. This essay traces Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People from London to New York and Dublin. Tree's decision to stage the play is a key moment because it moves Ibsen's work out of small, independent theatres and into a major touring company's repertoire. At the same time, especially while on tour in Ireland and the U.S., Tree's performance techniques and business practices obscured almost all of the qualities in Ibsen's work that had made him so controversial and had inspired the independent theaters in the first place. Following Tree's production illuminates two important shaping conditions for theatrical writers and entrepreneurs at the turn of the century: the demands for “stage business” within a burgeoning L...

Time, Space and Causality: Joe May, Fritz Lang and the Modernism of German Detective Film

Abstract: Such are the scars the First World War left on the face of modernity in cultural memory that film historians assume the end of the war to have been as radical a break in the development of the cinema as it was in political history and the arts. Not only would it be counter-intuitive to argue otherwise, but it would also cast doubt on the cinema as a legitimate art form – precisely what the films of the post-war period, under the name of ‘Expressionist cinema’, have stood for: the clean break with the old order, the aesthetic rebellion of a new generation. In matters cinema, however, the generational rupture argument, no less than the ‘art-versus-commerce’ argument (foundational for any avant-garde) may ultimately prove unhelpful even in understanding the aesthetic features of a particular style, not to mention the continuities, coalitions and cross-fertilisations typical of a highly professional elite of craftsmen and technicians, such as every filmmaking practice represents, whether it is industrially-controlled like Hollywood, or organised more like a cluster of craft guilds like the German cinema from the 1910s to roughly 1928. However, because of a periodisation scheme transferred from political history (the foundation of the Weimar Republic, 1918), an over-emphasis on a single film-historical factor (the foundation of Ufa, 1917), and a single film (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920), the German cinema up to 1918 is generally treated as distant and distinct from the post-war Aufbruch (new start) undertaken by a cinematic avant-garde presumed to have been in open rebellion against the commercial film production of the time. This template of cultural history in turn vitiates the debate about modernism and the cinema, by positing a series of oppositions that have proven to be largely untenable. In what follows I want to argue for a more nuanced assessment, leading to a revision of assumptions (but also a potentially more internally contradictory picture) regarding both the rupture between