This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception—these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts, a central factor with the advent of the cinema: gone were the days when an artwork strived merely to lift experience out the realm of change and flow. The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, coloured light, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism. Cubism is a movement on the cusp of the transition from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and flows. In contrast, futurism embraced completely the emerging electromagnetic view of reality. Cubism and Futurism examines the similarity and differences between the two movements’ engagement with the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension, as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.

"Includes essays by Alfred H. Barr, Georges Hugnet, a brief chronology of the Dada and Surrealist movements, bibliography relevant to the exhibition held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1936-37"--AbeBooks.

This is the first volume to focus on the diverse permutations of international surrealist cinema after the canonical interwar period. The collection features eleven original contributions by prominent scholars such as Tom Gunning, Michael Löwy, Gavin Parkinson and Michael Richardson, alongside other leading and emerging researchers. An introductory chapter offers a historical overview as well as a theoretical framework for specific methodological approaches. The collection demonstrates that renowned figures such as Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jan Švankmajer took part in shaping a vibrant and distinctive surrealist film culture following the Second World War. Addressing highly influential films and directors related to international surrealism during the second half of the twentieth century, it expands the purview of both surrealism and film studies by situating surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema.