"Moving Modernism reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions, the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema, which together changed the artistic landscape of early-twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than a book about dancing pictures or about pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering performances, working methods, and circles of aesthetic influence and reception for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, Moving Modernism challenges to modernism's medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde's development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged or suspended vision; to cubo-futurist and neo-symbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory and performance of Valentine de Saint-Point; Sophie Taeuber's hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer linked to Belgian constructivism, whose pioneers called her dance "music architecture," "living geometry," and "pure plastics"; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from Edison and the Lumières to Hans Richter, Fernand Léger and Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals abstraction's emergence not only as a formal strategy but as an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. Focusing on abstraction's productive rather than reproductive value, Andrew argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art's viewers engaged by the kinaesthetic sensation to move and be moved"--

The emergence of modern dance and the early history of cinema ran concurrent with the European avant-garde's development of pictorial abstraction in the first decades of the 20th century. However, many assume that modernist abstraction resulted from a century of natural, autonomous evolution to painting styles and tastes. In Moving Modernism, author Nell Andrew challenges this assumption. By examining dance and film created during this period, she argues that performative modes of art created the link between bodily movement and movement depicted in modernist paintings. In a seeming paradox, dance and film - durational arts, involving real bodies in space-participated in the development of abstract art. With archival material collected in North America and Europe, Moving Modernism resurfaces lost performances, identifies working methods, and establishes the circles of aesthetic influence and reception for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental film makers from the turn of the century to the interwar period. Reexamining the motivation that fueled the emergence of abstraction, Andrew claims that painters sought meaning not only in the material and formal picture but also in temporal and sensorial experience. Andrew looks at major figures and intellectual movements including Loïe Fuller and Symbolism; Valentine de Saint-Point and the Cubo-Futurist and neo-Symbolist movements; and early cinematic abstraction from Edison and the Lumières to Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp. Close examinations of each figure show that theatrical display, embodied self-projection, and kinesthetic desire are not necessarily in opposition to pictorial abstraction; in fact, they expand our understanding of the urges that created modern art.

The first full-length account of modernism from the perspective of literary geography.

Color was used in film well before The Wizard of Oz. Thomas Edison, for example, projected two-colored films at his first public screening in New York City on April 23, 1896. These first colors of early cinema were not photographic; they were applied manually through a variety of laborious processes—most commonly by the hand-coloring and stenciling of prints frame by frame, and the tinting and toning of films in vats of chemical dyes. The results were remarkably beautiful. Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. Looking backward, Joshua Yumibe traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century. Looking forward, he explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas in which many colors have become, once again, vividly unhinged from photographic reality. Throughout this history, Moving Color revolves around questions pertaining to the sensuousness of color: how color moves us in the cinema—visually, emotionally, and physically.

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. Movement is reality itself, the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

Features a history of the Hollywood community and its wartime films. Seeing Hollywood as a forcefield, the author examines the social networks, working relationships, and political activities of artists, intellectuals, and film workers who flocked to Hollywood from Europe and the eastern United States before and during the second world war.

For the past dozen years, J. Hoberman has been publishing witty, impassioned, vivid film criticism in the pages of New York's alternative weekly, The Village Voice. His first collection includes a variety of these (mostly) movie reviews, as well as a number of longer essays and film-festival reports, all written during the 1980s. For Hoberman, film criticism is a form of social commentary, and his articles reflect a decade when an actor was president, the Vietnam War was refought on the nation's movie screens, and soundbites determined elections. The variety of Hoberman's interests and the intellectual depth of his critiques are remarkable. Writing from the perspective of Lower Manhattan, he places movies in the context of the other visual arts--painting, photography, comics, video, and TV--as well as that of postmodem theorists such as Leslie Fiedler and Jean Baudrillard. Demonstrating the widest range of any American film critic writing today, Hoberman is equally at home discussing the work of Steven Spielberg and Andrei Tarkovsky, films by cutting-edge artists Raul Ruiz and Yvonne Rainer, and historical figures as disparate as Charles Chaplin and Andy Warhol. Vulgar Modernism offers an entertaining, trenchant, informed, and informative view of the past decade's popular culture.