Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, Screening Modernism is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema’s postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, András Bálint Kovács’s encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovács begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism’s origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, Screening Modernism ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, Screening Modernism is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema’s postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, András Bálint Kovács’s encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovács begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism’s origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, Screening Modernism ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

In Film and Literary Modernism, the connections between film, modernist literature, and the arts are explored by an international group of scholars. The impact of cinema upon our ways of seeing the world is highlighted in essays on city symphony films, avant-garde cinema, European filmmaking and key directors and personalities from Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Renais to Alfred Hitchcock and Mae West. Contributors investigate the impact of film upon T. S. Eliot, time and stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson, the racial undercurrents in the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and examine the film writing of William Faulkner, James Agee, and Graham Greene. Robert McParland assembles an international group of researchers including independent film makers, critics and professors of film, creative writers, teachers of architecture and design, and young doctoral scholars, who offer a multi-faceted look at modernism and the art of the film.

This book manifests at least four recent shifts and tendencies within Modernist studies in general that point at the expansion of this increasingly interdisciplinary field. First, Modernist studies has seen a temporal expansion, to the extent that scholars in the field have come to turn to both the pre- and posterior history of Modernism. Second, the field has witnessed a spatial expansion, in that increasingly so researchers have also come to scrutinize the Modernisms of regions at the fringes of Europe, and beyond. Thirdly, a vertical expansion too has marked Modernist studies in recent decades, not only by further expanding the canon of women writers and exploring the continuum between high- and lowbrow, but also by looking at the artistic and mediatized hierarchies and cross-fertilizations operative in the period. A fourth conceptual expansion of the field shows that whereas concepts such as “middlebrow”, “arrière-garde”, and to some extent even “avant-garde”, were once exotic notions of at best marginal importance in European Modernist studies, they now form part and parcel of the field, complicating and expanding it conceptually.

German architecture prior to the modern period has received less systemic, analytical study than that of Italy, France, and Britain. Scholarly discussion of broad traditions or continuities within Germanic or Central European façade design is even sparser. Baroque era studies of the region mostly devote themselves to isolated architects, monuments, or movements. Modernism's advent decisively changed this: Germanic architecture enjoyed sudden ascendancy. Yet, even so, study specifically of that region's façades still lagged – nothing compares to the dozens of treatments of Le Corbusier's façade systems, for example, and how these juxtapose with French neoclassical or Italian Renaissance methods. Given the paucity of multi-period studies, one can be forgiven for believing Germany's effervescence of radical, modern works seems unprecedented. This book takes up these multiple quandaries. It identifies and documents a previously unrecognized compositional tradition - characterized here as the 'screen façade' – and posits it as a counter-narrative critiquing the essentialist, 'authentic' canon currently dominant in Western architectural history. By crossing evenly over the dividing line between the historical and modern periods, it offers valuable insights on indigenous roots underlying some aspects of Germany's invigorating early twentieth-century architectural developments. The book chronologically examines 400 years of closely related facades, concentrated in Germany but also found in Austria, the Czech Republic, German-speaking Switzerland, and nearby areas of Central Europe. While nearly 75 buildings are mentioned and illustrated, a dozen are given extensive analysis and the book focuses on the works of three architects – Schinkel, Behrens and Mies. Relationships between examples of these three architects' façades far transcend mere homage amongst masters. Glimmers of the system they eventually codify are apparent as early as at Heidelberg Castle in 1559 and Nürnberg's Rathaus in 1622. The book argues that in Germany, northern Gothic affinities for bisection, intense repetition and rote aggregation intersected with southern Classical affinities for symmetry, hierarchy and centrality, thereby spawning a unique hybrid product – the screen. Instead of graphic formality, this study is guided by on-site perceptions, propositional contrasts, means of approach, interpretive conflicts and emotion and it relates the design of these façades to concepts proposed by contemporary philosophers including Novalis, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, and, most importantly, Gadamer on hermeneutics.

Cinema was the most important new artistic medium of the twentieth century and modernism was the most important new aesthetic movement across the arts in the twentieth century. However, what exactly is the relationship between cinema and modernism? Cinematic Modernism and Contemporary Film explores how in the early twentieth century cinema came to be seen as one of the new technologies which epitomised modernity and how cinema itself reflected ideas, hopes and fears concerning modern life. Howard Finn examines the emergence of a new 'international style' of cinema, combining a poetic aesthetic of the image with genre-based fictional narrative and documentary realism. He provides concise accounts of how theorists such as André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière have discussed this cinematic aesthetic, clarifying debates over terms such as 'realism', 'classical' and 'avant-garde' as well as recent controversies over terms such as 'slow cinema' and 'vernacular modernism'. He further argues the influence of modernism through close readings of many contemporary films, including films by Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Jia Zhangke, and Angela Schanelec. Drawing on a broad range of examples, including Soviet montage, Italian neorealism, postwar new waves and the 'new cinema' of Taiwan and Iran, this book explores the cultural significance of modernism and its lasting influence over cinema.

This book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films.