A Modernist Cinema: Film Art from 1914 to 1941

In A Modernist Cinema, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise.

Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors - Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles - these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art of filmmaking; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a
new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography.

Scott W. Klein is Professor of English and Artistic Director of the Secrest Artists Series at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the 1928 edition of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and with Mark Antliff the editor of the essay collection Vorticism: New Perspectives. He has published essays in such journals as ELH, Modernist Cultures, Twentieth Century Literature, and The James Joyce Quarterly, and is on the editorial boards of the Oxford CompleteWritings of Wyndham Lewis edition and of the The Journal of Wyndham Lewis.

Michael Valdez Moses is Professor of Literature and the Humanities in the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy and in the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University, and Associate Emeritus Professor at Duke University, where he was a faculty member of the English Department from 1987 to 2019. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1900-1939 (2010) and Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present (2019), and editor of The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 1994) and Modernism and Cinema (special issue of Modernist Cultures, 2010). He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, a Duke Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center, USIA Visiting Professor at the Universitat Aut�noma de Barcelona and at Universit� Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, and the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colorado College. He is former Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Duke University and a founding co-editor of the journal, Modernist Cultures.