The Dance of Abstract Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Nell Andrew
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Flat Screen ◽  
Lumiere Brothers ◽  
Loie Fuller

As a moving art, cinema was linked to dance from its earliest moments and, like dance, held an idealized position for artists of the avant-garde, from the serpentine dance films of Edison and the Lumière brothers to the abstract cinema of the interwar avant-garde. At either end, whether filming a dancing body or creating abstract montages, cinema strove to express, not a new formal image on the flat screen but the dancing effects (and affects) of motion itself. This chapter follows a series of early twentieth-century artistic engagements with cinematic abstraction. Despite varying levels of formal abstraction and representational imagery, these films are no longer concerned with reproducing a world to look upon but now an environment to look through with kinesthetic sensation and desire. In a particularly rich case, Germaine Dulac, outwardly indebted to the dance of Loïe Fuller, became her successor in choreographic cinema, engaging the multisensory body through the medium of abstraction.

scholarly journals Punk Rock as Popular Theatre

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Double
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Sex Pistols ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The University

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).

Ugliness, Underground, Queer Difference

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theoretical Overview

The introductory chapter of Ugly Differences provides a theoretical overview of the book and its central interventions on the concepts of ugliness and the underground. It turns to early-twentieth-century examples by Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay to frame genealogical connections between ugliness and queer female difference. This literary history highlights the roles that avant-garde, experimental, primitivist, and vernacular approaches to cultural production play in reflecting nondominant subjects whose differences are routed through de-privileged sites of the aesthetic.

Hieroglyphic Modernisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernist Fiction

In the British Museum, one object attracts more tourists than any other: the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of the Stone by Jean-François Champollion and the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 contributed to creating a worldwide vogue for all things Egyptian. This fascination was shared by early-twentieth-century authors who invoked Egyptian writing to paint a more complicated picture of European interest in non-Western languages. Hieroglyphs can be found everywhere in modernist novels and in discussions of silent film, appearing at moments when writers and theorists seek to understand the similarities or differences between writing and new recording technologies. Hieroglyphic Modernisms explores this conjunction of hieroglyphs and modernist fiction and film, revealing how the challenge of new media spurred a fertile interplay among practitioners of old and new media forms. Showing how novelists and film theorists in the modernist period defined their respective media in relation to each other, the book shifts the focus in modernism from China, poetry, and the avant-garde to Egypt, narrative, and film.

scholarly journals An Interdisciplinary Reading of the Film Entr’acte

2016 ◽  
pp. 186-204
Author(s):  
Claudia Kappenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
Interdisciplinary Project ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Francis Picabia ◽  
Time Image

This chapter explores the 1924 film Entr’acte, by Francis Picabia and René Clair, as an interdisciplinary project that combines ideas of cinematography, music, and choreography. The film constitutes a significant project of the avant-garde of 1920s Paris, driven by a strong conceptual framework and influenced by early twentieth-century discourses which underpinned cultural, social, and economic developments. Dada in particular was part of this tight net of affiliations and differences. Entr’acte also constitutes a key moment in a wider development of twentieth-century film, a significant film in a Deleuzian shift from movement-image to time-image. The film’s choreographic impetus is summed up in George Barber’s claim that the film, and the key shot of the dancer, are informed by Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Entr’acte’s choreographic structure and its relation to the film is highly significant to a twentieth-century map of choreographic practices and screendance.

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