2. The Latin term ‘Modo’.
(From Wiktionary )
only just
recently, presently
At the end of the sixth
century, Cassiodorus, a
Roman statesman,
writer and librarian used
the term ‘modernus’ in
the sense of
contemporary, but
wanted to conserve the
knowledge and ideas of
antiquity. (Both
Christianity and
Plato/Aristotle etc).
3. The Venerable Bede (672-735), wrote of
‘moderni’ and ‘antiqui’ in the eighth century.
He called his present times ‘Tempus
modernum’. The term ‘modernus’ came to
have a negative connotation.
Alcuin of York, (730-805) thought of himself
and his contemporaries as ‘insignificant
people of the end of the world’ warned of the
dangers of decay, which could herald the
coming of the Antichrist. Only a return of
moral renewal and the ways of the ancients
could save the world.
4. In the 12th Century, William, the
ageing abbot of Saint-Thierry, when
told that King David, when he was
old, ruled the kingdom from his bed,
concluded that in biblical times, the
world was youthful and people had
more strength and vitality.
Bernard of Chartres wrote about the
‘antiqui’ and ‘moderni’, saying in
essence that modern scholars were
dwarves who could see farther, but
only because they stood on the
shoulders of giants.
5. In the early 17th Century, Rene
Descartes argued for new
ways of judging and seeking
truth. He frequently set his
views apart from those of his
predecessors. He specifically
rejected the ancients . He
accounted for things by
mechanical explanations. He
began ideas which laid the
groundwork for the scientific
method. He said ‘I think,
therefore I am’ (Cogito ergo
sum)
6. In the 11th century, the theory of
tabula rasa, or clean slate, was
developed by the Islamic
philosopher, Ibn Sina. In the late
17th century. John Locke used this
idea to argue against Augustine
and the church who said that
mankind was inherently sinful.
Locke said that man was born with
a clean slate. He also suggested
that the people had the right to
overthrow their leaders. He broke
out of the ‘sacred circle’. His theory
of mind is often seen as the origin
of modern conceptions of identity
and the self.
7. Locke’s ideas went into the
‘Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen’ of the
French Revolution of 1789. This
asserts that all men are equal
and that there is no divine right
of kings and no special privilege
for the church. No mention,
however, of the rights of women
or slaves. The declaration is
based on the principles of the
Age of Enlightenment, such as
individualism and the social
contract of John Locke and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
8. The Industrial Revolution
began in England in the
late 18th Century. A hostility
developed towards
industrialisation.
Romanticism grew.
Members in England
included artist and poet
William Blake and poets
like Wordsworth,
Coleridge, John Keats,
Lord Byron and Percy
Shelley. Mary Shelley's
novel ‘Frankenstein’
showed concerns that
scientific progress might
not be always be for the
good.
Philip James de Loutherbourg,
Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801
9. The movement stressed the
importance of "nature" in art, in
contrast to "monstrous"
machines and factories. The
Romantics reacted against the
mechanical and the controlled.
In art, literature and music, they
emphasized the individual, the
subjective, the irrational, the
imaginative, the personal, the
spontaneous, the emotional, the
visionary, and the
transcendental.‘Wanderer Above the Sea of
Fog’ Caspar David Friedrich,
1818.
10. The Victorian Era
continued Enlightenment
ideas. The wild,
passionate, erotic, even
destructive aspects of
Romanticism continue in
all the arts, (although not
in the home). There is a
longing for the Gothic and
medieval past and at the
same time, great
scientific and technical
progress. Photography
takes off. Moving images
are captured on film for
the first time in 1888, in
Leeds.
11. Fin de siècle
French poets Baudelaire,
Mallarme, Rimbaud and
Verlaine began ‘Symbolism’.
They influenced artists. They
shared an interest in mystical
and spiritual expression in
their art and a rebellion
against realism that depicted
the observable world. They
expressed personal inner
vision, idealization and
fantasy and not just
descriptions of reality.
“Women on the beach”,
1898 by Edvard Munch
12. MODERNITY MODERNISM
Charles Darwin
Einstein's Theory of
Relativity
Sigmund Freud and
Psychoanalysis
Communism
Cars
Airplanes
Telephones
Radios
WWI
Cubism
Futurism (and Vorticism)
Abstraction(ism)
Stream of Consciousness
dada(ism)
Surrealism?
Expressionism
Existentialism
Pop art
Celebration of Technology
13. Avant-Garde.
1. The advance group in
any field, esp. in the visual,
literary, or musical arts,
whose works are
characterized chiefly by
unorthodox and
experimental methods.
2. Of or pertaining to the
experimental treatment of
artistic, musical, or literary
material.
3. Belonging to the avant-
garde: an avant-garde
composer.
4. Unorthodox or daring;
radical.
From dictionary.com
Pablo Picasso.TheTwo
Saltimbanques (Harlequin and
his Companion), 1901
14. The world seen from
multiple viewpoints.
Picasso’s ‘Les
Demoiselles
d'Avignon’, 1907.
‘There's something
anarchist and
ruthless about it that
contains dada and
Marcel Duchamp
and punk’.
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
15. ''On or about
December 1910
human character
changed,'' Virginia
Woolf observed.
Relations between
''masters and
servants, husbands
and wives, parents
and children'' shifted,
she wrote, ''and when
human relations
change there is at the
same time a change
in religion, conduct,
politics and literature.''
16. ‘Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2’ by
Marcel Duchamp,
1912. Successive
superimposed images
– influenced by stop-
motion images of
Etienne Jules Marey.
Criticised as ‘an
explosion in a shingle
factory’. Influence of
scientific ideas –
Einstein?
17. Futurists were
fascinated with
dynamism, speed,
and restlessness of
modern urban life.
‘We want no part in
the past’ wrote
Marinetti in Italy. Old
art should be ‘heaved
over the side of the
steamship of
modernity’ said
Mayakovsky in
Russia.
Umberto Boccioni – Elasticity 1912.
18. Hans Richter saw the
beginnings of Dada in the
outbreak of World War I. The
movement was a protest
against the bourgeois nationalist
and colonialist interests which
many believed were the root
cause of the war, and against
the cultural and intellectual
conformity — in art and more
broadly in society — that
corresponded to the war. Dada
protested against everything, a
nonsensical, absurd world
represented by slaughter and
stupidity.
19. Dada was nihilistic and anti
rational. Artists made
nonsensical speeches, poets
constructed poems by
cutting random words from
newspapers and picking
them out of a sack).Marcel
Duchamp exhibited 'found
objects' out of context e.g.
urinals. A reviewer from the
American Art News stated at
the time that "The Dada
philosophy is the sickest,
most paralyzing and most
destructive thing that has
ever originated from the
brain of man."
‘Fountain’ by Marcel Duchamp,
1917
20. The art of the Surrealist
movement was centred
around the irrational and
the subconscious.
Surrealists were influenced
by the 'untutored' art of
children, madness and so
called 'primitive art forms'.
They wanted to create
something more real than
reality itself. Many
Surrealists knew and
interacted in various ways
with Freud and Jung. ‘The Elephant Celebes’, Max Ernst. 1921.
21. Surrealists wanted to change
society and perception of the
world. They challenged reason
and ‘modernity’ and favoured
the magical and the mystical,
the instinctive, the chance
encounter, automatic writing
etc. The Persistence of
Memory is one of what Dalí
called his “handpainted dream
photographs” and can
simultaneously be read as a
landscape, a still-life, and a
self-portrait.
‘The Persistence of Memory’, Salvador
Dali, 1931
22. Modernism and the avant-garde
“Modernism has proposed a new kind of
art for a new kind of social and
perceptual world. The avant-garde,
aggressive from the beginning, saw
itself as a breakthrough to the future.
It’s members were…the militants of a
creativity which would revive and
liberate humanity”.
(Raymond Williams, ‘The Politics of Modernism’, 1989.
23. Avant-Garde Film
Traditionally, the avant-
garde cinema is seen in
opposition to Hollywood.
Mid 20th century art critic
Clement Greenberg
attached aesthetic value
to the avant-garde in
painting as in cinema.
He dismissed Hollywood
as kitsch – the
sentimental, the
melodramatic and the
banal.
In fact, this opposition is
not so clear cut. Many
avant-garde filmmakers
worked in commercial
film and some
celebrated aspects of
Hollywood – often the
most tacky and the most
kitsch. There arose a
third category –
commercial art films
which incorporated
radical ideas,
perspectives and
politics.
24. dada
The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to
assault traditional narrative verities, to
ridicule “character,” “setting,” and “plot” as
bourgeois conventions, to slaughter
causality by using the innate dynamism of
the film medium to overturn conventional
Aristotelian notions of time and space. In
so doing, they knew they would question
the ideological underpinnings of the old era
which had held the well-made story so
dear’. Donald Faulkner, NYSU Writers Institute
25. The Bearded Heart
Tristan Tzara organized a dada
event ‘The Bearded Heart’, and
wanted to show Dada films. He
commissioned Man Ray. He also
showed his own play ‘Heart of
Gas’. There was a riot afterwards
and seats and lights were
broken. One person had a
broken arm. Hans Richter wrote
that it was Dada’s swansong.
“There was no point in continuing
because nobody could any
longer see any point.”
26. Salt, Pepper, Pins and
Tacks
Man Ray writes “On some strips I
sprinkled salt and pepper, like a
cook preparing a roast, on other
strips I threw pins and thumbtacks
at random; then I turned on the
white light for a second or two”.
The anarchic arrangement of strips
of Rayographs and filmed
sequences expressed a spirit of
spontaneity and chance, which
were the dada strategies of
disrupting logic and rational order.
The title of the film, ‘Retour à la
Raison’, is therefore highly ironic.
27. ‘Un Chien Andalou’ was born
when Luis Bunuel told Salvador
Dali of a dream he had in which a
cloud sliced across the moon.
Dali, too, had been having strange
dreams. His consisted of ants
crawling from inside his hand.
There was one rule when it came
to writing the screenplay. The only
thing the succession of images
would have in common is the fact
that they have nothing in common.
Its purpose: to document desire
and shock.
28. "I suggested that we
burn the negative...
something I would have
done without hesitation
had the group agreed.
In fact I'd still do it
today; I can imagine a
huge pyre in my own
little garden where all
my negatives and all the
copies of my own films
go up in flames. It
wouldn't make the
slightest difference."
Luis Bunuel.
Screenshot from ‘Le Chien Andalou’, 1929
29. Precisionists were
American painters who
painted mammoth urban
structures devoid of
human activity, standing
in mute testament to the
hardness and coldness
of modern life.
Precisionism was an
American response to
Cubism and Futurism,
sometimes called
‘Cubist Realism’. Charles Demuth, Aucassiu
and Nicolette, 1921
30. Charles Scheeler had
spent time in Paris, as
did many American
artists. He created
Precisionist
landscapes and
cityscapes. He
teamed up with Paul
Strand, a
photographer to make
‘Manhatta’ a city film
celebrating New York.Skyscrapers, 1922
31. Camera movement is
kept to a minimum, as
is incidental motion
within each shot. Each
frame provides a view
of the city that has
been carefully
arranged into abstract
compositions. People
are shown almost as
automatons. Screenshot from ‘Manhatta’, 1921
32. In 1929, Dziga Vertov
made the film ‘Man
with a Movie Camera’
which he wrote
“Represents an
experimentation in the
cinematic
transmission of visual
phenomena without
the use of intertitle (a
film without intertitles)
without the help of a
script (a film without
script)...
33. ...without the help of a
Theatre (a film without
actors, without sets,
etc.) This new
experimentation work
by Kino-Eye is
directed towards the
creation of an
authentically
international absolute
language of cinema –
Absolute Kinography
– on the basis of its
complete separation
from the language of
theatre and literature."
34. Tossing aside the
traditional notions of
cinematic narratives
(poignant love stories,
sweeping historical
accounts, spooky
suspense flicks), Léger
zoomed in on every day
objects, like "a pipe, a
chair, a typewriter, a hat,
a foot." Finding visual
likeness between
shapes and movements,
"Le Ballet Mécanique"
divorces an object’s
visual aspects from its
function.
Screenshot from ‘Ballet Mécanique’ by
painter Fernand Leger and
cinematographer/journalist Dudley
Murphy, 1924
35. Closely aligned with
painting, photography
Non-narrative, abstract
images
Celebrating the city,
technology, energy
Creating an effect,
including shock
Experiments with
montage, form, close-
ups
Can be Romantic,
idealistic
Fernand Léger, ‘Le Grand
Dejeuner’ , 1920/21
