The document discusses the history and development of modernism in film from 1895 to the 1920s. It covers key events like the first public film screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895. The impact of WWI led American films to dominate European markets. In the 1920s, Europe developed a new self-conscious film culture influenced by modernist art. Writers like Ricciotto Canudo and Virginia Woolf explored whether film was a new seventh art form and how the medium might influence thought, emotion, and subjectivity. Filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Len Lye experimented with techniques like montage and editing to develop a cinematic language.

1. Modernism & film

2. 28th December 1895 Grand Café, Paris Lumière brothers Cinematograph Camera, projector and contact printer First commercial application Instant success Average film = 10 x production costs, therefore… capital venture = industry

3. Panorama of Ealing from a moving tram, 1901 Dir William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson. Produced by British Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Courtesy of the British Film Institute (BFI) under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence at http://www.bfi.org.uk/creative.

4. Impact of WWI European cinema loses its foreign investors. American production increases and so too import of US films. US = high-cost, high-return, intensive model of film production. In 1920s Europe = new, self-conscious film culture in context of modernist art.

5. Film = seventh art Ricciotto Canudo , Reflections on the Seventh Art , 1923 (architecture, sculpture, music, dance, painting, poetry, film) Avant-garde rejects the narrative and pictorial realism of painting, theatre and literature. Search for a specific vocabulary of film-form.

6. New. Machine art. Two questions. Does the form in some way determine the content? Is film art a new kind of art? If so, how? 2) Does the medium alter the way we think and feel? Does film introduce a new form of subjectivity? Is there a pre-cinema worldview, and a post-cinema worldview?

7. ‘ But what then are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk erect? [ … ] At a performance of Dr Caligari the other day, a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at the corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into non-entity. [ … ] For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words [...] It seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression [ … ] Is there, we ask, some secret language, which we feel and see, but never speak, and if so, could this be made visible to the eye? ’ Virginia Woolf, ‘ The Cinema ’ , Nation and Athenaeum, 1926

8. montage film-speed dynamic relations of objects/people split-screen reverse superimposition longshots/extreme close-up stop-motion/animation

9. Len Lye Tusalava http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJOXMln4C0&feature=related UK [1929]

10. 2) Does the medium alter the way we think and feel? Does film introduce a new form of subjectivity? Is there a pre-cinema worldview, and a post-cinema worldview? ‘ The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. ’ ‘ This beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not. ’ Film shows us a world that is real but ‘ real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life. We behold [it] as [it is] when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. ’ Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, Nation and Athenaeum , 1926

11. 2) Does film introduce a new form of subjectivity? Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (2nd version, 1936) Removes the somatic experience of art ’ s uniqueness. The event of cinema takes place not in its representational content but in the edit. Cinema makes the simultaneous, collective experience of art a possibility.

12. Dziga Vertov Man with a movie camera USSR [1929]

13. ‘ WE: variant of a manifesto ’ , 1922 ‘ We are cleansing cinema of foreign matter [...] We seek our own rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else. We find it in the movements of things. The psychological prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch, it interferes with his desire for kinship with the machine [...] Our path leads through the poetry of machines, through the bungling citizen to the perfect, electric man [...] We introduce creative joy into all mechanical labour [...] We foster new people. ’

14. Kino-Eye theory = kino-eye is perfectible eye, human eye is imperfect. In the edit, different times and places combine to show a truer picture. The Kino-Eye shows us space and time differently. Film shows us relations between things that are separate in space and time but related by underlying factors like economics, the effects of which could not previously be revealed in such a comprehensive way. Film transcends individual bodily limitations (which are also effects of power) to both reveal and create collective experience.

15. BFI Southbank / NFT http://www.bfi.org.uk/ http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ Early British film criticism