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.

Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early British film culture in literature, thus providing the first account of cinema as a cause for modernism. Shail’s study draws on little-known sources to create a detailed picture of cinema following its ‘second birth’ as both institution and medium. The book presents a comprehensive account of how UK-based modernism originated as a consequence of—rather than a conscious aesthetic response to—this new component of the cultural landscape. Film’s new accounts of language, endeavor, time, collectivity and political change are first considered, then related to the patterns that comprised modernist texts. Authors discussed include Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson.

Publisher Description

This study revolutionises our understanding of both literary modernism and early cinema. Trotter draws on the most recent scholarship in English and film studies to demonstrate how central cinema as a recording medium was to Joyce, Eliot and Woolf, and how modernist were the concerns of Chaplin and Griffith. This book rewrites the cultural history of the early twentieth century, showing how film technology and modernist aesthetics combined to explore the limits of the human. Offers major re-interpretations of key Modernist works, including Ulysses, The Waste Land, and To the Lighthouse Explores film and film-going in works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen Offers original analyses of crucial phases in the careers of two of the most celebrated film-makers of the silent era, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin

Tracing the history of modernism in cinema, this study provides readings of a range of classic films made between 1925 and 1980 by such filmmakers as Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. It argues that the act of vision and visual experience are problematized in literary modernism.

Many modernist and avant-garde artists and authors were fascinated by the occult movements of their day. This volume explores how Occultism came to shape modernist art, literature, and film. Individual chapters examine the presence and role of Occultism in the work of such modernist luminaries as Rainer Maria Rilke, August Strindberg, W.B. Yeats, Joséphin Péladan and the artist Jan Švankmaier, as well as in avant-garde film, post-war Greek Surrealism, and Scandinavian Retrogardism. Combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of Esotericism Studies with those of Literary Studies, Art History, and Cinema Studies, this volume provides in-depth and nuanced perspectives upon the relationship between Occultism and Modernism in the Western arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-232) and index.