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.

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

Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies—Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi’s films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.

Publisher Description

Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, Screening Modernism is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema’s postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, András Bálint Kovács’s encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovács begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism’s origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, Screening Modernism ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.

Noted film scholars analyze some of the most challenging films of the 20th century

For the past dozen years, J. Hoberman has been publishing witty, impassioned, vivid film criticism in the pages of New York's alternative weekly, The Village Voice. His first collection includes a variety of these (mostly) movie reviews, as well as a number of longer essays and film-festival reports, all written during the 1980s. For Hoberman, film criticism is a form of social commentary, and his articles reflect a decade when an actor was president, the Vietnam War was refought on the nation's movie screens, and soundbites determined elections. The variety of Hoberman's interests and the intellectual depth of his critiques are remarkable. Writing from the perspective of Lower Manhattan, he places movies in the context of the other visual arts--painting, photography, comics, video, and TV--as well as that of postmodem theorists such as Leslie Fiedler and Jean Baudrillard. Demonstrating the widest range of any American film critic writing today, Hoberman is equally at home discussing the work of Steven Spielberg and Andrei Tarkovsky, films by cutting-edge artists Raul Ruiz and Yvonne Rainer, and historical figures as disparate as Charles Chaplin and Andy Warhol. Vulgar Modernism offers an entertaining, trenchant, informed, and informative view of the past decade's popular culture.