Film Noir
Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s saw the emergence of ‘film noir’, a cycle of fatalistic crime thrillers, often produced as ‘B’ movies and distinguished…
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City films
This entry surveys the history and aesthetics of the city symphony film (or city film). It traces its intellectual and aesthetic origins in the late…
Film Subject Overview
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
Le Film d’Art
Film d’Art was a French production company founded in February 1908 by businessman Paul Lafitte and backed by Pathé. The company united playwright Henri Lavedan…
World Film News
World Film News was a publication that advanced the visibility of the documentary film movement and hosted wide-ranging debates over film, politics, and aesthetics. The…
Feminist Film
There is no consensus about what “feminist film” is. A simple definition would be films about women made by women that advance the feminist cause.…
Dadaism in Film
Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through…
Science Fiction Films
Science fiction films are films where plot premises generally (1) depend on a scientific development or concept not actualised at the time of filming, or…
Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives (“Anthology” hereafter) is an experimental film institution that was founded in 1970 by experimental filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, Peter Kubelka, Stan…
Film und Fotografie
FiFo, or Film und Fotografie, is shorthand for the Internationale Ausstellung des deutschen Werkbundes [International Exhibition of the German Werkbund], which opened in Stuttgart in…
Modernist Film Criticism
Criticism is one of the fundamental concepts in Modernism and is defined by “the intensification, almost exacerbation, of [a] self-critical tendency” that began with Kant,…
Modernism and Film Music in Latin America
Modernism in Latin America was, as in Europe, a movement that began as a reaction to late-nineteenth-century artistic currents, primarily in visual and plastic art,…
The British Documentary Film Movement (1926–1946)
The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that…
Expressionism
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Montage
As an aesthetic principle, montage, defined as the assemblage of disparate elements into a composite whole often by way of juxtaposition, is most often associated…
Surrealism Overview
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Modernism in East Asia
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
Modernism in Europe
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis, in the literal sense of that word. In every…
Dadaism
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
Constructivism
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
Photography
Cubism
Cubism is an influential modernist art movement that emerged in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The term was established by Parisian…
Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Auteur Theory, The
The auteur theory is a way of critically analyzing a film or corpus of films through viewing its director as the film’s author and principal…
Triumph of the Will (1935)
Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is a black and white propaganda film made by German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The film documents the 1934…