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…
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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…
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.…
Futurism
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Zabolotsky, Nikolai Alexeevich (1903–1958)
Nikolai Alexeevich Zabolotsky was a Russian poet and translator, and a member of the avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu (a modified acronym for Obedinenie Realnogo Iskusstva…
Genet, Jean (1910-1986)
Jean Genet was a poet, novelist, autobiographer and playwright within the Theatre of the Absurd movement. He wrote licentiously on homosexuals and outlaws, and explosively…
Vian, Boris (1920–1959)
Boris Vian (1920–1959) may well be the Renaissance man of twentieth-century France. In his short life, he was an engineer, a jazz musician, a fiction…
Kafka, Franz (1883–1924)
Franz Kafka was born 3 July 1883 to a bourgeois family in Prague, the Czech capital that in the late nineteenth century belonged to the…
Yehoshua, A. B.
A leading Israeli writer and cultural figure since the 1960s, Avraham B. Yehoshua’s work was recognized, even when he was a young man, as representing…
Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1904–1941)
Known during his lifetime as a failed avant-garde poet who went on to a successful, if minor, career as a children’s writer, Vvedensky is acknowledged…
Satie, Erik Alfred Leslie (1866–1925)
Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire,…
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…
A Movie (1958)
A Movie (1958) is a twelve-minute compilation montage of vintage newsreels, soft-core “girlie movies,” low-budget Westerns, educational and ethnographic films, and other black and white…
Abe Kōbō (1924–1993)
Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) was a pivotal shingeki playwright and director as Japanese contemporary theatre matured after World War II. Known also as a novelist, Abe…
Comics
The early twentieth century saw the rise of the modern comic strip, the comic book and the artist’s book as distinctive forms of graphic narrative…
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…
Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854-1900)
Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, essayist, author and poet, and one of Victorian England’s chief proponents of Aestheticism. His works are often characterised by…
Arrivi, Francisco (1915–2007)
Francisco Arriví was instrumental in developing a modern theater in Puerto Rico during the 1940s–1960s. A playwright, poet, essayist, and tireless promoter of Puerto Rican…
Queneau, Raymond (1903–1976)
Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet and essayist of very broad interests (leading to his directorship of the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade from…
Ruiz, Antonio (1897–1964)
Antonio Ruiz, also known as El Corzo or El Corcito after a famous Spanish bullfighter, was primarily an easel painter from the 1920s to the…
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) that deals with European colonialism…
Valle-Inclán, Ramón María Del (1866–1936)
The Spanish dramatist, novelist, and poet Ramón del Valle-Inclán was a major figure of the Generation of 1898, a group of writers that reinvigorated Spanish…
Tzara, Tristan (1896-1963)
Born Samuel (Samy or Sami) Rosenstock in Moineşti, Romania, Tristan Tzara was an avant-garde poet, performer, critic, and film director. Together with Hugo Ball, Hans…
Kharms, Daniil Ivanovich [ХАРМС, ДАНИИЛ ИВАНОВИЧ] (1905–1942)
Co-founder (with Aleksandr Vvedensky) of the short-lived Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta, or OBERIU (The Association for Real Art), Kharms was one of the leading figures of…
Automatism [REVISED AND EXPANDED]
There were different directions and forms connnected to Dada but an important element within it was a position of critique of established art and society.…