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…
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Wells, H.G. (1866–1946)
H.G. Wells was a British writer, educator, and social critic. Known as the founder of modern science fiction, Wells created many of the genre’s foundational…
Méliès, Georges (1861–1938)
Georges Méliès (born Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès) was a French showman, illusionist, and filmmaker best known for his early silent fantasy and science fiction films, such as…
Lovecraft, H. P. (1890–1937)
H. P. Lovecraft was an American pulp author in the 1920s and 1930s. His work, primarily published in the magazine Weird Tales, helped create the…
Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)
Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A…
Marker, Chris (1921–2012)
Chris Marker was a French filmmaker, photographer, writer, and multi-media artist who is widely considered to be the foremost pioneer of the essay film. More…
Burroughs, William S. (1914–1997)
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, William S. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation. He is known primarily for his controversial novel Naked…
A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] is the best-known work of special effects and film pioneer Georges Méliès (1861–1938). It is…
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.…
L’Herbier, Marcel (1888–1979)
Marcel L’Herbier was a French pioneer avant-garde (impressionist) filmmaker and theorist who made more than forty films between the 1920s and the 1950s. During World…
Clair, René (1898–1981)
Filmmaker, novelist, and critic René Clair (original name René-Lucien Chomette) was one of the foremost French film directors of the 1920s and 1930s. His first…
World Expositions of Paris (1889 and 1900) and Chicago (1893 and 1933)
The world expositions were monumental, public spectacles originating in the industrial fairs of early-nineteenth-century France and culminating in the Expositions Universelles of Paris (1889 and…
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…
Pulp Modernism
Pulp magazines are named for the low-quality pulpwood paper on which they were printed. They are part of the modernist periodical marketplace along with the…
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…
Arlen, Michael (1895–1956)
Michael Arlen, although now largely forgotten, was one of the most successful novelists of the 1920s. Born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Ruse, Bulgaria, to Armenian parents,…
Kubrick, Stanley (1928–1999)
Stanley Kubrick (b. 26 July 1928, Bronx, New York, US; d. 7 March 1999, St Albans, England) was a key late-modernist American director renowned for his creative…
Abbott, Edwin Abbott (1838–1926)
Edwin Abbott was born in London and educated at the City of London School and St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Church…
Tarkovsky, Andrei (1943–1986)
The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky stands at the zenith of high-modernist cinema. Amongst the many technical achievements that characterize Tarkovsky’s total art approach to cinema,…
Truffaut, François (1932–1984)
François Truffaut was a French film director, actor, and film critic, best known for being one of the founders of the French New Wave—a movement…
Googie Architecture
Googie architecture was a vernacular style of architecture that emerged in post-Second World War America, primarily in Southern California. Replacing Streamline Moderne as the style…
Altman, Robert (1925–2006)
Robert Bernard Altman (February 20, 1925, Kansas City, Missouri–November 20, 2006, Los Angeles) was an American director of television, theatre, and, most famously, films, including…
Modernism in Austria-Hungary
Modernism in Austria-Hungary developed in the imperial capital Vienna and other major cities such as Prague, Budapest, and Trieste. In the coffees houses of these…
Bergman, Ernst Ingmar (July 14, 1918–July 30, 2007)
Perhaps the exemplification of the European art-film director throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, Ingmar Bergman developed what would become an almost instantly recognizable…
Free Jazz
Free Jazz emerged in the late 1950s out of the ongoing negotiation of the American jazz tradition. By the mid-twentieth century, this African-American musical tradition…