Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The first feature film of legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, Strike, is an anatomy of the germination of collective action, its surveillance within modern networks…
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Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich (1898–1948)
Sergei Eisenstein was an early Soviet film director and theorist who produced widely acknowledged masterpieces of both silent and sound cinema, such as Strike (1924),…
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…
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…
Leyda, Jay (1910–1988)
Jay Leyda’s peripatetic life and protean career cut a unique, remarkable path. The long list of roles he mined include filmmaker, photographer, critic, archivist, art…
Ivens, Joris (1898–1989)
Joris Ivens (Georg Henri Anton Ivens), nicknamed “The Flying Dutchman” for his globe-trotting career, was a Dutch documentary maker. His political commitment and deft use…
The Birth of a Nation
One of the most watched and debated American films in history, The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith…
Modernist Shakespearean Cinema
From the moment of its birth cinema generated its own forms of Shakespeare. About 400 Shakespearean films were produced during the silent era, even though…
Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich (1893–1953)
Vsevolod Pudovkin was a Soviet actor, director, and film theorist working during the first half of the 20th century. He studied chemistry at Moscow State…
Jacobs, Lewis (1906–97)
Lewis Jacobs (1906–97) was an American film critic, historian, and filmmaker. Jacobs initially studied painting and design, and his first foray into cinema was through…
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…
Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich (1899–1970)
Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet director and theorist who initiated the montage movement of the 1920s. He proclaimed editing to be the primary authorial act…
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,…
Concrete Poetry
In general, ‘concrete poetry’ refers to a type of literary composition where the material aspects of a text (layout, typography, sound, etc.) are foregrounded and…
Kluge, Alexander (1932--)
Alexander Kluge is a German author, film director, and television producer who has also worked as a lawyer, teacher, and political lobbyist. A founding figure of…
Parnakh, Valentin Yakovlevich (1891–1951)
Brother of the celebrated poet Sofia Parnok, Valentin Parnakh was a Russo-Soviet dancer, jazz musician, actor, poet, and translator, a mover and shaker of the…
Foregger, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1892–1939)
A Soviet artist, critic, designer, choreographer, and theatre director, Nikolai Mikhailovich Foregger graduated from Law School at Kiev University, with a specialisation in medieval French…
Alvarez Bravo, Lola (1903–1993)
Born to a wealthy family in Jalisco, Mexico, Dolores Martínez de Anda (always known as Lola) was brought up in luxury during her infancy and…
Simultaneism (simultanéisme)
Neither a movement, nor a group of loosely connected artists, Simultaneism instead describes a tendency in modernist avant-garde art and literature from roughly 1912 through…
Griffith, David Wark (1875–1948)
American film director D.W. Griffith was a pivotal figure in cinema’s ascendance as a mass medium and modern art form. He is best known for…
Vertov, Dziga (b. January 2, 1896, Bialystok, Poland; d. February 12, 1954, Moscow, Russia)
Derived from the sound of a working film-reel and the word “vertet´sia” (to spin), Dziga Vertov is the pseudonym of David (aka Denis) Kaufman, a…
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930)
Vladimir Mayakovsky (МАЯКОВСКИЙ, ВЛАДИМИР) was a leading Russian poet of the twentieth century and representative of Russian Futurism, a modernist trend that emerged as an…
Russian Modernism (1890–1934)
Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan…
Politics and Cinema
The relationship between politics and the cinema is probably one of the most vexatious questions to have occupied the academic discipline of film studies, and…