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…
With its highly innovative reductionist style, the silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928], produced at the start…
Anglo-American director Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most influential auteurs in cinema history, making more than fifty feature films between 1925 and 1976. He…
A performer and teacher of voice and movement, François Delsarte developed a theory of expression that influenced modern dance, actor training, poetic recitation, silent film,…
Emak Bakia (Basque for “Leave me alone”) is a 16-minute long black-and-white silent film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled a “cine-poem,” it features no obvious…
De Brug (The Bridge) is a black-and-white short silent film by Joris Ivens about the Koningshavenbrug in Rotterdam, a railroad lift bridge built between 1925…
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is an American silent film directed by German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who was renowned for his Expressionistic films…
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…
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…
Max Fleischer (17 July 1883–11 September 1972) and his brother Dave (14 July 1894–25 June 1979) were innovators in the world of animated film and…
Charles Spenser Chaplin was born in London on April 16, 1889, and died on Christmas Day, 1977, at home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. He had been…
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…
Victor Sjöström (also known as victor Seastrom) was a Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is, with Mauritz Stiller, the joint founding father of…
A Page of Madness [Kurutta ichipeiji or ippeiji] is a black and white silent Japanese film directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke that has been celebrated for…
Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is not usually regarded as a modernist writer, but his works reveal a productive ambivalence towards Modernism. In Decline and Fall (1928),…
Regen (Rain) is a black-and-white short film by Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken about a rain shower in Amsterdam. As a masterpiece of Dutch avant-garde…
James Agee was an American film critic, journalist, and novelist, who, like his modernist contemporaries, pushed against the constraints of his genres. Born in Knoxville…
Denishawn, a for-profit enterprise combining a school and dance company, was founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by the internationally acclaimed solo performer Ruth St.…
A Japanese comedian, also known as Enoken, Enomoto initially created popular musical comedies in Tokyo’s downtown entertainment district Asakusa. His comedy style, containing elements from…
Furukawa Roppa was a Japanese comedian, film actor, and essayist, who was known for his round face with Lloyd’s glasses. He was active before and…
Silvestre Revueltas was a Mexican modernist composer and violinist. Known mainly for his references to modern Mexican culture, Revueltas is regarded as an essential figure…
During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as “modern” to their upper-class and, increasingly,…
The Ukrainian film director, artist, and writer Alexander Dovzhenko was born in Sosnytsia (Chernihiv region) and graduated from the Hlukhiv teachers’ college in 1914. He…
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,…
Vachel Lindsay was an American poet whose concern for developing a new, popular American language led him to become one of the first people to…