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.…
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Zoshchenko, Mikhail Michailovich (1894–1958)
Mikhail Zoshchenko was a Soviet writer of short stories and tales (sometimes autobiographical), as well as a feuilletonist, memoirist, and dramatist. He was a member…
Das, Jibanananda (1899-1954)
Jibanananda Das was one of the pre-eminent Bengali poets of the first half of the twentieth century. With the posthumous entry of his prose writings…
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…
Blixen, Karen (1885–1962)
Karen Blixen was a singular figure in 20th century Danish literary life. In the 1930s, when Blixen started writing, Danish literature was dominated by social…
Weston, Jessie (1850–1928)
Jessie Laidlay Weston was a British independent scholar and folklorist best known for her influential study From Ritual to Romance (1920), which sought to trace…
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1964)
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the most controversial and innovative authors of the twentieth century. Known for his use of insults, slang, and ellipses in…
Black Girl (1966)
Black Girl is the first feature-length sub-Saharan African production directed by Ousmane Sembène, also known as the father of African cinema. The film traces the…
Selvon, Samuel (1923–1994)
Samuel Selvon was a Trinidadian writer whose vivid portraits of daily life in both the Caribbean and post-Second World War England garnered international acclaim. Selvon’s…
Iranian New Wave
The Iranian New Wave began when a group of young Iranian directors—following developments in the Iranian cultural arena with origins in the political and social…
Ward, Lynd (1905–1985)
Lynd Kendall Ward was an American artist best known for the six novels in woodcuts he created between 1929–37, though he was also an accomplished…
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…
Cohl, Emile (1857–1938)
Emile Cohl (Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet), a renowned caricaturist and pioneering filmmaker born in Paris, is often credited with inventing the animated cartoon. In…
Fireworks (1947)
Fireworks, Kenneth Anger’s breakthrough short film brought him immediate renown, and acclaim from the likes of Jean Cocteau, upon its debut at the 1949 Festival…
Arab-American Theater
Arab-American Theater is a general term that describes plays and performances by Americans of Arab descent written in Arabic and/or English from the early twentieth…
Kawakami, Otojirō (1864–1911)
Kawakami Otojirō was an actor, comedian, and impresario during Japan’s early modern period and was the first to take Japanese performances on tour, albeit in…
Dreyer, Carl Theodor (1889–1968)
Carl Theodor Dreyer was a journalist, theatre critic, scriptwriter and film director born and brought up in Copenhagen. It is difficult to speak of a…
Al-‘Ujaylī, ‘Abd al Salām عبد السلام العجيلي(1918/1919–2006)
‘Abd al Salām Al-‘Ujaylī was one of the most productive and versatile literary figures in twentieth-century Syria. His experiences both as a medical doctor and…
Panicker, K.C.S. (1911–1977)
Kovalezhi Cheerampathoor Sankaran Paniker was of Malayali background but spent most of his active life as a painter, teacher, and organizer in Madras, now Chennai,…
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…
Anderson, Sherwood
Sherwood Anderson was an American short-story writer, novelist, and memoirist. He was a businessman turned author whose writing often rendered the lives of ordinary people…
Mann, Klaus (1906–1949)
Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann was born in 1906 into Germany’s most famous family of writers, in which, he would later write, ‘everything has already been…
Wicomb, Zoë (1948—)
Novelist, short-story writer and essayist Zoë Wicomb was born in Namaqualand, South Africa. Much of her fiction and criticism deals with the construction of racial…
Structuralism
Structuralism, generally described, is a twentieth-century intellectual movement associated with linguistic studies in Europe, despite its vast applicability and many adherents. An initial aim of…
Choukri, Mohamed (1935–2003)
Mohamed Choukri (Muḥammad Shukrī) was a Moroccan writer who made an important contribution to the renewal of literature in the Arabic world. Internationally, he is…