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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Moving the modernist imaginary: cinematic intervention in the french and american avant-garde, 1920-1935
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Projects & Abstracts
2001-10-01
2022-12-01
2001-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Jennifer Wild
2001/10/01
University of Iowa
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Moving the modernist imaginary: cinematic intervention in the french and american avant-garde, 1920-1935
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MOVING THE MODERNIST IMAGINARY: CINEMATIC INTERVENTION IN
THE FRENCH AND AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE, 1920-1935
Jennifer Wild / PhD Thesis Project
University of Iowa




   “Moving the Modernist Imaginary: Cinematic Intervention in the French and
American Avant-Garde, 1920-1935” is an interdisciplinary, trans-continental study of
modernism that emphasizes the growth of the theoretical and practical interest in cin-
ema in primarily Parisian and New York modernist art communities. Grounded upon
the emergence of experimental cinemas in Europe and America that stem from
American literary modernism and straight photography, and from the movements of
the historical avant-garde such as Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and constructivism, as
well as the collective, theoretical and practical enterprise of the French Impressionists,
this study reconsiders the central moments of cinematic exhibition, criticism, and the-
ory that manifested in the spaces and publications formerly devoted solely to the plas-
tic arts. In turn, this project launches a new consideration of the modernist transfor-
mation in the arts by way of cinema. This dissertation questions not only the degree to
which cinema challenged the institutional control of the traditional arts, the tradition-
al arts’ hold on the popular and avant-garde imagination, but also the hegemonic
parameter of the fine arts. The central, resulting thesis of this study posits that the dis-
cursive terrain of the cinema in fact initiated a new, modernist dynamic based upon an
inter-arts discursivity, temporality and visuality associated with an expansion of the
attributes of modernity – a critical expansion only the moving image could foster.
   Presently, it continues to be all too easy to contain the circulation, exhibition, and
hybridity of experimental film production and the fine arts of the 1920s in proximate
yet distinct realms. For a fuller historical and theoretical account of modernism, it has
become increasingly important to examine how cinema, in its varied manifestations
during this period, demands a place within the cultural framework for the arts, and
therefore presents a viable material, conceptual, and theoretical alternative in which
artists could ground an aesthetic and ideological critique of modernity. We need only
consider the presence of cinema in exhibition spaces formerly devoted to painting – the
Salon d’Automne, and the Musée Galliera, for example – to see that the “alternative cin-
ema network,” as Richard Abel identifies the French avant-garde, represents an inter-
esting, if not somewhat contradictory exhibition strategy if seen within the long histo-
ry of critique and cession from the national structures of fine art exhibition in France
by independent artists. The “museumification” of cinema during this period is admit-
tedly and effort of legitimisation for this heretofore dominant an narrative distraction;
however, the importance of the gallery, most importantly in New York, as an initial,
intermediary zone of cinema, literature, and the plastic arts, cannot be underestimated.
It is this level of integration that supplies the first significant paradigm shift in the con-
ception of modernism, that bridged the often opposing strains of modernist production

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                                                           MOVING THE MODERNIST IMAGINARY

in art, literature, and cinema, and that finally complicated the terms and parameters of
modernism by film’s own ties to the popular, and to economic and technical necessity.
  To an equally important degree, the inclusion of cinematic discourse in publications
formerly centered around modernist literary experiment – in America The Dial, The
Little Review, and Broom –, not to mention the grown of French inter-arts publications
such as Le Crapouillot, Le Gazette des Sept Arts, and L’Esprit Nouveau, suggests that the
direct influence of cinema upon early 20th century literary modernism and its commu-
nities is a central, however repressed, area of study. Certainly, the cinematic influence
in the writing of Dos Passos or E. E. Cummings, to name two writers at the center of the
American project, is clearly marked; however, the expanse of cinema’s influential
dynamism in the enterprise of literary modernism in terms of a pictorial and organiza-
tional plasticity in their pages is an area of consideration that is taken up in this proj-
ect. In this respect, the pre-war pages of Ricciotto Canudo’s Monjoie, the early 20s
efforts of Jean Epstein’s Bonjour cinéma, and Breton, Aragon, and Soupault’s
Litterature, are studied as evidence of cinema’s impact on the traditional art of litera-
ture and its criticism.
  During the important decade of the1920s, the industrial cinema of Hollywood solidi-
fied its narrative form as well as its popular dominion abroad thanks to the effects of
WWI on European production centers. On the one hand, the cinema is, from this stand-
point, clearly the ultimate manifestation of mass spectacle entertainment toward
which both European and American avant-gardeists were often quite ambivalent. On
the other hand, however, the 20s and early 30s is an era wherein a thoroughly art-cen-
tered film discourse begins to further transform the modernist and cinephilic enter-
prise most significantly in France. Indeed, the experimental film form becomes for the
diversely positioned practitioners of the avant-garde an important secondary pattern of
response in their sustained critique of the institution of art and high culture. As a sec-
ondary provocation, these films and their theory elaborate the modernist notions of
perception, spectatorship, exhibition, and economics, as well as demonstrate the degree
to which the cinema was perceived as a medium naturally, ontologically, embedded
within the modernist “great divide,” as Andreas Huyssen calls it, between high art and
mass culture. Thus, this dissertation makes clear how the cinema offered a range of per-
ceptual and representational strategies for the avant-garde’s praxis to everyday life, as
well as how the cinema becomes a means through which modern artists could further
intervene in the historical evolution of the traditional arts. A close examination of the
appearance and production of films within the spaces, publications, and communities
of American and French avant-garde movements complicates and expands the often
neat theoretical and historical parameters past theories of modernism have used to
understand the lineage of modern experiment in the arts.
  By tracking the inclusion of cinema in these modernist spaces and formations tradi-
tionally aligned with painting and literature, my aim is also to introduce the following
criteria to the modernist dialectic as it has been understood, after Adorno, as a complex
set of interactions with urbanity, and the academicization and historicization of art: the
cinema generally, and the American industrial cinema specifically. To incorporate the
American industrial cinema’s place in the historical avant-garde’s culture, theory, and,
importantly, imaginary, is indeed to reframe the continental divide between France and
America. Insofar as modernism has been normatively framed as a one-way flow from
Europe to America, the European avant-garde’s reception of the American feature film

                                                                                       ­145
JENNIFER WILD

presents a definitive fissure in the theorization of European – and American – mod-
ernism. While the historical avant-garde’s theory of the American cinema becomes a
traceable, trans-Atlantic dialectic with America and mass culture, their specific interest
in Chaplin and DeMille, for example, further complicates the modernist divide
between high art and mass culture. This project considers the film experiments of
Sheeler and Strand, Dulac, Epstein, Ray, Clair, Duchamp, and Watson and Webber, to
name a few, as equally important as Canudo’s and Epstein’s elaborate theoretical con-
siderations of Charlot – perhaps the most important figure from the American indus-
trial cinema to the European avant-garde. By evaluating the difference between the
American and European avant-garde’s interest in mass-cultural cinema, this project
also considers the degree of appropriation of and interaction with mass cultural form
and figuration to a modernist end on both sides of the Atlantic.
  Founded on a desire to wed the themes and recurring theses in the study of mod-
ernism, the avant-garde, silent cinema, and modernity, this project provides a new
methodological account of the trans-Atlantic flux and exchange surrounding cinema’s
intervention, disruption, and contribution to modernism in the arts. While my inter-
disciplinary research undertakes to link certain non-filmic texts and theoretical and lit-
erary traditions into the canon of early avant-garde cinema, my most important goal is
to re-orient our historical understanding of the interdependence between modernist
experiment in the arts and in the cinema, and to clarify the full range of impact the cin-
ema had on the arts and its culture during this period. It is from here that modernism
can be newly understood in its post-cinematic incarnation. Yet, beyond challenging the
continental divide that frames the proliferation of the modernist project as a one-way
flow from Europe to America, this thesis aims equally to disrupt the disciplinary divide
between film studies and art history. It is the central work of this thesis to discover what
this particular divide has stymied, neglected, or repressed in the study of American and
European modernism in the arts after cinema.




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