Transnational Networks of Avant-Garde Film in the Interwar Period (original) (raw)

Midnight in Andalusia: Mainstream Cinema and the Avant-Garde

The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema, 2024

A number of important thinkers have argued that experimental cinema and mainstream cinema are discrete domains with little or no overlap. This chapter seeks to complicate this argument by giving close attention to the work of the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Not only were Buñuel’s avant-garde films heavily influenced by the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, they went on to influence the mainstream narrative films of Woody Allen. An analysis of Buñuel’s cinema and its intertexts suggests that experimental and mainstream films often exist in a state of symbiosis rather than one of radical alterity.

Understanding Cinema: the Avant-gardes and the Construction of Film Discourse

This essay highlights the role of historical avant-gardes in shaping film discourse. This role was vital for the recognition of cinema as an art form, as well as for the constitution of a visual and textual discourse that came to be reflected in the Institutional Mode of Representation – Hollywood film from the 1920s to the 1940s. To realize the importance of artistic movements in the creation of new paradigms for art at large, it is necessary to understand their principles and the context in which a new way of looking and reflecting on the world came about. The promotion of authentic and efficient film literacy requires focusing on the era in which cinema began. Only by examining the 19th century more deeply can we perceive what lies beyond that invention of the Lumière brothers. The essay shows that cinema was not only inscribed in the times from which it emerged but that it also launched a new paradigm that the arts of the 20th century were yet to discover.

Are you Afraid of the Cinema?': Du Cinéma and the Changing Question of Cinephilia and the Avant-Garde (1928-1930)

AmeriQuests, 2015

This essay considers José Corti’s early issues of Du Cinéma as part of an historical avant-garde complex that, in tandem with literary experiments, shaped another historical approach to early cinema criticism and theory by looking beyond cinephilia as a structuring paradigm. Identifying fear, rather than love, as a powerful avant-garde discourse, I suggest that Du Cinéma and especially the avant-garde writer André Delons forwarded a negative dialectical approach to cinematic thought, inquiry, and research. By investigating the enquête or questionnaire as a central research method in this avant-garde tradition, I reorient our understanding of Du Cinema's claim to the cinema's mutability, and its ability to reveal the limits of knowledge.

Rea Walldén, ‘Beware! Construction! A Semiotic Methodology for Approaching Avant-Garde Cinema’, Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, 3 (2), 2017, 111-135.

Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics, 2017

This paper proposes a methodology for approaching avant-garde cinema based on Hjelmslev’s theory of sign-function. Its starting point is the epistemological rupture constituted by Saussure’s introduction of the concept of fundamental semiotic arbitrariness, which radically alters the relation of the semiotic realm to what lies outside it. The paper uses Hjelmslev’s model of semiotic stratification, concentrating on the strata of substance, their inner structure and their articulation with the extra-semiotic realm. It proposes some interpretive hypotheses regarding the lower levels of the strata, notably the incorporation in the model of the situations of production and reception. It goes on to apply the modified model to cinema. It shows how some traditional ontological and epistemological positions regarding reality and materiality, as well as their aesthetic and ethical implications, underlie the ways cinema has been theorised. These issues are reformulated and resituated with the help of the Hjelmslevian model. The above sets the ground for attempting an inclusive meta-definition of avant-garde art. I argue that avant-garde is an approach to the arts, not a style, and therefore a structural description is needed to comprehend it. The definition I propose relies on the intimate connection between innovative artistic practice and a focus on the expression-plane, modelled on the prototype of revolution, sustained by a materialist ideology and motivated by a political demand: tell the truth, be revolution. In other words, attention to the expression-plane is the result of a political demand for epistemic sincerity; materiality becomes the path to know and, potentially, change reality. The final part of the paper attempts to identify and interpret specific techniques used by avant-garde cinema and classify them under strategies aiming at the revelation of cinema’s constructed nature through drawing attention to its expression-plane.

Transnational Cinema Notes on a Developing Field of Study De Montfort keynote

In this talk I aim to present an overview of the historical shifts of the transnational in film studies, and consider the ways in which the discipline has responded to developments in the social sciences. In the talk I outline the key areas of focus in what I refer to as the first phase of transnational cinema studies. These are: migration and cinema and exilic and diasporic filmmaking; transnationalizing readings of national and regional cinema; historical readings of transnational cinema; and film festival studies. Following this, I discuss some of the strengths and limitations in attempting to categorize and assess scales of transnationality in film production. The final section of the talk presents an overview of the second phase of transnational film studies, and considers the expanded reach of the transnational to the many fields that make up the discipline.

Transnational dreamscapes: Cinema and visual motifs in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition

Catalan journal of communication & cultural studies, 2022

This article explores the connections between moving images and world fairs by focusing on a specific case: the Barcelona 1929 International Exposition. The event, a key moment in the city's history, showcased cinema as a technological marvel, a vehicle for transnational influence and a tool for propaganda. After an introduction to the political and economic context of the exposition, our analysis covers four main areas: first, we document the role played by Palacio de Proyecciones, a sumptuous palace where new audiovisual devices and techniques were displayed; second, we trace the remains of the mysterious lost film Barcelona Trailer, where Hollywood stars greeted Hispanic audiences and praised the exhibition; third, we offer a critical analysis of the newsreels recorded by the film company CINAES and their mise en scène; finally, we compare visual motifs and shots from the 1929 footage with contemporary images produced today in Barcelona, examining the links between visual culture, technology and gender.

Comprehending Abstract themes in avant-garde film

Comprehending Abstract themes in avant-garde film, 1999

In this paper I will analyse two films, Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren (1943) and Lost Highway by David Lynch (1996); both depict Hollywood, Los Angeles through elliptical editing and surreal imagery. I will endeavour to highlight similarities between the texts and use structural theories, expounded by David Bordwell and Edward Branigan, to suggest a way of comprehending their narratives.