Harmony and Dissent

by Elder, R. Bruce

• ISBN13: 9781554580286
• ISBN10: 1554580285
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-30
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr

Summary

This book offers a new look at avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. In this work, R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape. To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity's cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar (and highly questionable) epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms.

Table of Contents

Modernism and the Absolute Film: The Overcoming of Representation	p. 1
The Philosophical and Occult Background to the Absolute Film	p. 3
Modernism and the Absolute Film	p. 39
Modernism and Revolution: Constructivism Between Marxism and Theology	p. 203
Spiritual Interests in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Russia	p. 205
Symbolism and Its Legacies	p. 225
Constructivism: Between Productivism and Suprematism	p. 265
Eisenstein, Constructivism, and the Dialectic	p. 279
Concluding Unscientific Postscript	p. 439
Viking Eggeling's Diagonal-Symphonie: An Analysis	p. 445
Shot Description / Analysis	p. 450
Index	p. 465
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