This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinemas lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about films provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those medias materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the authors previous, Harmony & Dissent , examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.
- ISBN10 1554586410
- ISBN13 9781554586417
- Publish Date 15 October 2015 (first published 1 January 2012)
- Publish Status Transferred
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Format eBook
- Pages 560
- Language English