Between 1927 and 1933, the journal "Close Up" championed a European avant-garde in film-making. This volume republishes articles from the journal, with an introduction and a commentary on the lives of, and complex relationships between, its writers and editors.

Between 1927 and 1933, the journal "Close Up" championed a European avant-garde in film-making. This volume republishes articles from the journal, with an introduction and a commentary on the lives of, and complex relationships between, its writers and editors.

Between 1927 and 1933, the journal "Close Up" championed a European avant-garde in film-making. This volume republishes articles from the journal, with an introduction and a commentary on the lives of, and complex relationships between, its writers and editors.

Close Up was the first English-language journal of film theory. Published between 1927 and 1933, it billed itself as "the only magazine devoted to film as an art," promising readers "theory and analysis: no gossip." The journal was edited by the writer and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, the novelist Winifred Bryher, and the poet H. D., and it attracted contributions from such major figures as Dorothy Richardson, Sergei Eisenstein, and Man Ray. This anthology presents some of the liveliest and most important articles from the publication's short but influential history. The writing in Close Up was theoretically astute, politically incisive, open to emerging ideas from psychoanalysis, passionately committed to "pure cinema," and deeply critical of Hollywood and its European imitators. The articles collected here cover such subjects as women and film, "The Negro in Cinema," Russian and working-class cinema, and developments in film technology, including the much debated addition of sound. The contributors are a cosmopolitan cast, reflecting the journal's commitment to internationalism; Close Up was published from Switzerland, printed in England and France, and distributed in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and Los Angeles. The editors of this volume present a substantial introduction and commentaries on the articles that set Close Up in historical and intellectual context. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in the origins of film theory and the relationship between cinema and modernism.

The Companion combines a broad grounding in the essential texts and contexts of the modernist movement with the unique insights of scholars whose careers have been devoted to the study of modernism. An essential resource for students and teachers of modernist literature and culture Broad in scope and comprehensive in coverage Includes more than 60 contributions from some of the most distinguished modernist scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Brings together entries on elements of modernist culture, contemporary intellectual and aesthetic movements, and all the genres of modernist writing and art Features 25 essays on the signal texts of modernist literature, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Pays close attention to both British and American modernism

This companion provides students and scholars alike with an interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism. Through essays written on a range of cultural contexts, this collection helps readers understand the significant changes in belief systems, visual culture, and pastimes that influenced, and were influenced by, the experimental literature published around 1890-1945.

The Tenth Muse explores writings on the cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the study of the terms and strategies of early writings about film with literary engagement with cinema in the same period. She gives a new understanding of the ways in which early writers about film - reviewers, critics, theorists - developed aesthetic categories to define and accommodate what was called 'the seventh art' or 'the tenth muse' and found discursive strategies adequate to the representation of the new art and technology of cinema, with its unprecedented powers of movement. In examining the writings of early film critics and commentators in tandem with those of more specifically literary figures, including H.G.Wells and Virginia Woolf, and in bringing literary texts into this field, Laura Marcus provides a new account of relationships between cinema and literature. Intertwining two major strands of research - the exploration of early film criticism and theory and cinema's presence in literary texts - The Tenth Muse shows how issues central to an understanding of cinema (including questions of time, repetition, movement, vision, sound and silence) are threaded through both kinds of writing, and the ways in which discursive and fictional writings overlapped. The movement that defined cinema was also perceived as a more fragile and unstable ephemerality that inhered at every level, from the fleeting nature of the projected images to the vagaries of cinematic exhibition. It was the anxiety over the mutability of the medium and its exhibition which, from the 1920s onwards, led to the establishment of such institutional spaces for cinema as the London-based Film Society, the new film journals, and, in the 1930s, the first film archives. The Tenth Muse explores the continuities between these sites of cinematic culture and the conceptual, literary and philosophical understandings of the filmic medium.

Pop Modernism examines the popular roots of modernism in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including experimental movies, pop songs, photographs, and well-known poems and paintings, Juan A. Suárez reveals that experimental art in the early twentieth century was centrally concerned with the reinvention of everyday life. Suárez demonstrates how modernist writers and artists reworked pop images and sounds, old-fashioned and factory-made objects, city spaces, and the languages and styles of queer and ethnic “others.” Along the way, he reinterprets many of modernism’s major figures and argues for the centrality of relatively marginal ones, such as Vachel Lindsay, Charles Henri Ford, Helen Levitt, and James Agee. As Suárez shows, what’s at stake is not just an antiquarian impulse to rescue forgotten past moments and works, but a desire to establish an archaeology of our present art, culture, and activism.

Publisher Description

Using silent cinema as a critical lens enables us to reassess Katherine Mansfield's entire literary career. Starting from the awareness that innovation in literature is often the outcome of hybridisation, this book discusses not only a single case study, but also the intermedia exchanges in which literary modernism at large is rooted.