Introduction: A Modernist Cinema?

Abstract

From the time of Eadweard Muybridge’s first successful experiments with stereoscopic fast motion photography in 1878, the history of cinema has been indissolubly linked with those of modernity and modern art. The rapid development of the new medium by Muybridge, William Friese-Greene, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Thomas Edison, and Auguste and Louis Lumiere in the 1880s and 1890s occurred during a period of artistic ferment and formal innovation in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, opera and music. Even as the ‘cinematograph’ of the Lumiere brothers (and Jean Aime Le Roy), the ‘Vitascope’ of Edison, and the ‘Bioscop’ of Emil and Max Skladonowsky enjoyed their initial public triumphs in Paris, New York and Berlin in the mid-1890s, a bewildering variety of new movements in the arts – naturalism, symbolism, aestheticism, impressionism, decadence, modernismo, art deco, modernisme (the Catalan architectural movement) and verismo, to name only a few of the most prominent – flourished in Europe and the Americas. The subsequent worldwide success first of the silent movie and then after 1927 of the sound film significantly coincided with what has been traditionally regarded as the heyday of literary (and more generally artistic) modernism. At a time when the traditional boundaries of modernist studies are undergoing a radical and decisive remapping, and when the emergence of new media prompts us to reconsider the relationships among new technologies, cultural production and artistic expression, it seems altogether appropriate, and a matter of critical and theoretical importance, to pose (once again) the question of what the relationship is (or was) between modernism and cinema. The contributors to this issue of Modernist Cultures – the first to be published by Edinburgh University Press – have both raised and responded to this question in different ways; but for all their differences in disciplinary perspective, methodological approach and