Words in Motion: The Movies, the Readies, and the "Revolution of the Word"

Abstract

One of the twentieth century's most contentious aesthetic controversies was laid to rest, at least according to contemporary news reports, at the Metropolitan Museum late in 1936 when Erwin Panofsky lectured on the topic "The Motion Picture as an Art." 1 Though the enthusiasm of the New York papers, stirred by this plebeian invasion of the precincts of the Met, may have been a bit misplaced, Panofsky's lecture is still considered important in establishing serious academic study of the movies. A revised version of the lecture, entitled "Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures," has been reprinted dozens of times, in so many different contexts that it has been called not just Panofsky's most popular work but "perhaps the most popular essay in modern art history." 2 In fact, the essay has been so frequently reprinted that it has lost contact not just with its original state as a lecture at the Met but also with its first publication, which took place, as it happens, in transition, the avant-garde literary magazine edited by Eugene Jolas, where the lecture appeared alongside an installment of Joyce's then untitled Work in Progress, the first English translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, James Agee's "In Memory of My Father," and illustrations by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Wassili Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder. 3