Vernacular Modernism Research Articles

Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia Robert Dixon Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia. Ann Stephen, Philip Goad, and Andrew McNamara, eds. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press in association with Powerhouse Publishing, 2008. Pp. xxxiii + 253. $72.40 (Paper). Modern Times follows an earlier collection of primary sources by the same editors and publisher, Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967 (2006). In Australia it is accompanied by an eponymous travelling exhibition that opened at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, in August 2008, where Ann Stephen is curator. Reviewers of the earlier volume read it, incorrectly, as elaborating Bernard Smith's received account of the Australian reception of modernism in Australian Painting (1962) as a series of belated, style-based shifts occurring discretely within painting, sculpture, design, and architecture. Accordingly, in their introduction to Modern Times, the editors stress that the essays collected here tell, "for the first time", another, "untold" history of Australia's informed engagement with modernism as an international, interdisciplinary project spanning five decades, from 1917 to 1967. The twenty-five essays collected here deal with the popular reception of "modernism"—or "modernity"—in and range of media, including painting, architecture, design, fashion, photography, [End Page 256] and advertising; and a range of sites, such as skyscrapers, exhibitions, factories, milkbars, and suburban swimming pools. They are divided into five thematic, roughly chronological sections: "Abstract in Australia," "Bodies & Bathers," "City Living," "Designs on the Space Age," and "Electric Signs & Spectacles." As in many wide-ranging collections with multiple authors, however, the editors' initial arguments about modernism and social modernity, cultural nationalism and internationalism, and the belatedness or otherwise of provincial cultures, tend to drop in and out of their contributors' essays, varying as they do in content, length, and approach. Their argument is cogently demonstrated, for example, in several of the essays in "Abstract in Australia," including Andrew McNamara's "The Bauhaus in Australia," Annabel Pegus's "Colour in Art," and Heather Johnson's "Modern Rooms." These essays use prosopography—so common now in transnational histories—to trace modernism's flows of people, texts, and ideas across national borders, as seen in a series of exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1910s to the 1960s: Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre's "Colour in Art Exhibition" (1919); de Maistre's contribution to Sydney Ure Smith's Burdekin House Exhibition (1929); Alleyene Zander's incorporation of locally made furniture in her Exhibition of British Contemporary Art (1933); and the involvement of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, a former Bauhaus teacher who came to Australia in 1940, in Clement Meadmore's "The Bauhaus: Aspects and Influence" (1961). Pegus demonstrates that de Maistre's experiments with colour were contemporary with similar experiments in London and Paris, while Meadmore's internationalism made him unconcerned with what he called the "geographical thing" (5): that is, the "nationalist modernism" of the Antipodeans. While the careers of de Maistre, Hirschfeld-Mack, Margaret Preston, John Power, Wolfgang Sievers, and Harry Seidler confrm modernism's international project, these essays by and large focus on the Australian phase of their careers, paradoxically giving the book a national frame of reference – de Maistre, for example, plays no part in the narrative after his departure for London in 1930, where he associated with Francis Bacon, Herbert Read, and Patrick White. Stephen's essay, "The Body at the Scene of Modernism," serves as an introduction to the essays in Part 2, outlining the theme of "embodied modernism." Her arguments about the body, the body image and mass consumption, exemplified by the Berlei lingerie company's mechanical figure-type indicator, suggest Tim Armstrong's influential formulation of "prosthetic modernity."1 This usefully draws together a range of examples from many fields of practice—from X-rays in medical practice and avant-garde photography, to the migration of Max Dupain's nudes from modernist art photography to advertising and erotica—but the argument might be sharpened by a distinction between forms of high modernism and what cinema historian Miriam Hansen terms "vernacular modernism."2 The connections—as well as the discontinuities—between these domains of practice are reflected in the content and approach of...

Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (review)

Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (review)

Rae Beth GORDON, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910. Vernacular Modernity in France

Rae Beth GORDON, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910. Vernacular Modernity in France

Review of *Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s*, edited by Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly

Contradictions are embraced in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s, a collection of essays that charts the cultural climate of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The editors, Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly, fulil their aim of representing the dynamism and diversity of Australia’s complex relationship with modernity, and of contesting approaches based on aesthetic hierarchies. As such, this volume provides rich context for the changing narrative of modernism in Australia, and for consideration of ideas about modernity in general. There is a focus on the energy and innovation of Australian involvement in a transnational process and, at times, a vigorous questioning of the operations of modernism.

The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity Rachael Hutchinson The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. By Catherine Russell. Duke University Press, 2008. xviii+465 pages. Hardcover $99.95; softcover $27.95. Naruse Mikio (1905–1969) learned and practiced filmmaking in the mid-twentieth century, a time when Japan experienced the massive upheavals of war and occupation as well as societal and ideological change. Fascist, democratic, and citizens' rights movements took place in the context of a burgeoning consumer culture and mass media that drew attention to the search for identity and how to represent and conceptualize oneself in the modern milieu. In her groundbreaking study of Naruse Mikio's cinema, Catherine Russell analyzes the construction and representation of Japanese women on screen, as well as the overall project of modernity operating on and around Japanese women in real life. Japanese women emerge as disappointed in the broken social promises of the Meiji Restoration and Occupation democracy, but also as hopeful and something more: strong, energetic, forward-looking, and makers of their own destiny. A non-Japanese speaker, Russell brings an external viewpoint to the study of Japanese cinema and succeeds in vividly transporting us not only into the historical period during which Naruse worked, but also into the worldview of Japanese women, so brilliantly and restrainedly expressed by a series of strong actresses like Hara Setsuko, Tsukasa Yōko, and Takamine Hideko. In this study, Russell analyzes all sixty-seven of the extant Naruse films, aiming to highlight his aesthetic values without resorting to a hierarchical ranking of the films. Her description of the films as "fragments of one much longer film" (p. xii) is borne out through detailed plot synopses with a focus on repeated narrative events, showing the cohesiveness of Naruse's vision. Describing her work as an auteur study, Russell compares Naruse to other directors of his generation—Kurosawa Akira, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Ozu Yasujirō—but admits she "cannot really testify to the distinctiveness of Naruse's cinema" in terms of industry or studio norms. Rather, her main aim is to show how his work "participates in and contributes to Japanese modernity as a cultural movement" (p. xiii). Russell succeeds in this by detailing Naruse's attention to materiality and showing how his films may be read as "ethnographies" or "anthropological studies" of everyday life in the modern Japanese city. She demonstrates how the films use key narrative events such as traffic accidents—variously involving trains, cars, and bicycles—as, essentially, examples of the modern effects of urban living; she also shows how Naruse's construction of female subjectivity through costume and appearance sets fashion trends and kitsch against traditional kimono and more enduring styles. Russell uses to great effect Miriam Hansen's idea [End Page 216] of "vernacular modernism," where film is seen as a modern democratizing influence on a global urban culture, and frequently references Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Naoki Sakai in exploring the relationship between subjectivity, mass culture, and cinema as a "mode of experience." Throughout the book, Russell interrogates the definition of "modernity" in the Japanese case, basing it firmly in mass culture and the historical moment. This focus succeeds in avoiding the essentialization typical of "national cinema" approaches. So many critics of Japanese film have focused on national traits or representations of Japanese identity through the invocation of tradition, that it is a relief to see a work dealing in concrete and observable historical and cultural specifics. This specificity also allows an examination of weaker films as well as works acclaimed as masterpieces, while the chronological structure enables us to trace the developmental changes in female subjectivity across time. In its broad range and specific readings, Russell's work follows Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's study of Kurosawa, although she makes sure to contrast her own interpretations with Yoshimoto's in regard to melodrama and national allegory.1 Unlike Yoshimoto, Russell does not theorize about the binary hierarchies of fidelity discourse that plague adaptation studies; instead she analyzes Naruse's adaptations of novels by Hayashi Fumiko, Kōda Aya, and Kawabata Yasunari on their own merits. By evaluating these films primarily as films, Russell has actualized...

Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France by Rae Beth Gordon

Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France by Rae Beth Gordon

Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland

<i>Jindabyne</i>’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland

From Nestoroff to Garbo: Pirandellian Humour in Its Cinematic Vernacular. 29

A discussion of the 1932 Hollywood adaptation of Pirandello's 1930 play, Come tu mi vuoi, in the context of Miriam Hansen's analysis of Hollywood cinema as "vernacular modernism" allows us to explore the relationship between Pirandello's umorismo and mass culture. The coexistence of multiple identity constructs in the absence of one stable identity is at the core of umorismo and is vividly dramatized in the play's presumably amnesiac female protagonist. The film's humoristic dimension is found not so much in its explicit discourse on identity, which the film's happy ending largely tends to resolve, as in its peculiar reconstruction of the Greta Garbo star-image, lying in excess of the film's story and diegesis, which shares with Pirandello's humour the constellation of diverse and competing images as projected onto the figure of the female protagonist.

Sensational modernism: experimental fiction and photography in thirties America

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, Modernism uncovers a rich vein of experimental work by politically progressive artists. Examining images by photographers such as Weegee and Aaron Siskind, and fiction by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Pietro di Donato, Joseph Entin argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using what he calls an aesthetic of astonishment, focused on startling, graphic images of pain, injury, and prejudice. Traditional portrayals of the poor depicted stoic, passive figures of sentimental suffering or degraded but potentially threatening figures in need of supervision. Sensational modernists sought to shock middle-class audiences into new ways of seeing the nation's impoverished and outcast populations. The striking images these artists created, often taking the form of contorted or disfigured bodies drawn from the realm of the tabloids, pulp magazines, and cinema, represented a bold, experimental form of social aesthetics. Entin argues that these artists created a willfully unorthodox brand of vernacular modernism in which formal avant-garde innovations were used to delineate the conditions, contradictions, and pressures of life on the nation's fringes.

The cracow school. Arising of the national style in polish architecture of the interwar period

In the 1920s, the architects belonging to the so-called Cracow School faced the challenge of creating public buildings to suit the needs of the re-born state administration as well as the challenge of defining the iconography and symbolism with which it could be identified. The School’s strong position soon after Poland regained independence was due to the fact that Cracow was the most important Polish artistic center at the time. From 1901, operated there the Association of Polish Applied Art, which through various publications, contests, and exhibitions, looked for a Polish national style based on Polish vernacular art and European modernism. The artists belonging to the Association, and later to the Cracow Workshops, best suited the artistic needs of the re-born state. Apart from being commissioned to carry out various prestigious projects, many of them also reached top positions at Art Academies, which had fundamental significance for the development of the Polish arts. The history of the Cracow School represents an appropriate background for a vast analysis of the relations between the arts and politics and also economic and social factors in Central Europe during the interwar period.

The Transformation of Silent Cinema's Byeonsa as the Star of Vernacular Modernism in Colonial Chosun

The Transformation of Silent Cinema's Byeonsa as the Star of Vernacular Modernism in Colonial Chosun

The Transformation of Silent Cinema's Byeonsa as the Star of Vernacular Modernism in Colonial Chosun

The Transformation of Silent Cinema's Byeonsa as the Star of Vernacular Modernism in Colonial Chosun

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (review)

Reviewed by: An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 Paul Clark (bio) Zhang Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxxiii, 488 pp. Paperback $30.00, ISBN 0–226–98238–6. This book is a remarkable achievement, deserving a place on the bookshelves of all serious researchers of Chinese film and indeed world cinema. Any student of modern Chinese culture can learn much from this important work. The first forty years of cinema in China have not been widely researched, with the exception of the 1930s, the period in which the post-1949 film enterprise traces the roots of left-wing or progressive filmmaking. Previous studies have focused on the film industry, on particular film texts, or on reception. Zhang Zhen presents a nuanced, detailed examination of film culture, a much broader concept. In her introduction she declares, “What I try to offer in this book is cultural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of Shanghai cosmopolitan film culture of the prewar period” (p. xxviii). She has succeeded admirably. Zhang addresses several assumptions or themes that researchers have traced through these first decades of film in China. These include the shadow play and older origins of Chinese cinema, the influence of Hollywood, and the rise of the left-wing filmmakers. On the shadow play, Zhang brilliantly contextualizes the wonderment Chinese urban dwellers felt toward the new entertainment and traces how film fit into the broad menu of distractions available to such audiences. The idea of the flâneur from Tom Gunning’s study of early Western cinema lends itself to an approach for examining the Chinese phenomena that takes in window shopping, dancing, and a whole range of modern activities in which the cinema was embedded. Zhang traces how film culture was a major part of the production of a “sociocorporeal sensorium and a broadly defined vernacular movement” (p. xxx). She places a particular emphasis on how gender issues played out in this film culture, discussing the notion of the “modern girl” (e.g., pp. 254–274). On the interplay between Hollywood cinema and Chinese film culture, Zhang delves into the complexity of relationships between personnel, understandings, and audience responses. A simplistic model of foreign influence and Chinese response has been shown in other fields of modern Chinese history to be clearly well past its use-by date. This book offers a more sophisticated interpretation of the mutual dependence and interactions between all the players in the film arena. The discussion of Maxu Weibang’s Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng [1937]), which rounds out the book as a key work in the transition from silent to sound cinema, shows well Zhang’s abilities to trace influences, mark difference, and place the “cinema of attractions” (e.g., p. 153) in the broader cultural context. [End Page 305] Recent work (for example, Pang Laikwan’s Building a New China in Cinema [2002] and Hu Jubin’s Projecting a Nation: Chinese Cinema before 1949 [2003]) has properly brought into question the linear claims to inheritance that many post-1949 Chinese film researchers have asserted from the 1930s film corps who remained active on the mainland after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Zhang takes this analysis further, not by simply extending the implication, but through her innovative readings of a range of handbooks and other materials and her concentration on the wider theme of film culture. The approach through “vernacular modernism” in effect allows her to step back from the self-absorbed intellectualisms of the 1930s filmmakers and their alleged heirs to present a broader view. “Demythologizing does not discredit the historical importance of this progressive cinema, but rather traces its history, in particular its interaction with urban modernity and a mass culture of consumption and entertainment” (p. 247). This is a densely argued work in which Zhang makes careful use of the idea of “vernacular modernism” articulated by her doctoral supervisor, Miriam Hansen. With the linguistic skills of a native speaker, Zhang has been able to extend her mentor’s ideas into deeper, more revealing territory. The result is a tour de force...

Photography's Other Histories (review)

Reviewed by: Photography’s Other Histories ed. by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson David Odo Photography’s Other Histories. Edited by Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson. Duke University Press. 2003. There is by now a significant body of scholarly work on colonial and postcolonial photography. Although enlightening our understandings of colonialisms, in particular the relationship between photographic image and stereotype, most of this work has failed to venture beyond the important discussion of colonial encounter and its lingering effects, neglecting to investigate wider systems of photographic practice that fall outside normalized European and North American models. Photography’s Other Histories goes a long way in disrupting these limited and limiting views of photography by locating this global practice within specific, local systems and providing case studies that expand received notions of the history of photography. The volume is comprised of twelve essays edited by anthropologists Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson and is divided into three sections: “Personal Archives,” “Visual Economies,” and “Self-Fashioning and Vernacular Modernism.” It includes essays from an international conference held at the Museum of Queensland in Brisbane in 1997, as well as three reprinted essays. The essays are mostly well-crafted case studies that make good use of theoretical frameworks without losing their solid grounding in ethnographic and historical research. After a well-constructed introduction by Pinney, the first section of the volume, “Personal Archives,” begins with Jo-Anne Driessens’ very personal chapter, “Relating to Photographs,”on her journey through Australian archives of photographs of Aboriginal people, which ultimately helped her track her birth family. This is followed by two similarly personal accounts of photographic encounters with archived images, by Michael Aird, again in an Aboriginal context, and a reprint of Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s 1998 essay, in a Native American context. These essays are not the usual academic discourse thinly disguised as ‘the native’s view’; instead, they are jargon-free, creative alternatives to established ways of writing about photography. Aird’s contribution, “Growing up with Aborigines,” injects into what could have been an ‘empirical’ piece of academic museum ethnography a personal, inside view of his own community, and demonstrates how in the postcolonial, people can employ colonial photographs in strategies of survival, “looking past” the surface, reclaiming them and strengthening indigenous family history and life (p. 25). Tsinhnahjinnie’s suggestion by example of what an indigenous reinterpretation of colonial photography looks like is especially interesting. For example, she recasts—through vivid dreaming—what were initially “depressing” ethnographic images, such as those taken of the massacre at Wounded Knee, as images of survival by moving beyond what is pictured during a waking viewing. Although certainly not the final word on how to incorporate postcolonial indigenous views on photography into academic discourse, these essays raise important issues of how colonial images, mostly maligned by scholars, can be and have been reappropriated by people in postcolonial communities, in very positive and even healing ways. The book would have been strengthened, however, had additional chapters that expand academic ways of analyzing photography been included. Furthermore, the choice of essays in the first section (and subsequent sections) does nothing to dismantle reified notions of who the Other is, sticking squarely to the usual, non-western, colonial/postcolonial subject, ignoring a myriad of other possible constructions of difference. As a result, while the volume successfully argues for a reorientation of the critical debate in the study of photography away from the Euro-American center, it simultaneously maintains dominant categories of Otherness. A notable (but only partial) exception to this problem is found in the book’s second section, “Visual Economies.” The section, whose title is taken from Deborah Poole’s influential model of the unequal exchanges and circulation of Andean images across cultural and geographic boundaries, includes five excellent essays that examine these economies in various regions. Morris Low’s chapter on Japanese colonial-scientific photographs is the volume’s lone example of a non-western version of othering, and a welcome addition to scholarship on the understudied but exceedingly rich field of East Asian photographic practice. Low introduces us to another ‘colonial archive’—that of the Japanese in Manchuria —and encourages inclusion of this non-western colonialism into larger...

Postcolonial theory and Francophone literary studies

Introduction 1. Productive Intersections, by Anne Donadey and H. Adlai Murdoch Part I. Rethinking Theoretical Beginnings 2. Power, Purpose, the Presumptuousness of Postcoloniality, and Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs, by E. Anthony Hurley 3. Unfathomable Toussaint: The (Un)Making of a Hero, by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi 4. A Neglected Precursor: Roland Barthes and the Origins of Postcolonialism, by Alec G. Hargreaves Part II. Postcolonialism, Modernity, and French Identities 5. Nomadic Thought, Postcolonialism, and Maghrebian Writing, by John D. Erickson 6. Narratives of Internal Exile: Cixous, Derrida, and the Vichy Years in Algeria, by Ronnie Scharfman 7. Meinoires d'Immigres: Bougnoul for What? by Kenneth W. Harrow 8. French Interwar Cinema as Vernacular Modernism: Pabst's Drame de Shanghal (1938), by Winifred Woodhull Part III. Displacing Francophonie: Migration and Transcultural Identities 9. Quebec and France: La Francophonie in a Comparative Postcolonial Frame, by Eloise A. Briere 10. Displaced Discourses: Post(-)coloniality, Francophone Space(s), and the Literature(s) of Immigration in France, by Michel Laronde 11. The Francophone Postcolonial Field, by Jacques Coursil and Delphine Perret Part IV. Theorizing the Black Atlantic 12. Borders, Books, and Points de Repere, by Renee Latrier 13. Francophone Studies / Postcolonial Studies: Postcolonializing through Relation, by Anjali Prabhu and Ato Quayson 14. Intersections and Trajectories: Francophone Studies and Postcolonial Theory, by Dominic Thomas 15. Afterword: Francophonie, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms, by Francoise Lionnet

Shinseinen, the contract, and vernacular modernism in Japan

Shinseinen, the contract, and vernacular modernism in Japan

VERNACULAR MODERNISM ‘Film: The First Global Vernacular?’ University of London

VERNACULAR MODERNISM ‘Film: The First Global Vernacular?’ University of London Get access Mike Hammond Mike Hammond Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 58, Issue 1, AUTUMN 2004, Pages 355–358, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/58.1.355 Published: 01 October 2004

Genesis in Buli: Christianity, Blood, and Vernacular Modernity on an Indonesian Island

Christianity and local ontology in the North Malukan village of Buli intersect in surprising ways that upset conventional ideas about tradition and modernity. The poetics and cultural politics of blood, as these emerge in an idiosyncratic telling of Genesis, attest to a paradoxical modernity. In this ambivalent modern imaginary, traditional ontology frequently structures pretensions to being modern, while modern sensibilities form the basis of ostensibly traditional assertions. Attending to the discursive and ontological aspects of blood in Buli therefore provides a way of analyzing the entangled imaginaries of modernity and tradition in a marginalized Indonesian community, and by extension a way of bringing the debates about invented traditions and alternative modernities into constructive conversation. (Symbolism and politics of blood, alternative modernities, objectified tradition)

Cinema as 'Vernacular Modernism' Conference

Cinema as 'Vernacular Modernism' Conference