Overview

"In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways. Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements as Dada and surrealism made some of the most enduring and fascinating films in the history of cinema. In The Filming of Modern Life, Malcolm Turvey examines five films from the avant-garde canon and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis Picabia and Rene Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). All exemplify major trends within European avant-garde cinema of the time, from abstract animation to ""cinema pur."" All five films embrace and resist, in their own ways, different aspects of modernity."

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"""Combining lucid readings of five central avant-garde films from the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey's The Filming of Modern Life cogently challenges the cliches of academic film history. The readings support his insight that these films respond to a subtle range of ideas about mechanization. Turvey sees the avant-garde cinema as a coherent nexus of reactions to the evolution of film syntax and genres rather than a repudiation of bourgeois modernity or the competing assimilations of cinema to Dada, surrealism, or constructivism."" P. Adams Sitney , Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, and author, Visionary Film ""The Filming of Modern Life incisively challenges conventional accounts of avant-garde film theory and practice in the 1920s. In readings both subtle and historically astute, Malcolm Turvey unpacks conceptual ambivalences that animate five canonical films in individual essays, each a model of lucid critical writing and perfectly gauged for seminar discussions. He raises provocative questions that will reignite consequential debates even as they reaffirm the complex ethos informing classical modernist cinema."" Stuart Liebman , Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center"

Combining lucid readings of five central avant-garde films from the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey's The Filming of Modern Life cogently challenges the cliches of academic film history. The readings support his insight that these films respond to a subtle range of ideas about mechanization. Turvey sees the avant-garde cinema as a coherent nexus of reactions to the evolution of film syntax and genres rather than a repudiation of bourgeois modernity or the competing assimilations of cinema to Dada, surrealism, or constructivism. --P. Adams Sitney, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, and author, Visionary Film The Filming of Modern Life incisively challenges conventional accounts of avant-garde film theory and practice in the 1920s. In readings both subtle and historically astute, Malcolm Turvey unpacks conceptual ambivalences that animate five canonical films in individual essays, each a model of lucid critical writing and perfectly gauged for seminar discussions. He raises provocative questions that will reignite consequential debates even as they reaffirm the complex ethos informing classical modernist cinema. --Stuart Liebman, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

Combining lucid readings of five central avant-garde films from the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey's The Filming of Modern Life cogently challenges the cliches of academic film history. The readings support his insight that these films respond to a subtle range of ideas about mechanization. Turvey sees the avant-garde cinema as a coherent nexus of reactions to the evolution of film syntax and genres rather than a repudiation of bourgeois modernity or the competing assimilations of cinema to Dada, surrealism, or constructivism. P. Adams Sitney , Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, and author, Visionary Film The Filming of Modern Life incisively challenges conventional accounts of avant-garde film theory and practice in the 1920s. In readings both subtle and historically astute, Malcolm Turvey unpacks conceptual ambivalences that animate five canonical films in individual essays, each a model of lucid critical writing and perfectly gauged for seminar discussions. He raises provocative questions that will reignite consequential debates even as they reaffirm the complex ethos informing classical modernist cinema. Stuart Liebman , Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

Author Information

Malcolm Turvey is Professor of Film History at Sarah Lawrence College and an editor of October. He is the author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition.

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