Screening Modernity: Modernism and Mass Culture

This course explores the relationship between cinema and modernism, with two interrelated questions in mind: what might film studies contribute to our understanding of modernism and modernity and, conversely, how might the perspective of modernist aesthetics help us elucidate and reframe the history and theory of cinema? In so doing, we will approach modernism as encompassing a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed. The majority of our primary texts will be films, ranging from a collection of fin de siècle actualities produced by Lumière and Edison, through D.W. Griffith's initial experiments with parallel editing between 1908 and 1912, to an array of film experiments released between the 1910s and 1930s: Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Lang's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler and Metropolis; Mickey Mouse animation shorts; the slapstick comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Arbuckle; Surrealist experiments by René Clair (Entr-Acte), Fernand Leger (Ballet Mechanique), and Germane Dulac (The Seashell and the Clergyman); 1930s musicals such as Golddiggers of 1935, Blonde Venus, and Princess Tam Tam. Primary readings include short works by Edgar Allen Poe, E.T. Hoffman, Charles Baudelaire, and André Breton. In addition to extensive engagement with modern theorists, particularly Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Sigmund Freud, we will discuss a wide array of critical works by contemporary film and modernist scholars.