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Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book, through both an intermedial and a transnational focus, replaces auteuristic accounts of the director’s work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentienth century cinema and visual culture.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called “the magic pilgrimage” to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. The Ethnic Avant-Garde draws on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an “ethnic avant-garde.” These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an “Afro-Cuban” voice; Langston Hughes’s translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway’s first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Mixed Messages presents and interrogates ten distinct moments from the arts of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America where visual and verbal forms blend and clash. Charting correspondences concerned with the expression and meaning of human experience, this volume moves beyond standard interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive, and contextual terms. Offering a genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, avant-garde studies, word-image relations, and literary studies, Mixed Messages takes in architecture, notebooks, poetry, painting, conceptual art, contemporary art, comic books, photographs and installations, ending with a speculative conclusion on the role of the body in the experience of digital mixed media. Each of the ten case studies explores the juxtaposition of visual and verbal forms in a manner that moves away from treating verbal and visual symbols as operating in binary or oppositional systems, and towards a consideration of mixed media, multi-media and intermedia work as brought together in acts of creation, exhibition, reading, viewing, and immersion. The collection advances research into embodiment theory, affect, pragmatist aesthetics, as well as into the continuing legacy of romanticism and of dada, conceptual art and surrealism in an American context.

Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new communist nation by USA in 1933. In this period American artists, writers, and designers looked at the emerging Soviet Union with fascination, as they observed this epochal experiment in communism develop out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They organised exhibitions of Soviet art and culture, reported on visits to Russia in books and articles, and produced works that were inspired by post-revolutionary culture. One of the most important innovations of Soviet culture was to collapse boundaries between disciplines, as part of a general aim to bring art into everyday life. Correspondingly, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach by looking at American avant-garde responses to Soviet culture across several media, including architecture, theatre, film, photography, and literature. As such, Watching the red dawn considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ by examining the interconnected ways in which Constructivist works were influential upon American practices.

Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a serious reconsideration, even resurrection, of Sitwell's important place in British modernism. Overall, this book makes a place for the lost story of Sitwellism in modernist history. It shows how her place in that history depends on a continual public and private remaking of self. Further, this book gives substance to the type of avant-garde that she (and her brothers) worked to craft—ornamental and baroque—by exploring the affective traces it produced in melancholic camp and her notion of female poetry. Finally, it demonstrates some ways in which that effect also includes and even invites engagement with socio-historical discourses of class, gender, and empire. Altogether, this volume opens the way for a long and rich reconsideration of this crucial, central figure of British modernism.

As a fundamentally hybrid medium, cinema has always been defined by its interactions with other art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance and dance. Taking the in-between nature of the cinematic medium as its starting point, this collection of essays maps out new directions for understanding the richly diverse ways in which artists and filmmakers draw on and reconfigure the other arts in their creative practice. From pre-cinema to the digital era, from avant-garde to world cinema, and from the projection room to the gallery space, the contributors critically explore what happens when ideas, forms and feelings migrate from one art form to another. Giving voice to both theorists and moving image practitioners, Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice stimulates fresh thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, can be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.

Silent-era film scholarship has all too often focused on a handful of German directors, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, but little attention has been paid to arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the period: Paul Leni. This collection – the first comprehensive English-language study of Leni’s life and career – offers new insights into his national and international films, his bold forays into scenic design and his transition from German to Hollywood filmmaking. The contributors give fresh insights into Leni’s most influential films, including Waxworks (1924), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), and explores such lesser-known productions as The Diary of Dr. Hart (1918), Backstairs (1921) and the Rebus film series (1925–7). Engaging with new historical, analytical, and theoretical perspectives on Leni’s work, this book is a groundbreaking exploration of a cinematic pioneer.

In the 1950s and 1960s György Ligeti went through a remarkable transition from writing music in the style of Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. The book begins with Ligeti’s synthesis of folk music and modernism in Musica ricercata and continues through the turn of the 1970s, examining nearly every major work as well as numerous unpublished studies. It shows Ligeti’s early discovery of twelve-tone technique, the influence of electronic music on his orchestral writing, and his involvement with the absurdist Fluxus group, and it argues that the repertoire of techniques he developed in this experimental period was incrementally codified into the composer’s personal style in the mid- and late 1960s. The conclusion looks at Ligeti’s approach to form and expression at the turn of the 1970s, when one phase of his metamorphosis had run its course, and the new challenge of composing an opera loomed on the horizon. Throughout the book, sketch study works alongside comments from interviews—counterbalancing the composer’s crafted public narrative, revealing hidden influences, lingering attachments, and insights into the creative process, and ultimately helping complete the picture of how he found his voice in a generation straddling the divide between the modern and postmodern eras.

How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, Hillel-Erlanger to Isou, and Cocteau to Damas and Gleize. ‘Cinepoetry’ names a disseminated but insistent practice of writing poetry under the inspiring warp of films, movie culture, the scenario form and cinema as actual or imaginary apparatus. Poets were struck by the essential feature of cinema--automorphosis—making it the first artificial form capable of reshaping itself like fluids and organic bodies. Far from marginal, cinepoetry forces us to reassess central tenets of modernism and the avant-garde, such as the inception of Surrealism and Lettrism, or the relation of Symbolism to visual technologies. Arguing that the mutation of the Romantic imagination into the ‘imaginary’ was hastened by cinepoetic thought, the book provides a new genealogy for poetry in the age of new media based on what is often lacking in remediation studies: close analyses of a large and diverse corpus of works, and the identification of a specific set of cross-medium operations. This book reconfigures key binaries within the interdisciplinary landscape of today's humanities: the canon and the margins, literature and cinema, text and image, close reading and post-technological hermeneutics, old vs. new media, prose poems vs. visual poems, text-based poetry vs. digital poetry. It also engages with the place of cinema in the thought of Jean Epstein, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault among others.