Discovering Pure Cinema: Avant-Garde Film in the 1920s

The 1920s saw the worldwide creation of the ‘City Symphony Films,’ avant-garde montages of the daily lives of cities. This study is grounded in the historical context of the modernisation of time, demonstrating how these films reflected and coped with the rise of an abstract and standardised conception of temporality. Through the analysis of the historical reception of the films, I argue that they were perceived as offering an alternative to the precise and impersonal measure of the clock by using cinematic time as an experiential duration, set by the depicted action and the attempt to affect viewer’s emotions through their bodily sensations. Watching these films today highlights the extent to which the processes of unification and standardisation have only intensified since, causing a rift between time and the human body. The antidote offered by these films, in the form of cinematic time as an experiential time that affects viewers through their bodies, is relevant today more than ever.

Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2015

This article explores how the creative career, protean experiments and theoretical writings of Taiwanese/Shanghainese/Japanese writer, translator, filmmaker and critic Liu Na'ou (1905À1940) were enriched by the interpenetration of his transcultural and transmedial aspirations. Through close reading of Liu's amateur "city film," The Man Who Has a Camera (1933), paying explicit homage to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's "city symphony" film The Man With a Movie Camera (1929), I investigate how it embodies and encompasses the notions of reinvention and transculturation. Furthermore, through Liu's film criticism, especially on sound aesthetic and rhythmicity, I examine how camera movement and body movement, rhythm and musicality communicate and become entangled with the concept of transmediality. These complications also mediate Liu's ambiguous cultural identity as a colonial subject and transnational practitioner. I suggest how these intertwined concepts and practices created new aesthetic possibilities in 1930s Shanghai and contributed to-as well as constrained-a distinctively cosmopolitan vision.

2012

Film and Literary Modernism, Cambridge Scholars Press

Film and Literary Modernism Editor: Robert P. McParland Date Of Publication: Mar 2013 Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4450-5 Isbn: 1-4438-4450-0 In Film and Literary Modernism, the connections between film, modernist literature, and the arts are explored by an international group of scholars. The impact of cinema upon our ways of seeing the world is highlighted in essays on city symphony films, avant-garde cinema, European filmmaking and key directors and personalities from Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Renais to Alfred Hitchcock and Mae West. Contributors investigate the impact of film upon T. S. Eliot, time and stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson, the racial undercurrents in the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and examine the film writing of William Faulkner, James Agee, and Graham Greene. Robert McParland assembles an international group of researchers including independent film makers, critics and professors of film, creative writers, teachers of architecture and design, and young doctoral scholars, who offer a multi-faceted look at modernism and the art of the film.

Architectural attention focuses on the city film in this chapter about experimental modernism in the city symphony film genre, suggesting that the films Manhatta, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and The Man with the Movie Camera, commonly classified as “City Symphony films,” crystallize three notions explored by early modernist artists: the new metropolis, the relationship between time, space and motion, and the new cognitive interpretation of the world.

literature review for MPhil upgrade

The mechanization of time in early 20th-century city life is expressed in the cultural imaginary by three archetypes which appear in avant-garde cinema: the mechanical human, the automaton and the dandy. By means of these figures, avant-garde cinema proposes a visual aesthetically intensified reflection on human sensorial apparatus, fundamentally altered by urban life.

2013