A Modernist Cinema

Scott W. Klein is Professor of English and Artistic Director of the Secrest Artists Series at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of the 1928 edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, and with Mark Antliff the editor of the essay collection Vorticism: New Perspectives. He has published essays in such journals as ELH, Modernist Cultures, Twentieth Century Literature, and The James Joyce Quarterly, and is on the editorial boards of the Oxford Complete Writings of Wyndham Lewis edition and of the The Journal of Wyndham Lewis.Michael Valdez Moses is Professor of Literature and the Humanities in the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy and in the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University, and Associate Emeritus Professor at Duke University, where he was a faculty member of the English Department from 1987 to 2019. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1900-1939 (2010) and Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present (2019), and editor of The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 1994) and Modernism and Cinema (special issue of Modernist Cultures, 2010).He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, a Duke Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center, USIA Visiting Professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and at Université Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, and the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colorado College. He is former Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Duke University and a founding co-editor of the journal, Modernist Cultures.

The volume does not descend into a vague "modernists go to the movies" survey. Rather, despite the canonicity of the films, each essay provides strong case studies. Though all the essays have a similar implicit thesis--something like "this film, which does not seem to be modernist, actually speaks to modernism"--the variety of topics covered is the book's strong suit.

• Introduction Chapter 1: Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria, Gesture, Modernism, by Enda Duffy and Maurizia BoscagliChapter 2: D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and the Ever-Present Now, by Michael North Chapter 3: Sergei Eisenstein's Collage: Filming Montage in Museums at Night, by Lisa SiraganianChapter 4: From Automaton to Autonomy: Mechanical Reproduction in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, by Richard BegamChapter 5: "Suspense is Like a Woman": Sex and Style in Alfred Hitchcock's Pleasure Garden and The Lodger, by Laura Frost Chapter 6: F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: Between Two Worlds, by Laura MarcusChapter 7: "A Language Worth the Trouble of Learning"? Carl Theodore Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, by Andrzej GasiorekChapter 8: Intervals of Transition: Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera, by Tyrus MillerChapter 9: Luis Buñuel, Surrealism and the Politics of Disorder, by Michael WoodChapter 10: Yasujir's Ozu's A Story of Floating Weeds and the Art of Being Behind, by Carrie J. Preston Chapter 11: "Saved from the Blessings of Civilization": John Ford's Stagecoach, the West, and American Vernacular Modernism, by Michael Valdez MosesChapter 12: "Tout le monde a ses raisons" The Problem of Impressionist Commitment in Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu, by Jesse Matz Chapter 13: "You Must Speak": Silence, Scale, and Power in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, by Scott W. Klein Chapter 14: Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi Neoclassicism: Olympia, by Elizabeth Otto Chapter 15: On Auratic and Sentimental Objects: High and Low Modernism in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, by Douglas Mao Index