Words in Motion: The Movies, the Readies, and the "Revolution of the Word"

One of the twentieth century's most contentious aesthetic controversies was laid to rest, at least according to contemporary news reports, at the Metropolitan Museum late in 1936 when Erwin Panofsky lectured on the topic "The Motion Picture as an Art." ¹ Though the enthusiasm of the New York papers, stirred by this plebeian invasion of the precincts of the Met, may have been a bit misplaced, Panofsky's lecture is still considered important in establishing serious academic study of the movies. A revised version of the lecture, entitled "Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures," has been reprinted dozens of times, in so many different contexts that it has been called not just Panofsky's most popular work but "perhaps the most popular essay in modern art history." ² In fact, the essay has been so frequently reprinted that it has lost contact not just with its original state as a lecture at the Met but also with its first publication, which took place, as it happens, in transition, the avant-garde literary magazine edited by Eugene Jolas, where the lecture appeared alongside an installment of Joyce's then untitled Work in Progress, the first English translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, James Agee's "In Memory of My Father," and illustrations by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Wassili Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder. ³

Restoring this groundbreaking essay to its original published context creates a concatenation at least as interesting as the one that provoked the New York papers in 1936. For it suggests not just that international modernism of the kind exemplified by transition might have had some interest in the movies, in its own way as unexpected as the idea that the Met might have had such an interest, but also that the modernist avant-garde might have played a role in erasing the distinction between this mass medium and advanced art. ⁴ Establishing such a relationship, however, inevitably raises a related question. If literary modernism, at least in regard to this journal, played a significant role in legitimizing the movies as an accepted art form, does this suggest that movies played any reciprocal role in the aesthetic transformation of modern literature and art? In particular, what role might the movies have played in the aesthetic project most commonly associated with transition, which was published under the banner of "the Revolution of the Word"? ⁵ Would it be possible to apply much more broadly an invented term that Jolas applied to one of his own poems, "Logocinéma of the Frontierman"? ⁶ In what sense might transition itself, and perhaps even the general modernist project behind it, be considered a kind of "logocinema," a revolution of the word accomplished quite literally by bringing to language the physical dynamism and energy associated with film?

In fact, the publication life of transition, which appeared regularly from 1927 to 1932 and then sporadically until 1938, coincided with a dramatic peak in the intellectual prestige of the movies. As Natasha Staller has shown, film had been a popular diversion and an aesthetic influence in the French avant-garde from as early as 1904, and Vachel Lindsay had begun his American campaign on behalf of the movies in 1915, but what had been something of a lonely effort at that time quickly became almost a commonplace of the avant-garde in the 1920s. ⁷ Film magazines such as Close Up, which advertised itself in the September 1927 issue of transition as "The first review to approach films from the angles of art, experiment and possibility," appeared all over Europe between 1921, when Cinéa appeared in France, and 1930, when Film Art began publication in England. Film societies were founded in most European capitals—in Paris in 1920, in London in 1925, in Amsterdam in 1927—and theaters showing classic and experimental films were established...