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L et us begin with a potted taxonomy of vanguard movements in early twentieth-century art so extreme that it amounts to a parody. Some avant-garde movements seem coolly rational, committed to principles of harmony and to means of social reform that arise from those principles; others seem to proffer riotous dissent whose proposed manner of social reform would be far less integrative. Some avant-garde movements (De Stijl, European Constructivism, Minimalism, Orphism, and even, in some measure, Cubism) seem committed to rigorous Pythagorean principles of order, and other avant-garde movements (Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist ) to attacking the received principles of good form (of form as order, coherence , and harmony). Thus, we commonly think of an Apollonian avant-garde and a Dionysian avant-garde. Few would doubt that this taxonomy is all too simple. It is already well established that Neo-Plasticism and Dada, for example—on this too simple schema, movements that seem radically opposed—were in fact closely related (and certain individuals, including Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg , participated in both simultaneously). And more generally, affinities among the various avant-garde movements of the early modernist era have been demonstrated. Moreover, that the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century were varying responses to common (and evolving) social factors is commonly understood. In this book I want to lay the groundwork for PREFACE ix proposing an additional reason for rejecting this too simple dichotomy—I want to open up an additional way of understanding ties that link various avant-garde movements together. I argue that the ideals of many of these vanguard movements, including seemingly opposed movements, were influenced by beliefs then current regarding the character of the cinema: the authors of the manifestos that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement often proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. Indeed , I argue, the role of the cinema in helping shape the new artistic forms that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century was more than that of one among many influences that cooperated to produce that remarkable flowering of the arts. The cinema, I argue, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which took shape a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms. To get a sense of this claim, let us take a ready-to-hand way of thinking about how the cinema helped shape Constructivism’s ideals. Like many of the vanguard movements of the twentieth century, European and Soviet Constructivists proposed to integrate art and life. They argued that to effect this integration, a new art would have to come forth—an art appropriate to the modern age, one that would make use of contemporary (i.e., industrial) materials and adopt contemporary methods of production. Thus, this new (visual , literary, and performing) art would possess some key features of film, for films are made using machines, and often in teams that reflect the industrial manner of organizing production. Moreover, Constructivists contended, to reflect reality, art would have to draw on the actual world; and in keeping with modern scientific principles (as they conceived them), the forms into which this real-world material would be wrought would have to be dialectical in character (for forms arising from dialectical principles reflect the basic underlying dynamic that gives reality its shape). But the cinema was understood as an art form that by its very nature draws on the actual world (its basic material , the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein contended, are photo-fragments of reality ), and these raw materials are organized into dialectical patterns (patterns of conflict). Thus, in these respects, too, the new art the Soviet and European Constructivists hoped to create would be an art that possessed key attributes of the cinema. These are among the more ready-to-hand ways of thinking about the assertion that the cinema helped shaped the ideals of the Constructivist movement (and more generally, of vanguard movements in early twentieth-century art). The more interesting part of that story lies buried in my comment that the ideals of various avant-garde movements were shaped by then current understandings of the nature of cinema. For the cinema—partly owing to the enthusiasm its novelty engendered and partly owing to the lingering hold of Preface x [3.129.247.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 03:58...

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