Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

by R. Bruce Elder
Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

by R. Bruce Elder

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Overview

Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception—these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism, Futurism, and Technologies of the Spirit: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts, a central factor with the advent of the cinema: gone were the days when an artwork strived merely to lift experience out the realm of change and flow.

The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, coloured light, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism. Cubism is a movement on the cusp of the transition from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and flows. In contrast, futurism embraced completely the emerging electromagnetic view of reality.

Cubism, Futurism, and Technologies of the Spirit examines the similarity and differences between the two movements’ engagement with the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension, as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781771122450
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date: 06/30/2018
Series: Film and Media Studies
Pages: 591
Sales rank: 977,580
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

R. Bruce Elder is an award-winning filmmaker and teaches media at Ryerson University. His book Harmony & Dissent (WLU Press, 2008) received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Rudolf Kuenzli described DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (WLU Press, 2013) as “that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.”

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Modernism and the Visual Arts 35

Modernism and Abstraction 38

The Attributes of Aesthetic Experience 44

Optical Experience and the Higher Noesis 47

Producing Facts 51

Primordial Experience: A Non-reflexive, Pre-objective Awareness 65

The Influence of Emmanuel Kant 70

Basic Themes in Cubism and Futurism 85

The Senses' Disconnection from Reality 85

Time, Reality, and Meaning 89

Absolute Space, Relative Space 103

Nerves 114

Notes 119

2 Dudley Murphy, Fernand Leger, and Ballet Mécanique: Vorticism, Cubism, Collage, and Léger's New Realism 139

The New Vision 139

Prosthetics for the Senses: Reconciling Two Descriptions of the World 151

Cubism and the Crisis of Vision 155

Cubism and Passage 162

Understanding Simultaneity, Understanding Instantaneity 167

Cubist Painting Between Structure and Representation 170

The Transitional Phase: Towards Synthetic Cubism 172

Cubist Collage and Papier collé 176

Synthetic Cubism 183

Bergson's Importance for Cubism 190

Léger and Synthetic Cubism 199

Proceeding from Synthetic Cubism: Fernand Léger and the New Realism 200

Léger: Cubism, Quasi-Cubism, and Non-Cubism 202

Léger, the Object, and the Human Body 206

Léger and the "All-Over" Form 208

Léger's New Realism 211

Léger and the Theory of Contrasts 213

The Idea of the New Human and Its Contribution to Léger's Evolution 219

Equivalent to Life: Plastically Organized Intensity 221

Léger and Purism 228

Towards the Cinema: A Montage of Pre-existing Elements 235

Ballet mécanique and the Mechanical Ballet: Rhythm in Ballet mécanique 236

Diversity in Ballet mécanique 268

Another Appeal of the Cinema 270

Cubism, African American Art, and Infinite Plasticity 273

Cendrars and Léger on Language and Cinema 275

Léger's Collaborators 281

Another Key Collaborator: George Antheil 291

Pound's Antheil: Parallels Between the Film Ballet mécanique and Antheil's Theory of Composition 296

Pound, Antheil, Vorticism, and Harmony 302

A Mechanical Ballet: Music, Film, and Film Music 310

Shot Analysis of Ballet mécanique 318

Conclusion 318

Notes 321

3 Futurism 375

Futurism and New Italian Culture 379

Futurism: The Violence of the New Replacing the Old 381

Painting Becomes a Futurist Synthetic Art 385

Speed + Electricity + Collective Consciousness = Futurism 400

Futurism, Symbolism, Unanimism, and Bergson 404

Universal Dynamism and Perception 408

The Influence of Bergson 414

The Cinematic Condition of Futurism 419

Futurism's Occult New Man 423

Futurism, Electromagnetism, and the Issue of Homologies 458

The Futurist Theory of Perception 468

The Futurists, Universal Relations, and Space 476

Bergson, Symbolism, Unanimism, and Primordial Experience 479

The Serata futurista and the Variety Theatre 504

The Futurists' Dynamic View of Reality and Futurist Dynamism 513

The Serata futurista and the Cinema 518

Futurist Painting and Sonic Art 528

Futurism and the Cinema 538

Arnaldo Ginna, Bruno Corra, and Synaesthetic Cinema 552

Futurism and the Anti-anthropocentric Aspiration 568

In Lieu of a Conclusion 575

Notes 582

Index 643

Appendix: A Shot analysis of Ballet mécanique

Online at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/C/Cubism-and-Futurism

Bibliography

Online at https://wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/C/Cubism-and-Futurism

Interviews

- Ideas on art, energy and electricity have assumed increasing importance in the digital age. I think this work lays the essential groundwork for understanding artistic developments in the second half of the twentieth century and the convictions out of which new media art would emerge.

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