The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907-1924)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8904951 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Abel (0009-0008-4694-285X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1975 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 18-18 |
| Publication date | 1975-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225131 |
| OpenAlex | W2323908233 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
When did serious writers of literature really discover the cinema? The place was France; the time, just before and during the First World War. The principals were two different generations of poets in the Parisian avantgarde. Although similar phenomena occurred elsewhere about this timeItaly (Bruno Corra, F. T. Marinetti), the United States (Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Munsterberg), Russia (Vladimir Mayakovsky), and Sweden (Bo Bergman)-what happened in France was unique in scope and intensity. Its importance was twofold. This discovery would affect the embryonic development of French film aesthetics-with very different contributions from each generation of the avant-garde. And it would influence significantly the work of the poets themselves. Previous studies have sketched or touched on certain points of this discovery, but none has given it the attention it deserves.1 One of the bestJ. H. Matthews' Surrealism and Film-even concludes that, though quite number of the avant-garde poets were eager to learn from film, there is not much evidence of [their] ability to bring anything to the cinema in return.2 The following pages offer an opposing view. At the beginning of the century, in France as in the United States, writers generally considered the cinema a charming distraction (Georges Courteline, Le Journal, October 24, 1913). Its unusual popularity was explained with characteristic disdain as laziness in the case of anyone who doesn't use his head during the day and has no wish to change the routine at night, and desire for rest in the case of the intellectual upon whom daily life weighs so heavily!3 (Roger Lalli, La Flora, October 15, 1912). And
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Avant garde · Criticism · Humanities · Literary criticism · Literary theory · Literature · Cinema and Media Studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Critical Theory
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1983 - 2010 (28) |
| Highly cited | No |