This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and
the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and
especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century
responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on
film were troubled by the cinema's lowly form, this work proposes that
there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it.
Far from anxious about film's provenance in popular entertainment, some
writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important
art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary
life.
This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose
commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how
to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media's
materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the
conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art
movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a
companion to the author's previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the
Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.