R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that
announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic
movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the
visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on
attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early
decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which
a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape.
To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that
opens up some broad topics concerning modernity's cognitive (and
perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within
that regime engendered some peculiar, and highly questionable,
epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder
advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by
modernity engendered, by way of response, a peculiar sort of "pneumatic
(spiritual) epistemology." Elder then shows that early ideas of the
cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses
this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two
key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a
pure, "objectless" (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism,
Constructivism, and Productivism.