bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Renoir, Pierre-August (1841–1919)
Authors: Spencer Jeremy
Published: September 2018

Pierre-August Renoir was a French painter and sculptor involved in the formation of Impressionism. As a pupil of the Swiss academic painter Charles Gleyre (1806–1874), whose studio he attended from 1861, Renoir met and befriended Claude Monet (1841–1926), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), pivotal members of the original impressionist movement. In April 1862, at the age of twenty-one, he passed the examination to attend the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts. In the summer of 1869, Renoir painted with Monet at La Grenouillère. The resulting pictures of Parisian leisure, painted outside in front of distinctly modern scenes, were decisive in Impressionism’s development. Although he met the artists who would become known as the Impressionists in 1861, he would not exhibit with them until 1874, when the first impressionist exhibition was held in Paris. Renoir showed a large number of paintings in the first three exhibitions of the Impressionists. Throughout the 1870s, Renoir gained popularity with critics and secured the patronage of art dealers. Because of his disillusionment with the movement, Renoir chose not to exhibit at the final impressionist exhibition in 1887. His later works adopted more classical themes through a return to the nude, rejecting the ‘modern life’ subjects of Impressionism.
Hore, Somnath (1921–2006)
Authors: Kumar Mallik Sanjoy
Published: September 2018

Born at the beginning of the 1920s, and acquiring academic training during the mid 1940s, Somnath Hore represents a generation of artists in Bengal, India, who actively redefined the language of visual art from an earlier phase of nationalist self-redefinition, in the face of a long colonial history of British socio-political and cultural domination. In response to the imposition of an alien taste and the hegemonic proclamation of the colonizer’s perspective as superior, Indian responses of the nationalist dimension had harked back to the pre-colonial past in an attempt to invent a contemporary that would visibly retain links to ‘tradition’.
Krasner, Lee (1908–1984)
Authors: Landau Ellen C.
Published: September 2018

Lee Krasner, born 27 October 1908 in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents from Russia, was an abstract expressionist painter whose status as the sole female pioneer of the movement is widely recognized. After attending the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union, Krasner’s talent blossomed at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where she developed a radical understanding of the implications of modernism. Throughout her lifetime and long after, Krasner’s artistic career was overshadowed by her role as the wife (and widow) of Jackson Pollock. Credited by critic Clement Greenberg as ‘‘absolutely catalytic’’ for Pollock’s aesthetic development, Krasner shrewdly managed his reputation and prices after his untimely death. This allowed her to establish the Pollock–Krasner Foundation in her will with a multi-million-dollar endowment to support needy and neglected artists. In her Little Image series, created after she and Pollock moved from Manhattan to Long Island in 1945, Krasner explored the possibilities of drawing (and sometimes dripping) in paint in a manner similar to Pollock. By the time Lee Krasner died, on June 20, 1984 in New York City, she was considered a role model for feminist artists. The complexity of what has been characterized as her ‘‘working relationship’’ with Jackson Pollock is a defining feature of her importance to the history of postwar American art.
Lissitzky, El (1890–1941)
Authors: Vronskaya Alla G.
Published: September 2018

The Soviet artist, photographer, designer, and architect Lazar Markovich (Mordukhaevich) Lissitzky grew up in a Jewish family in Smolensk in western Russia. In 1909 Lissitzky moved to Germany, where he studied architectural engineering at Darmstadt Technische Hochschule. While living in Germany, Lissitzky traveled throughout Europe and became connected with the circle of Russian-Jewish painters in Paris. In 1919, after an invitation from Chagall, Lissitzky became the head of the architecture department at the Higher Artistic Workshops in Vitebsk. The school was soon joined by Kazimir Malevich, whose presence stimulated Lissitzky’s growing interest in Suprematism. Lissizky’s only realized architectural project was the printing plant of the journal Ogoniok in Moscow (1930–1932). In 1925, Lissitzky began work as an exhibition designer, which would remain his primary occupation for the rest of his life.
The Madras Art Movement (1960s–1980s)
Authors: Bhagat Ashrafi S.
Published: September 2018

The Madras Art movement was a regional modern art movement that emerged in the 1960s at Madras [Chennai], South India. Post Independence [1947], Indian artists had to establish their identity and authenticity as did Third World nations internationally. From the locus of the colonial established Madras School of Arts and Crafts, Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury, its first Indian artist Principal (appointed in 1930) created the fine arts curriculum and set the stage for the development of this modern movement. It was developed further under K.C.S. Paniker, the Principal of the Art School in the 1960s [1957–1966]. The group of artists that came together in the early 1960s within the art institution provides for a critical study of modernity exercised by them within the parentheses of the Madras Art Movement. This movement that took place in the early 1960s was pushed creatively by visionaries and stalwarts such as K.C.S. Paniker in painting and S. Dhanapal in sculpture. The artist-teachers along with students creatively interacted with the vernacular art of the region, thus the school played a pivotal role in the formation of artistic statements from the core members of the Madras Art Movement. As it was the only institution offering comprehensive art education in South India, until the emergence of other art institutions in the 1960s, many students aspiring to be artists gravitated here from the four states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Within the movement two broad styles, ‘‘Figurative’’ and ‘‘Abstract,’’ can be identified as practiced by the artists who passed through the portals of this institution and established themselves as artists in their own right.
Drachmann, Holger Henrik Herholdt (1846–1908)
Authors: Carbone Elettra
Published: September 2018

Holger Drachmann was a Danish writer and painter, active in the period of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia (1870s–1890s). He was influenced by Georg Brandes and his radical ideas but later moved towards more national conservative trends. He was a prominent public figure of his time as well as a very productive and versatile author. His works range from realistic and impressionistic poems, novels and travel accounts to national romantic dramas and historical melodramas. A number of his songs have become embedded in the Danish popular tradition.

Born in Copenhagen, he was the son of physician Andreas Georg Drachmann. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts and started a career as a marine painter. Although he abandoned this path in favour of literature in 1870, he continued to paint. He is particularly remembered for his seascapes of Bornholm and Skagen, where he settled in 1904. His interest in the sea and maritime life had a direct influence on his literary works, as shown instance by his poetry collection Sange ved Havet (1875).
Stridentist Movement (1921–1928)
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

The Stridentist Movement [Movimiento Estridentista], founded by poet Manuel Maples Arce (1898–1981), was the only avant-garde Mexican literary and artistic group in the 1920s. The movement was centered in Mexico City from 1921–1925 and in Jalapa, Veracruz from 1925 until it disbanded in 1927. Stridentist writers wrote poetry characterized by formal and linguistic experimentation, which were illustrated by Stridentist artists. In this way they developed a style specific to the movement. They produced illustrated books, magazines, pamphlets and manifestos, in which text and image work together in a symbiotic fashion that shaped the political and artistic character of the movement. Like the Futurists, their aesthetic embraced such symbols of modernity as skyscrapers, aeroplanes, telephones, railroads and electric wires. Their influences were Cubism, Spanish Ultraismo, German Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Constructivism. In an unusual combination of artistic internationalism and political nationalism, the Stridentists saw themselves as revolutionary, both artistically and politically, and their works included themes of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Unique in Latin America at this time, the sophisticated appearance of the group, the cubo-futurist fragmentation and the dynamism that characterized the portraits, epitomize the inventiveness of the Stridentist vision.
War Art in Japan
Authors: Ikeda Asato
Published: September 2018

Under Japan’s totalitarian state during World War II, most Japanese artists participated in the war effort. Their activities included producing works commissioned by the state, displaying works in state-sponsored exhibitions, donating the proceeds of art to the state, and dedicating works, as symbolic gestures, to religious sites, important battles, seminal state officials, or to those who gave their lives in the war. War artists produced works in diverse media, styles, and subject matter, ranging from painting, photography, woodblock prints, and sculpture to architecture and interior design. However, their works invariably glorified Japan’s military occupation in Asia and war against the West, or they resonated with the wartime state ideology that sought to recreate a traditional Japanese culture uncontaminated by modernity.
Die Brücke [The Bridge]
Authors: Grimm Dagmar
Published: September 2018

Convinced that art should be an expression of life representing the vitality of the times, four architecture students in Dresden joined together to found Die Brücke [The Bridge] in 1905. The name, suggested by one of their founding members, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, reflected their intention to provide a bridge between the art of previous generations and that of the new era of the twentieth century.

As the initiator of Die Brücke and its chief spokesman, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had the audacious idea of renewing German art. He was joined by Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, fellow students studying at Dresden’s Technische Hochschule [Dresden Technical Institute]. In preceding years, both Kirchner, who had taken leave of absence to study art, and Bleyl had been working on woodcuts influenced heavily by the earlier Jugendstil. While Bleyl remained interested in the illusion of space, Kirchner had begun to simplify his style to include greater planarity, with jagged lines providing delineation and contour, creating a two-dimensional effect that was already indicative of his signature stylistic innovations of the future.
Covacevic, Gaggero, Medina, Echeñique and Gonzālez (1972)
Authors: de Cortazar Galleguillos Gabriela Garcia
Published: September 2018

The architectural practice Covacevic, Gaggero, Medina, Echeñique and Gonzālez was established in 1971 for the sole purpose of designing a single building over a period of only 275 days. Despite its brief existence, its significance for Chilean architecture is paramount, both in terms of the specific building designed by the collective and because of the individual relevance of each architect. This "super-firm" was put together by Miguel Lawner and Jorge Wong, from the CORMU (Corporación de Mejoramiento Urbano—Urban Development Corporation), following the direct instruction of the then president, Salvador Allende, with the objective of designing the UNCTAD building.

UNCTAD III (the third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) was scheduled to be held in Santiago in May 1972, and as Chile lacked an existing space to host it, the required 40,000-sq-m building had to be hastily constructed. This presented a challenge that would demand an exceptional combination of legal, human, and technical resources. The establishment of an ad hoc architectural practice and the selection of a recently vacated plot in downtown Santiago, among other strategies, made this building important not only in architectural terms, but also urban, social and, eventually, historical ones.
Mendelsohn, Erich (1887–1953)
Authors: Kiessel Marko
Published: September 2018

Erich Mendelsohn was born on March 21, 1887, in Allenstein, East Prussia. He gained his architectural education at the technical universities in Charlottenburg and Munich in 1908–1912. Immediately after WWI he established his office in Berlin. Like other German avant-garde architects in the revolutionary atmosphere after the war he was affiliated to the Arbeitsrat für Kunst [Work Council for Art] in 1919. In 1925 he became a member of the architectural organization Der Ring [The Ring] which promoted Neues Bauen [New Building]. The 1920s were probably the most successful period for Mendelsohn and his crowded office. Shortly afterwards the changed political situation led to a brief period of exile for the Jewish Mendelsohn in Amsterdam after which he established a new office in London in 1933. The opening of a second office in Jerusalem followed in 1935, before he moved again to Palestine in 1939. From 1941 he spent the later part of his career in the United States until his death on September 15, 1953, in San Francisco.

Mendelsohn, who was inspired by Henry van de Velde, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Frank Lloyd Wright, began his career with the expressionist, organically shaped Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1919–1922), a research observatory and at the same time a dynamic symbol of Albert Einstein’s theories on energy and matter. It won him many private engagements, making him one of the most successful modern architects of the 1920s with numerous commissions in Germany and one in Leningrad (Red Flag Textile Factory 1925), despite not being mentioned in Sigfried Giedion’s influential Space, Time and Architecture (1941).
Solsona, Justo José (1931--)
Authors: Plotquin Silvio
Published: September 2018

Justo Solsona is an Argentinian architect, the onset of whose activity corresponds to the process of political reorganization which followed the collapse of the government of Juan Domingo Perón (1955). During this period the political agenda aimed to use architecture and design in a bid to encourage eloquent modernization, metropolitan culture, and upgraded technology. As a result, a dozen works placed Solsona at the heart of architectural production in Argentina.

The proposed 300-house complex in La Boca, south of the city of Buenos Aires, winner of the competition sponsored by the National Mortgage Bank (1957), and designed in partnership with the architects Ernesto Katzenstein, Gianni Peani, and Josefa Santos, was a high-density original and fresh answer in reinforced concrete to cultural and traditional ways of living.

The winner of the second prize in the competition for the design of the National Library (1961), Solsona proposed a sculptural metal roof comprising metabolist abstract shapes that created innovative relationships between the main reading rooms and the lawns of an existing state garden where the new library was to be located. In fact, it was his entry to this competition in collaboration with Flora Manteola, Javier Sánchez Gómez, and Josefa Santos (and later, Carlos Sallaberry) that led to the establishment of the architectural studio MSGSSS, where he remained throughout his subsequent career.
Stam, Mart (1899–1986)
Authors: Poppelreuter Tanja
Published: September 2018

Mart (Martinus Adrianus) Stam (b. in 1899 in Purmerend, Netherlands—d. in 1986 in Goldach, Switzerland) was a Dutch architect, designer, and architectural theorist, and was involved in a number of principal events and organizations during the 1920s and 1930s.

Stam moved to Berlin in 1922 to work as a draftsman with Max Taut and Hans Poelzig among others. While in Berlin, Stam met El Lissitzky who introduced him to Constructivism. Inspired by the progressive and social outlook of this Russian movement Stam founded the avant-garde magazine ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen [ABC: Contributions on Building] together with Hans Schmidt, Hennes Mayer, and Emil Roth (1924–1928). The magazine focused on convincing readers about the social necessity for low-cost, well-designed, and functional houses, as well as the use of modern technologies. ABC also established connections with Asnova, the association of new architects in Moscow, and published the student work of Vkhutemas [School of Modern Architecture] in Moscow.
Valparaíso School (1952--)
Authors: García de Cortázar Gabriela
Published: September 2018

The term "Valparaíso School" is often applied to the school of architecture, design, and arts of the Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile, in specific relation to a novel academic approach initiated in 1952 and established in 1967 through an academic reform. The shift in teaching strategies implied the rejection of a Beaux-Arts-inspired syllabus in favor of a particularly local approach that involved new interests, processes, and products, in part inspired by aspects of imported heroic Modernism. The main promoters of this change were the architect Alberto Cruz and the poet Godofredo Iommi.

Alberto Cruz was born in 1917. He studied architecture at the Catholic University in Santiago from 1934. After graduating, he became a teacher there and participated in movements to change the school’s syllabus in 1949. In 1975 he received the National Architecture Award from the Chilean Architects’ Association. Godofredo Iommi, from Argentina, was born in 1917 and studied Economics for two years in Buenos Aires before leaving his studies uncompleted. Instead, he began a poetic practice, inspired by the modern Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro.
Archer, William (1856–1924)
Authors: Postlewait Thomas
Published: September 2018

Born in Edinburgh, William Archer served as a London theater critic from 1881 to 1920. He retired from weekly reviewing when his melodrama The Green Goddess was a major success in New York (1920–1922) and London (1923–1924). His translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays began to be published in 1888 and culminated in The Works of Henrik Ibsen (twelve volumes, 1906–1908). He translated and helped to stage the first London productions of A Doll’s House (1889), Ghosts (1891), and Rosmersholm (1892), and in close partnership with the actress Elizabeth Robins co-directed the productions of Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1898).

He also translated and published plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann. In his advocacy for modern English drama, Archer supported the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Harley Granville Barker, and Bernard Shaw. He led the British campaigns against stage censorship and for a national theater. In 1907 he and Barker published A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. In the mid-1880s he and Shaw drafted a play entitled Rhinegold that Shaw later transformed into Widowers’ Houses (1892), the play that launched his playwriting career. Between 1892 and 1924 Archer wrote well over 100 articles and reviews on Shaw and his plays. Although he criticized some of the plays, he repeatedly praised Shaw as a modern dramatic genius. Their abiding friendship thrived on their debates about all aspects of modern drama, including Shaw’s plays. In 1923 Archer published The Old Drama and the New, a historical survey of British drama with a lengthy (and still argumentative) section on Shaw.
Hamilton, Cicely (1872–1952)
Authors: Cockin Katharine M.
Published: September 2018

Cicely Hamilton, lesbian actor, author, and women’s suffrage activist, is best known for her plays Diana of Dobson’s (1908), exposing exploitation in the retail trade, How the Vote Was Won (1909), a suffrage comedy co-authored with Christopher St. John, and A Pageant of Great Women, which raised consciousness about women’s history in productions across Britain from 1909 to 1912. Hamilton also wrote nondramatic works, including the political tract Marriage as a Trade (1909) and the novel William, An Englishman (1919), which was inspired by her experience of wartime France. Hamilton’s prolific writing career reflects her wide-ranging interests, political commitments, and sense of public duty; her plays exemplify the intersection of Feminism and theater in the early 20th century.
Ichikawa, Ennosuke II (1888–1963)
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

Ichikawa Ennosuke II was a kabuki actor in the Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras who collaborated with artists in the modern drama movement and was instrumental in the Shin Buyō [New Dance] movement. He is regarded as a progressive, even radical artist who reinvigorated kabuki through innovation, and modern and Western influences.

Born Kinoshi Masayasu, the son of Ichikawa Danshirō II, he began performing child roles in kabuki at an early age, debuting at the Kabuki-za in Tokyo in 1892 under the name Ichikawa Danko I. He spent the next two decades performing traditional kabuki. He also joined Ichikawa Sadanji II and Osanai Kaoru’s Jiyū Gekijō [Free Theater], in 1909, participating in the early development of shingeki. In 1910 he took the name Ichikawa Ennosuke II and performed in plays by modern and shin-kabuki playwright Okamoto Kidō.

In 1919 Ichikawa travelled to the United States and Europe to experience Western theater and dance. The productions he encountered profoundly shaped his understanding of performance and fired his imagination. Upon his return to Japan he began experimenting with fusions of modern and traditional forms. In September 1919 he premiered an adaptation of the play Sumidagawa [The Sumida River] influenced by Russian ballet. In 1920 he joined other modernist artists to form Shunjūza, a study group and artists’ collective including Osanai Kaoru, Ichikawa Sadanji II, Bandō Jusaburō III, Ichikawa Sumizō VI, and Ichikawa Shōchō II, the last three all kabuki actors, to present plays by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Kikuchi Kan, and Okamoto Kidō.
Katsureki-mono
Authors: Zheng Guohe
Published: September 2018

"Living history" plays were historical kabuki plays produced during the Meiji period 10s and 20s (1868–1888) in an attempt to reform the practices associated with genre’s Edo period (1603–1867) to suit the rapidly changing times. As such they represent an early phase of the modernist movement in Japanese theater.

Due to strict government censorship to prevent subversion, kabuki plays based on historic events in the Edo period tended to twist the plot, set the action in the distant past (a practice known as mitate, "disguise"), or to include absurd materials or performance tricks. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs in this new age, Ichikawa Danjūrō IV (1838–1903), a famous Meiji period (1868–1912) actor, in 1870s started to reform the art in response to what he perceived as the expectations of the post-Restoration spectators and to make it suitable for entertaining the upper classes and visiting foreign dignitaries. In order to achieve his goal, Ichikawa Danjūrō IV invited Kawatake Mokuami (1838–1893), the greatest playwright of the day, to write new historical plays based on documented history. Moreover, costumes, props, and even lines used in these plays were all to be the result of careful research and investigation. Thus a sense of realism was introduced into kabuki.
O’Neill, Eugene (1888–1953)
Authors: King William Davies
Published: September 2018

Eugene O’Neill is regarded as the quintessential modernist among American playwrights, and many of his works show an affinity with the themes and methods of notable modernists, but he resisted alliance with any artistic movement and ultimately resisted involvement in the theater itself. In his fervent exploration of the means of art, he seemed constantly to be rejecting the methods and even the goals of his contemporaries. Some might call his approach eclectic or experimental, but once his career had ended, it became clear that his experiments were driven by a lifelong project of self-analysis and a frustrated romantic quest for fulfillment.

O’Neill was born in New York in 1888, the third son of James O’Neill, a leading actor on the American stage at the point of its commercial boom. His convent-educated mother, by then disappointed with her husband, who would play the Count of Monte Cristo over 4,000 times in his career, had recognized the cost of commercial success in the theater—the lack of a home. A few years earlier, while they were on tour, her second son had suddenly died, and the birth of Eugene, intended to heal that loss, coincided with her becoming addicted to morphine. O’Neill was educated in Catholic boarding schools and grew up deeply alienated from the values of his upbringing: Christianity, middle-class conventions, and art of the commercial variety.
Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936)
Authors: Bettaglio Marina
Published: September 2018

Born in the Sicilian town of Agrigento and educated in Palermo, Rome, and Bonn (Germany), the Nobel Prize winner (1934) Luigi Pirandello is a key literary figure of the 20th century, whose concerns reflect the modernist crisis of consciousness. In his novels, plays, and short stories, the unity of the Cartesian subject is irretrievably shattered into a myriad of masks that carry the baroque interplay of being and appearances to an extreme. In the shift from a stable and unitary interpretation of human identity to a plural and changing one, Pirandello’s works express a skeptical view of human existence while paving the way to Postmodernism. Like identity, truth itself ceases to be a unified concept: acquiring a plurality of meanings, it becomes the expression of individual interpretations.

From his initial novel L’Esclusa [The Outcast] (1901), in which the theme of honor and rejection is resolved in a paradoxical way, Pirandello’s works question the phenomenal world and the concept of "truth," and expose the absurdity of a human condition trapped in the arbitrariness of social conventions. Problematizing the relationship between individual and society, Pirandellian characters struggle in vain to find a way out of their constricting existence and to overcome the limitations of their conditions.
Strindberg, August (1849–1912)
Authors: Balkin Sarah
Published: September 2018

August Strindberg is Sweden’s most important writer and one of the most influential dramatists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Along with Henrik Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist with whom he is most often compared, Strindberg transformed modern Western theater, inspiring playwrights such as Georg Kaiser, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Sarah Kane, and Caryl Churchill as well as the film and theater director Ingmar Bergman. Strindberg’s plays span the naturalism of early European Modernism as well as Symbolism and Expressionism. His work in nondramatic genres and media includes novels, autobiography, journalism, poetry, essays, painting, and photography. Outside of Sweden Strindberg is known as a personality and a playwright who mined his own and others’ experiences for his art. The miseries of marriage are central to many of Strindberg’s plays, which underwent radical stylistic changes following a personal crisis in the mid-1890s. Strindberg’s experiments with alchemy and occultism during this period influenced his later works, which frequently represent dreams, states between life and death, and the transformability of matter. In the 21st century, Strindberg’s plays are mainstays of world drama.
Workers’ Theater Movement
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: September 2018

The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period of Stalin’s "Third Period" militant class struggle; it was also briefly the name of a workers’ troupe in London. The historical shape of the WTM follows the ideological progress of the Communist International (Comintern), from the hard left turn in 1929 to the collaborative politics of the Popular Front in 1933–1934. As proposed by its ideological leaders and principal activists, the Workers’ Theatre Movement was evidence of the transnational emergence of a proletarian culture derived from the universal modernity of industrialism. In practice, the movement was an aggregate of practices and theories drawn into the semblance of an organization through the cultural apparatus of the Comintern.

The Workers’ Theatre Movement was both a loose international alliance and a range of local experiences that varied greatly. In metropolitan centers, the workers’ troupes occupied a gradient ranging from militant street theaters, such as Ewan MacColl’s Red Megaphone in Birmingham, UK and the Shock Troupe of the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre in New York, to the radical edges of the professional theater, such as the Group Theatre in New York and Unity Theatre in London. Outside of major theatrical centres, WTM troupes were more often organized by radical unions, or, as in the case of the Toronto Workers’ Experimental Theatre, by Communist Party cultural clubs.
Zangirimono [Cropped-hair Plays]
Authors: Wetmore Kevin
Published: September 2018

In Meiji-era Japan, as part of the reforms to kabuki in response to modernization, playwright Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893) and actor Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903) developed a new genre of kabuki that focused on presenting both external Western elements and contemporary dramatic narratives onstage in the kabuki style.

In the late 1870s, seeking contemporary pieces that would meet government-dictated reforms within kabuki, Onoe Kikugorō V (1844–1903) asked Mokuami to write modern kabuki plays for him to perform in. The result was "cropped-hair plays" [zangirimono]. As the reforms of the Meiji period took hold, an obsession with the surface elements of Western culture and modernity took hold over the middle and upper classes. The social elite rejected the traditional garments and hairstyles of the samurai, which were perceived as premodern. Kimonos were discarded in favor of Western suits. Swords were no longer worn. Bowler hats, pocket Watches, rickshaws, newspapers, and canes grew in popularity, and topknots (chonmage, the hairstyle of the samurai) were cut off, resulting in "cropped-hair plays": dramas that featured modern office workers and government officials without topknots in contemporary settings.
Bazin, André (1918–1958)
Authors: Anderson Joel Neville
Published: September 2018

André Bazin (born April 18, 1918, Angers, France–died November 11, 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, France) was an influential French film critic who was active during the development of postwar film theory. Directing cine-clubs during the Nazi Occupation, he co-founded the monthly film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951 with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, which he edited until his early death of leukaemia. Publishing 2,600 articles during his lifetime, he was preparing the four-volume collection of his writing, Qu-est-ce que le cinéma? [What Is Cinema?], at the time of his death. A champion of Italian Neorealism, Robert Flaherty, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles, he helped to launch filmmakers of the French New Wave [Nouvelle vague] who developed their formal convictions as writers at Cahiers, including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and his foster-son François Truffaut.
Dadaism in Film
Authors: Lantz Andy
Published: September 2018

Members of the Dada cultural and artistic movement began to experiment with film as a means to disseminate their stylistic partialities and cultural values through a new medium free of cultural respectability and aesthetic pretension. Founded in Zurich, Switzerland, by Tristan Tzara in 1916, this avant-garde movement would soon spread to France, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere. Much like the surrealists who would follow, the dadaists sought to liberate their audience from the cultural allegiances, prejudices, and norms of thinking that, in their view, had been largely responsible for the catastrophes of World War I.

Unlike surrealist film, dadaist film did not seek to lure its viewers into the cinematic illusion. Instead, dadaists employed unconventional methods in order to alienate the audience members and to provide them the distance with which to reflect upon the meta-artistic (and anti-artistic) quality of their productions. Film enabled the dadaists to distort reality, motion, and perspective; it revealed familiar things in radically unfamiliar but persuasive new shapes.
Deren, Maya (1917–1961)
Authors: Miller Stefanie
Published: September 2018

Maya Deren (born Eleanora Derenkowskaia in Kiev, Ukraine) was a Russian American experimental filmmaker whose work in the 1940s and 1950s had a profound impact on American avant-garde filmmaking. She was additionally a film theorist, dancer, chorographer, photographer, ethnographer, poet, and entrepreneurial promoter of the avant-garde. In her theoretical writings, Deren argues that film is a distinct form of high art uniquely suited to represent modernity. For Deren, film’s distinct nature lies in its ability to use reality creatively through manipulations of space and time by means of cinematic techniques such as the jump cut, multiple exposure, slow motion, reverse motion, and superimposition. She argues that in order for the medium to realize its potential as a unique form of art, a film should be organized according to its own organic logic, breaking with conventions adopted from literature, such as plot. Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943; made in collaboration with Alexander Hammid), features a circular narrative structure that explores the subconscious imaginings and subjective focus of its central female figure, played by Deren.
Feminist Film
Authors: Galindo Gloria
Published: September 2018

There is no consensus about what "feminist film" is. A simple definition would be films about women made by women that advance the feminist cause. An early example of the type is The Smiling Madame Beudet [La souriante Madame Beudet] (1922), an impressionist, silent tale of a woman’s psychological and physical confinement. It was directed by Germaine Dulac, the main female filmmaker in 1920s French avant-garde cinema. However, some critics also consider feminist those films that have a female protagonist or deal with women’s matters, regardless of the filmmaker or screenwriter’s gender, as is the case with Thelma and Louise (1991) directed by Ridley Scott. This view contrasts with the practice of film festivals and distributors. The distributor Women Make Films, for example, relies nearly exclusively on female directors, and the London Feminist Film Festival exclusively schedules films by women that deal with feminist issues or are feminist in their representation of women.
Huston, John (1906–1987)
Authors: Neighbors Ryan
Published: September 2018

John Huston was an American actor, director, and screenwriter, who became one of the world’s most influential filmmakers. Born in Missouri to Rhea Huston, a sports editor, and Walter Huston, a vaudeville actor and eventual film star, Huston spent his early years as an artist, author, reporter, soldier, and amateur boxer. He started out in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Samuel Goldwyn at Universal Studios, and later for Warner Bros. At Warner Bros., he helped to launch Humphrey Bogart’s career with High Sierra (1941). A string of successful scripts gained him his first directing job with Maltese Falcon (1941), a film that would thrust Huston into the limelight. In total, his career spanned over five decades, earned him fifteen Oscar nominations and two Academy awards, a Golden Globe, and several lifetime achievement awards. Huston worked in multiple genres, including comedies, war films, musicals, Westerns, adventures, and literary adaptations. His most pronounced role, however, likely involved his development of the modernist film noir, writing and directing several classics of the genre, including Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Many of these films call into question traditional forms of authority, religious faith, and epistemology, and focus on protagonists who wander the world on a journey to define their own values.
Jordan, Lawrence (1934--)
Authors: Gosse Johanna
Published: September 2018

Lawrence (Larry) Jordan has worked as an experimental filmmaker for the last six decades. Raised in Denver, Colorado, he attended high school with filmmaker Stan Brakhage and composer James Tenney. In the late 1950s he befriended artist Joseph Cornell, with whom he collaborated on a number of films. Jordan played a key role in the development of Bay Area film culture, as co-founder (with Bruce Conner) of the Bay Area’s first film society and first 16 mm experimental theater in 1958, and later as a founding member of Canyon Cinema. In total, he has made more than fifty films, both live action and animated, many in collaboration with other artists. However, he is best known for his animated cutouts of Victorian engravings, which reflect the influence of Cornell’s Wunderkammer-like boxes and Max Ernst’s collage novels. His surreal animations, such as Duo Concertantes (1964) and Our Lady of the Sphere (1969), range from the meditative to the whimsical and the uncanny, and often feature vintage costumes, exotic animals, floating objects, and magical landscapes. Jordan represents a strand of the post-war American avant-garde that looked back to early film history with sincere affection rather than irony, and attempted to recover the enchantment of cinema at the turn of the century.
Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich (1899–1970)
Authors: Eubanks Ivan
Published: September 2018

Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet director and theorist who initiated the montage movement of the 1920s. He proclaimed editing to be the primary authorial act in filmmaking, because a montage could generate images that transcend the ontology of the constituent shots (i.e., such images exist only as the sum of sequential shots, and their referents may exist only within the film). This phenomenon, known as the "Kuleshov effect," allowed the director to construct "artificial" or "creative landscapes" (imaginary places). Kuleshov asserted that the more nuanced aspects of acting result from editing, a claim he demonstrated in his Mozzhukhin Experiment. In this piece, which is lost, a shot of Ivan Mozzhukhin from an earlier film appeared repeatedly, followed each time by a different image such as a bowl of soup, a corpse, or a sensuous woman. In each instance the subsequent image should have caused the viewer to perceive a different emotion on the actor’s face. Although Kuleshov’s ideas formed the basis for Soviet cinema, and influenced such notable contemporaries as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, his career declined in the 1930s following the advent of Socialist Realism and coinciding with a backlash against Formalism. Nevertheless, he was appointed the head of the Russian State Institute of Film in 1944, and received the Order of Lenin in 1967.
Modernist Film Criticism
Authors: Galindo Gloria
Published: September 2018

Criticism is one of the fundamental concepts in Modernism and is defined by "the intensification, almost exacerbation, of [a] self-critical tendency" that began with Kant, "the first to criticize the means itself of criticism" (Clement Greenberg). Modernism makes use of a multiplicity of approaches and techniques in order to reflect on the means of representation by focusing on its methods. That is, instead of trying to describe, thoughts, feelings, relationships, or the world in a realist way, the modernist artist and critic focuses on the way representation articulates experience, turning, at the same time, art into a reflection of itself. In this sense, modernist discourse operates as a statement, ‘by the specific practices of art criticism, by the art activities implicated in the critic/author’s formulations and by the institutions which disseminate and disperse the formulations as events’ (Marcus 2007).

Earlier film theory "was unformed and impressionistic," and its major concern was, as Robert Stam points out, to define whether or not cinema was an art that was linked or opposed to the other arts. An early theorist, Riccioto Canudo, in his manifesto "The Birth of the Sixth Art" (1911), understood cinema as the conjunction of "the three spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, and painting), and the three temporal arts (poetry, music and dance), transforming them into a synthetic form called ‘Plastic Art in Motion" (Abel 1988: 58–66 quoted in Stam 2000: 28).
Nakahira, Kō (1926–1978)
Authors: Amit Rea
Published: September 2018

Nakahira Kō was a prolific and wide-ranging Japanese film director who, during his relatively short career, directed more than forty feature-length films. He began his career as an apprentice at the Shōchiku Studio, working as an assistant to such prominent directors as Kurosawa Akira and Kawashima Yūzō. He moved to Nikkatsu and his directorial debut, Kurutta kajitsu [Crazed Fruit] (1956), was one of the works known as Taiyōzoku [Sun Tribe] films, that were adaptations of novels written by Shintarō Ishihara, and showcased rebellious youth. This film and others led the critic and filmmaker, ōshima Nagisa, to place Nakahira among the new modernists of Japanese cinema, highlighting in particular his experiments with narrative and cinematic form. Nakahira, however, was not always as radical in his filmmaking as the directors who would later form the New Wave. He was also involved in mainstream cinema, writing and directing, for example, Kurenai no tsubasa [Crimson Wings] in 1958, a sensational blockbuster that became one of the biggest box office successes of the decade. In the latter half of the 1960s Nakahira became one of the early transnational directors of the postwar era, working in Hong Kong where he directed films for the Shaw Brothers Studio.
New American Cinema
Authors: Key Laura E.B
Published: September 2018

The New American Cinema was a movement to create independent films that expressed the countercultural moods and sensibilities of the late 1950s and early 1960s; these films represented a break away from the standardization and conformity of corporate Hollywood and from the ideological conservatism of the American mainstream. The term refers both to the films of the period and to the independent film distribution collective of the same name which was established in New York by some New American Cinema filmmakers.
Lavista, Mario (1943–)
Authors: Alonso-Minutti Ana R.
Published: September 2018

Composer, pianist, intellectual, editor, and teacher Mario Lavista is regarded as a central figure in Mexico’s contemporary music scene. A prolific composer of orchestral, stage, chamber, solo, and electronic pieces, Lavista’s oeuvre is characterized by its intersections with the other arts. His music shows an integration of modernist avant-garde trends from both European and American music, while also adopting compositional techniques from diverse historical periods of Western art traditions. He has maintained an active performance career, especially through collective improvisations using prepared piano.

Lavista’s role as intellectual has been shaped mainly through the series of lecture-recitals he regularly organizes as a member of El Colegio Nacional—a prestigious government-funded institution intended to foster the cultural and intellectual activities of an intellectual elite. Moreover, he is the founder and director of one of the most renowned music journals in Mexico, Pauta: Cuadernos de Teoría y Crítica Musical, which promotes multidisciplinary dialogues, especially among writers, painters and musicians, and has a strong emphasis on contemporary music. Lavista has been teaching at the Conservatorio Nacional since 1970, where his role as educator and mentor has been particularly relevant for ‘‘practically all Mexican composers that are younger than he is’’ (Cortez 14).
Sanjinés, Jorge (1936--)
Authors: Cuéllar Jorge E.
Published: September 2018

Jorge Sanjinés is a Bolivian director, screenwriter, and author. A committed political filmmaker, Sanjinés’s films and essays attempt to integrate Marxist revolutionary theory and indigenous ways of knowing towards the creation of a popular, transformative, liberating cinema. His first feature, Ukamau [And So it Is] (1966) tells the story of a native man who exacts revenge on a wealthy mestizo for the rape and murder of his wife. His second film, Yawar mallku [Blood of the Condor] (1969), is a story of indigenous resistance against a covert US Peace Corps sterilizing program affecting the women of an Andean peasant village. In 1971 Sanjinés directed El coraje del pueblo [The Courage of the People], a documentary re-enactment of the government-sponsored massacre of miners in 1967 using survivors of the slaughter itself. Considered an integral part of the New Latin American Cinema, Sanjinés’s filmmaking practice is notable for its intimate collaboration with indigenous peoples through his production collective, Grupo Ukamau. Sanjinés’s films, though frequently affected by limited financing and marginalized forms of exhibition and distribution, have been instrumental in preserving the indigenous language Quechua, challenging ethnic and class hierarchies, and revealing the injustices, exploitation, repression, and racism in Bolivian society. His latest film, Insurgentes (2012), is a historical tracing of the lost sovereignty of Andean communities in Bolivia from Spanish colonization to the first indigenous President of Bolivia, Evo Morales.
Messiaen, Olivier (1908–1992)
Authors: Broad Stephen
Published: September 2018

Olivier Messiaen was one of the foremost composers of the twentieth century, with a distinctive compositional style of great emotional intensity. This style drew on a diverse array of rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, and formal influences that included the songs of birds, and expressed a deeply held Catholic faith. Messiaen was influential as a teacher and foresaw the concept of total serialism taken forward by his pupils Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. There are major works throughout his sixty-year career, including La Nativité du Seigneur (1935), the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, completed 1941), Catalogue d’oiseaux (completed 1958), Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (1963), Des canyons aux étoiles (completed 1974) and St François d’Assise (completed 1983). In his treatises Technique de mon langage musical (1944) and Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie (1994–2002), he set out his musical inspirations and processes in considerable detail.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975)
Authors: Pheiffer Brittany
Published: September 2018

Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and thinker whose long career concerned aesthetics, ethics, literary and cultural theory, linguistics, and sociology. His earliest works, in the late 1910s, were primarily concerned with aesthetics and the legacy of Neo-Kantianism. His intellectual community at the time—philosophers, critics, and theorists—has been retroactively dubbed "the Bakhtin Circle." Bakhtin was sent into exile in 1929 and spent six years in Kazakhstan, where he wrote important essays, including "Discourse in the Novel." Scholars note that the political repressions of the 1920s left their mark on Bakhtin, who self-censored his future work and used literary criticism as a veiled means of addressing philosophical, political, and social questions. Almost none of Bakhtin’s work was published until the 1950s. It is distinguished by terminological innovations, most notably "dialogism," "chronotope" and "heteroglossia." For Rabelais, Bakhtin invented the genre "grotesque realism," proposing that the carnival and the related "carnivalesque" were vital cultural institutions. About Dostoevsky, Bakhtin stressed the "multivoicedness" of the novels and their distinctive "unfinalizability." Further explorations of genre, speech, and poetics followed.