bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gance, Abel (1889–1981)
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Abel Gance, né Abel Perthon, was a French dramatist, actor, critic, poet, screenwriter, and director. Trying to make it as a playwright and actor from 1906 to 1910, a lack of success led Gance to the cinema. He started writing screenplays and selling them to studios; a newfound belief in the medium even prompted Gance to create a short-lived production company, directing four short films between 1911 and 1912. His delicate health kept him out of the war and landed him a job at Film d’Art (by virtue of severe personnel shortage) where he wrote and directed ten films. Like his contemporaries Delluc, L’Herbier, and Epstein, Gance was a strong vocal advocate for an artistic cinema that maximized the potential of the new medium. To achieve this, they made use of rhythmic editing patterns; optical devices such as masks, dissolves, and multiple exposures; conspicuous camera movements and angles; and much more. They are therefore referred to as the first cinematic avant-garde and, even though their styles differed quite a bit, often categorized as French impressionists. Gance’s reputation hinges on three silent canonic masterpieces, J’acccuse! (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927), in which, as Brownlow notes, "he made a fuller use of the medium than anyone before or since" (1968: 518).
Hawks, Howard (1896–1977)
Authors: García-Mainar Luis Miguel
Published: September 2018

Born Howard Winchester Hawks in Goshen, Indiana, to a wealthy industrialist family, he is considered one of the major directors of the classical Hollywood studio era. He was not a film stylist, but worked within mainstream studio formulas and avoided spectacular flourishes. Hawks was a versatile professional who excelled in every major film genre and contributed to establishing several of them, such as the gangster film with Scarface (1932), the screwball comedy with Bringing Up Baby (1938), or the adventure melodrama with Only Angels Have Wings (1939). His status changed from mere studio director to artist when French critics advocated the politique des auteurs in the 1950s and 1960s and hailed him, together with Alfred Hitchcock, as the paradigm of the American auteur. Henri Langlois (1963) considered him to be the leading modernist American director given that he embraced Functionalism and rejected Impressionism and ornament. To Peter Wollen, his films had the perfection of well-designed machines. His love of speed and aviation both confirmed him as the new modern man and revealed his taste for the values of traditional heroic adventure (1996: 8).
Hubley, John (1914–1977) and Elliott, Faith (1924–2001)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Animator John Hubley, born in Marinette, Wisconsin, served as creative head of UPA (United Productions of America) in its early years and originated its most popular character, the near-sighted Mr. Magoo. He had previously worked on several Walt Disney animated features but left the studio during the 1941 strike. Hubley played a crucial role in UPA’s development. In 1944 he brought the fledgling company a United Auto Workers project promoting the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which effectively turned it into an animation studio. He directed the first films that UPA made for Columbia Pictures, which demonstrated the young studio’s ability to make successful theatrical cartoons and so secured a long-term distribution contract with Columbia. Besides creating Mr. Magoo, Hubley earned the studio three Oscar nominations in its first four years of production. His crowning achievement at UPA was Rooty Toot Toot (1951), a modern retelling of the popular ballad "Frankie and Johnny." The film could serve as a compendium of design features characteristic of UPA cartoons: very simple backgrounds; angularly rendered characters; and an extremely idiosyncratic use of color, which includes unusual shading, unmotivated chromatic change, and spillover drawn outlines.
Just Intonation
Authors: Hasegawa Robert
Published: September 2018

Just intonation is a system of tuning musical intervals based on simple ratios between the frequencies of their constituent pitches. For voices and most musical instruments, just intonation minimizes the acoustical interference between simultaneous sounds and leads to the highest degree of blending and consonance. Though its roots are ancient, twentieth-century composers revived just intonation towards new esthetic ends.

The idea of using ratios to quantify interval size originated in ancient Greek music theory: In Pythagorean intonation, all intervals are measured with ratios made solely of multiples of the integers 2 and 3. In response to the growing use of thirds and sixths in the fifteenth century, Renaissance theorists expanded Pythagorean intonation to include multiples of 5, replacing the tense Pythagorean major third, 81/64, with the mellifluous just major third, 5/4—in all ratio-based tunings, simpler ratios produce smoother, more consonant intervals. Musicologists typically reserve the term ‘‘just intonation’’ for this Renaissance system, though it is also used metonymically to refer to all ratio-based tuning systems.
Ivens, Joris (1898–1989)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Joris Ivens (Georg Henri Anton Ivens), nicknamed "The Flying Dutchman" for his globe-trotting career, was a Dutch documentary maker. His political commitment and deft use of montage helped to shape documentary practice as he recorded and championed generally leftist political causes on every continent but Antarctica. Ivens was born in Nijmegen, Holland, to a prosperous Catholic family who ran a photographic supplies business. While studying to take charge of the family business, Ivens became both politically active and fascinated with film culture. In 1927 he helped to found the Amsterdam Filmliga [Film League], which brought him into contact with avant-garde films of the day and with visiting filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. A Filmliga visit to Berlin experimental abstract animator Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) allowed Ivens to see Ruttmann’s new documentary feature, Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grosstadt [Berlin, Symphony of a Great City] (1927), one of the first films to attempt to portray a city solely through edited shots of urban life and physical details. The film’s influence on Ivens persisted throughout his career.
Jancsó, Miklós (1921–2014)
Authors: Humphrey Daniel
Published: September 2018

Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó (September 27, 1921–January 31, 2014) emerged in the 1960s with a series of films professing both an unapologetic Marxist perspective and a subtextually resonant critique of Soviet-style totalitarianism. His earliest films exhibited a palatable, even popular form of Socialist Realism, but his work departed from realist models after 1968; he developed a style involving extremely long takes (one of his features comprises only twelve shots), intricately choreographed crowd scenes, and pageant-like parables that at times depart notably from the confines of reality: In Még kér a nép [Red Psalm] (1972) characters killed on screen are casually resurrected; in Szerelmem, Elektra [Electra, My Love] (1974) an anachronistic helicopter arrives in the final shot to carry its ancient Greek protagonists away to their destiny; and in any number of films, actors (often naked) and animals (usually horses) move in relation to each other in ballet-like synchronicity across vast outdoor plains.
Kieślowski, Krzysztof (1941–1996)
Authors: Maeder Marie-Therese
Published: September 2018

Krzysztof Kieślowski was a highly influential Polish filmmaker in the tradition of auteur cinema. Kieślowski tackled the tension between the political, spiritual, and ethical, and his camerawork often involved close framing and sequence shots. His first works, documentaries that examined everyday aspects of Polish reality, were followed by the fiction film Bez Końca [No End] in 1985, a distinctive audio-visual narration that launched his collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, his co-scriptwriter, and Zbigniew Preisner, who scored his films. Bez Końca considers the impossibility of understanding human misfortune and provokes the audience’s empathic involvement. In his early fiction films, Kieślowski scrutinized the restrictions produced by communist ideology alongside metaphysical questions (No End, Prspadek [Blind Chance] (1987), but in his middle phase, which began with Krótki film o zabijaniu (A Short Film about Killing, 1988) followed by the television mini-series Dekalog [The Decalogue], he emphasized social themes. The Decalogue, set in a Warsaw housing project, is loosely based on the Ten Commandments. In the 1990s Kieślowski focused increasingly on moral issues, and works such as La double vie de Véronique [The Double Life of Véronique] and Trois couleurs [Three Colors] have a more spiritual dimension. Kieślowski found funding outside Poland, but he also became disillusioned with Polish critics, who, he felt, misjudged him. They often ignored his engagement with existential and ethical questions by aligning his work with a politically and socially concerned Polish cinema.
L’Herbier, Marcel (1888–1979)
Authors: Torres Hortelano Lorenzo J.
Published: September 2018

Marcel L’Herbier was a French pioneer avant-garde (impressionist) filmmaker and theorist who made more than forty films between the 1920s and the 1950s. During World War I he learned the basics of filmmaking in the Army Cinematographic Service. He wrote a seminal text, Hermès et le silence (1918), in which he stated that cinema is not an art but a new language which calls into question the traditional notion of art. One of his best attempts to put into practice his theories was the poetic Rose-France (1919). In 1921 he filmed one of his masterworks, El Dorado, mainly in Granada (Andalusia, Spain), which anticipated the German Kammerspiel. He used a range of cinematographic means—including color tinting of the image—to determine character psychology and the moral atmosphere of the space, defining a kind of "cinematic melodrama" and creating a visual music. Other similar films from his silent period include L’Inhumaine [The Inhuman Woman] (1924), a science fiction drama, and L’Argent (1928), adapted from Émile Zola’s novel. In the silent L’Argent, L’Herbier used sound in an original way, recording real sound effects, which were played back in some theaters. When talkies arrived, he renounced the avant-garde, but still made noteworthy films including Le Mystère de la chambrejaune [The Mystery of the Yellow Room] (1930) based on Gaston Leroux’s novel, and La Nuitfantastique [The Fantastic Night] (1942). L’Herbier was also the founder, in 1944, of the Institut des HautesÉtudesCinématographiques. During the post-war period he poured his energy into television productions.
Méliès, Georges (1861–1938)
Authors: de Fren Allison
Published: September 2018

Georges Méliès (born Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès) was a French showman, illusionist, and filmmaker best known for his early silent fantasy and science fiction films, such as Trip to the Moon (1902) and Impossible Voyage (1904). While most early films were actualities, he took an innovative, non-realist approach to the medium, employing its unique capacities for altering space and time to produce allegorical and dream imagery. He is sometimes called the first cinemagician due to his pioneering work in special effects, including the stop-trick film, double exposure, split screen, dissolve, and superimposition.

Méliès launched his entertainment career as a magician in the arcades of late 19th-century Paris. In 1888 he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, the most famous magic theater at the time, which came complete with stage props, illusions, automata (whose parts he used to build his first film camera), and performers, including Jeanne d’Alcy, who became his muse, long-time mistress, and second wife. The performance skills that he developed in the theater were later incorporated into filmmaking, an occupation that he began pursuing passionately after attending the première screening of the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe at the Grand Café in 1895. A year later, he helped to found the Star Film Company and built what is considered the first film studio of the silent period, whose main stage area featured a steel frame surrounded by glass walls to capture the sunlight.
Marker, Chris (1921–2012)
Authors: Sperling Joshua
Published: September 2018

Chris Marker was a French filmmaker, photographer, writer, and multi-media artist who is widely considered to be the foremost pioneer of the essay film. More digressive, meditative, and playful than traditional documentaries, Marker’s films combine observational footage, often from his travels, with ruminative voice-overs. Ironically, his most famous work was his only foray into fiction, La Jetée (1962), a short science-fiction film composed almost exclusively of black-and-white still photographs. Despite Marker’s often secretive and reclusive relationship with the public, his intimate authorial voice gained him an international cult following.
Masumura, Yasuzō (1924–1986)
Authors: Amit Rea
Published: September 2018

Masumura Yasuzō was a Japanese film director, scriptwriter, and critic. He started his career at the Daiei Studio, as an assistant, most notably to the directors Mizoguchi Kenji and Ichikawa Kon. After one fo his essays won him a scholarship, Masumura went on to study film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Italy. During his time there he continued publishing articles, including a regular column in the film magazine, Kinema Junpō. In his writing on film, Masumura praised much of European cinema while simultaneously leveling harsh criticism against almost all Japanese films, blaming them for being too slow and emotionally repressed. He was eager to bring radical changes to filmmaking in Japan, namely speed, the sense of an individual subject, and the open expression of human desire. He attempted in the first films that he directed to incorporate such innovations. During his long tenure as a studio director at Daiei in the 1960s Masumura continued to challenge Japanese cinematic conventions, working within defined film genres, such as yakuza, war films, and jidaigeki [period drama], as well as directing several adaptions of famous novels. In the early 1970s he left Daiei to work as a direct or for other production companies, including Shōchiku, Tōhō, and ATG.
Melodrama
Authors: García-Mainar Luis Miguel
Published: September 2018

With its origins in the novel and the theater, melodrama appeared in late 18th-century Europe and reached maturity at the turn of the 20th century. In the United States, the incipient film industry adopted it as a vehicle for suspense and action stories aimed at a mass audience. Melodrama featured a Manichaean world in which unquestionably virtuous protagonists had to endure suffering and defend themselves from the advance of evil, in the form of utterly villanous antagonists. Belonging to the same family as the biblical parable, it offered testimonies of moral struggle that have pervaded most commercial cinema across the world—in France, Italy, Mexico, the Middle East, and the various Indian industries—yet is best known through its Hollywood incarnation. Hollywood combined the melodrama with various types of action films but also developed a distinct version revolving around domestic conflict and sentimental plots. During the 1970s film criticism associated the term with films centerd on women and family life, frequently containing a more or less open critique of dominant gender relations. Excessive in form and emotions and subtly critical of social mores, it combined popular appeal and modernist stylization, and attracted auteurs striving for cultural respectability and commercial success.
Menken, Marie (1910–1970)
Authors: Suárez Juan A.
Published: September 2018

Marie Menken was a New York-based experimental filmmaker who produced her main work during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Brooklyn to an immigrant Lithuanian family, she attended the New York School of Fine and Industrial Arts and the Art Students’ League, where she was trained as a painter, her original vocation. After finishing her studies, she worked as a secretary to Hilla Rebay, first director and chief curator of the Museum for Non-Objective Painting (later renamed Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum). In 1936 she was granted a summer residency at the Yaddo artist colony in upstate New York, where she met Willard Maas (1907–1970), another resident, then a rising poet and editor. They married the following year and stayed together for the rest of their lives in a complex, at times embattled, relationship that led to fruitful artistic collaboration. By Maas’s own account, their interest in film was spurred by their friend Norman McLaren, the Scottish animator who lived in New York during the war years before moving to Canada to direct the Animation Division of the National Film Board.
Naruse, Mikio (1905–1969)
Authors: Anderson Joel Neville
Published: September 2018

Naruse Mikio was a popular and critically renowned Japanese film director who was active from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. He completed eighty-nine films, of which sixty-seven survive. From a poor family and raised by his sisters, he began work as a prop assistant at Shochiku studios at the age of fifteen, where he would direct his first film ten years later. Beginning with slapstick comedies, Naruse’s interest in urban poverty and strong, if ill-fated female characters drew him to the josei-eiga (woman’s film) genre. By the mid-1930s he had moved to PCL (Photo-Chemical Laboratories, later incorporated into Toho Studios), where he would work for the following three decades, undertaking additional projects at Shintoho and Daiei. While his prewar silent pictures display early experimentation with voice-over, flashbacks, and montage sequences, his work in sound and later widescreen and color is characterized by exacting mise-en-scène, and quick unrelenting cuts following performers’ gestures and expressions. Naruse’s modernist economy of style moves at the pace of urban life, thrusting his female protagonists (often Takamine Hideko, who starred in seventeen of the director’s best-known films) into the financialization of interpersonal relationships, whereby yearning for love outside money and family is dulled by having to survive the daily hardships of patriarchal society and monetary debt.
Münsterberg, Hugo (1863–1916)
Authors: Gerow Aaron
Published: September 2018

Hugo Münsterberg was a German American psychologist whose pioneering work in applied psychology led him to investigate such topics as forensic psychology, industrial efficiency, and even the motion pictures. Born in Germany, he studied psychology under Wilhelm Mundt (1832–1920) before being invited to teach at Harvard by William James (1842–1910). While making important contributions to experimental and clinical psychology from a behaviorist standpoint, his belief in applied psychology made him a prominent contributor to popular magazines, commenting on the contributions of psychology to industrial organization (as a Taylorist), business, science, education, and criminology. In terms of Modernism, his greatest contribution was as the author of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), one of the first theoretical examinations of the cinema. While defending film as an art through a neo-Kantian analysis of its differences from both other media and physical reality, Münsterberg in particular argued the parallels between emergent filmic devices such as the close-up and flashbacks, and psychological processes like attention and memory. Cinema was a superior art because of this, becoming aesthetic in Kant’s sense—disinterested and purposive without purpose—because it was not a slavish reproduction of reality, but rather an embodiment of the workings of the human mind. Münsterberg’s approach to film influenced later attempts to understand the medium through psychology and spectatorship.
Painlevé, Jean (1902–1989)
Authors: Heitzman Kendall
Published: September 2018

Jean Painlevé was a French scientist who was particularly well known for his documentary films about science and the natural world. He was the only son of French prime minister Paul Painlevé, himself a respected scientist. The younger Painlevé studied physics, chemistry, and biology at the Sorbonne, but he turned to filmmaking as a way of capturing aspects of scientific study that were other wise invisible. His films were criticized by the French scientific establishment, which distrusted the medium as a whole, but beginning with Œufs d’épinoche [The Stickleback’s Eggs: From Fertilization to Hatching] (1928), Painlevé built a corpus of documentary films that attracted attention from intellectuals in other fields, including Marc Chagall, Man Ray, and Georges Bataille. Painlevé’s films found resonances between science and Surrealism through a panoply of "trick" shots, using slow motion, whimsical music, and the patterns of nature to render the natural world strange. Painlevé was politically progressive throughout his life, and despite their ostensibly apolitical nature, Painlevé’s films are often perceived to be commentaries on the human world in which he lived. Painlevé claimed that he chose the subject of L’Hippocampe [The Seahorse] (1934) because the male of the species bears the eggs, while Les Assassins d’eau douce [Freshwater Assassins] (1947) depicts the brutality of life in a pond that mirrors the brutality of the war France had just endured. Painlevé was active in the creation and promotion of the Institute of Scientific Cinema (ICS), which worked to promote science films, and he continued to produce films into the 1980s.
Paisà
Authors: Russo Michela
Published: September 2018

Paisà (Paisan. Italy 1946, b/w, 124 min. Drama). Directed and produced by Roberto Rossellini. Production: OFI, Foreign Film Production Inc., Capitani Film. Written by Federico Fellini, Sergio Amidei, and Roberto Rossellini. Music by Renzo Rossellini. Cast: Episode I, Sicily—Carmela Sazio (Carmela) and Robert Van Loon (Joe); episode II, Naples—Dots M. Johnson (Joe) and Alfonsino Pasca (Pasquale); episode III, Rome—Maria Michi (Francesca) and Gar Moore (Fred); episode IV, Florence—Harriet White Medin (Harriet), Renzo Avanzo (Massimo) and Gianfranco Corsini (Marco); episode V, Romagna—William Tubbs (Captain Bill Martin); episode VI, Po River—Dale Edmonds (Dale) and Van Loel (German officer).
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1922–1975)
Authors: Humphrey Daniel
Published: September 2018

Known in North America mainly as a provocative filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini (March 6, 1922–November 2, 1975) is also celebrated in his native Italy as a significant poet, novelist, essayist, and public intellectual. Pasolini left a rich body of work that has grown in stature since his ignoble death at the hands of a hustler in 1975. Born in Bologna to lower-middle-class parents—a career military officer and an elementary school teacher—Pasolini’s biography is replete with scandal (charges of "obscene acts," all-but-open homosexuality) and accomplishment (innumerable awards, including one from the Vatican itself). Noted early in his career for his poetry in dialect rather than standard Italian, Pasolini’s writing, or, really, his "discursive production," is often more important for how things are said than for what is said. Particularly valuable is his theory of a "cinema of poetry," developed both on paper and celluloid: cinema that stresses the "felt presence" of the director (for instance with hand-held camera work or clearly personal choices in framing).
Pereira dos Santos, Nelson (1928--)
Authors: Baker Peter
Published: September 2018

Nelson Pereira dos Santos (born in 1928 in São Paulo) is a Brazilian actor, screenwriter, film critic and theorist, producer, and director. He can be considered the initiator of modern Brazilian cinema. His first feature, Rio: 40 Graus [Rio 100 Degrees F.] (1955), jump-started the cinema nôvo [New Cinema] movement that would dominate Brazilian vanguard cinema throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout more than fifty years of filmmaking, Pereira dos Santos has continued to shape the Brazilian screen. Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês [How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman] (1971) is his most internationally known film; a departure from his earlier neorealist style, it started a more self-critical phase that reflects on the instability of all ideologies and registers the disappointment with the left in Brazil following the onset of the military dictatorship in 1964. The late 1970s films attempted to create what he called a popular cinema, rejected theoretical treatment, and sought to convey the views of ordinary citizens. He has continued to be an influential filmmaker in the so-called New Brazilian Cinema of the 1990s and today, with political films such as Brasilia 18% (2006). The majority of his films are based on literary adaptations from Brazilian authors. Since 2006 he have been a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters—the first filmmaker to be nominated.
Rossellini, Roberto (1906–1977)
Authors: Russo Michela
Published: September 2018

Roberto Rossellini (Roberto Gastone Zeffiro Rossellini, Rome, May 8, 1906—June 3, 1977) was an Italian film director, screenwriter, and producer. His early work appeared at the height of Fascism—two shorts, now lost, on the subject of nature: Daphne (1936) and Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un faune (1938). At the beginning of the 1940s he released his first feature films exalting the virtues of World War II combatants: La nave bianca (1941), about a group of Italian sailors on a hospital ship, Un pilota ritorna (1942), about the war between Italy and Greece, and L’uomo dalla croce (1943), about military chaplains on the Russian front. With these three films, which are often referred to as the "Fascist trilogy," Rossellini’s work is considered to be highly controversial for his use of certain fascist ideological themes that he would definitively abandon in the aftermath of the war. This trilogy already crosses Realism and documentary filming with social aesthetics, humanist concerns, and a sharp observation of everyday life. These traits characterized Rossellini’s postwar Neorealism and never completely disappeared from the different phases of his future work.
Sen, Mrinal (1923--)
Authors: Amit Rea
Published: September 2018

Mrinal Sen is an Indian film director closely associated with the Indian New Wave (alternatively known as the Parallel Cinema). Born in Faridpur, now Bangladesh, he moved to Calcutta in 1940. Although Sen began directing films in 1955, it was his 1969 film, BhuvanShome, that earned him recognition among those associated with India’s independent art cinema. While the simple narrative emphasizes progressive socialist ideas, the film is most notable for its cinematic form, which incorporates live footage and documentary-like filmmaking with fast editing and several animated sequences. In the early 1970s Sen’s films become more radical politically, glorifying violent demonstrations against the government. This shift is visible in his "Calcutta Trilogy" (Interview, Calcutta 71, and Padatik) and Chorus (1975), the latter earning Sen the Silver Prize at the 1975 Moscow International Film Festival. In the latter half of the 1970s Sen turned to more mainstream filmmaking. He has also directed several documentary films, among them a film produced for the British Film Institute’s series on world cinema, And the Show Goes On—Indian Chapter (1999).
Sirk, Douglas (1900–1987)
Authors: Ogawa Shota Tsai
Published: September 2018

Douglas Sirk was a German émigré director who was widely celebrated for his melodramas produced for Universal Studios during the 1950s, which inspired generations of critics and filmmakers. In his commercially successful and critical acclaimed works such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Written on the Wind (1957), Sirk reinvented American suburbia as a perfect dramatic setting in which individuals struggled against bourgeois norms and invasive modern technology. Sirk’s films are the hallmark for Hollywood melodramas in which thematic use of music, colour, and costumes propel the drama to a boiling point.
Sjöström, Victor David (1879–1960)
Authors: Hortelano Lorenzo J. Torres
Published: September 2018

Victor Sjöström (also known as victor Seastrom) was a Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is, with Mauritz Stiller, the joint founding father of Swedish cinema and a pioneer of silent film art. His first worldwide success, Ingeborg Holm (1913), was a drama heralding what would be the hallmarks of his cinema: a strong sense of truth, a refined form of expression (he studied painting in his youth), slow pacing, representations of nature enveloped in violent mysticism, but also a strong sense of realism exemplified by Strejken [The Strike] (1914), for some scenes were shot during a real strike. In 1915 he initiated his golden age: Terje Vigen [A Man There Was] (1916), Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru [The Outlaw and his Wife] (1918) and Ingmarssönerna [Sons of Ingmar] (1918). These works are full of flashbacks, daring camera movements, crossfades and point-of-view shots which denote a free modernist narrative. One of the last films he made before leaving for Hollywood due to the crisis in Swedish cinema was the fantasy drama Körkarlen [The Phantom Carriage] (1921). After a difficult period adapting to the United States, he filmed, true to his style, what is probably his masterpiece: The Wind (1928) with Lillian Gish. Although it was a commercial failure, he discovered his favorite subject: the individual struggle against a hostile universe sustained by love and faith. He never made a ful transition to the talkies, so after some minor movies, he devoted himself to acting. His final performance was as the elderly professor in Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957).
Solanas, Fernando (1936--)
Authors: Cuéllar Jorge E.
Published: September 2018

Fernando "Pino" Solanas is an Argentinian director, screenwriter, author, politician, and public intellectual. Alongside Octavio Getino, Solanas is a founder of the Third Cinema political film movement, which would serve to express the political challenges of Latin American cinema and contribute to transforming filmmaking practice. His most important film, La hora de los hornos [Hour of the Furnaces] (1968) is a forceful critique of Neocolonialism, violence, and underdevelopment. The film would yield the manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" co-authored by Solanas and Getino in 1969. Third Cinema, for Solanas and Getino, is a radical film practice that opposes First Cinema (Hollywood cinema) and rejects Second Cinema (auteur, European art cinema) in favor of articulating a political cinema attendant to the problems of the world’s underclasses, and committed to the decolonization of the developing world. A dedicated activist and political persona, Solanas continues to make films and inroads in to Argentine politics. Other notable works include Memorias del saqueo [Social Genocide] (2004), a documentary about political corruption, economic privatization, and widespread hunger in Argentina, as well as Dignidad de los nadies [Dignity of the Nobodies] (2005), a film about the existential challenges facing Argentine people following the economic crisis of 2001. Solanas was elected to the Argentine Senate as a representative of the progressive party Proyecto Sur. Actively writing, producing, and directing films in search of the film-essay form, Solanas’ most recent feature documentary is titled La guerra del fracking (2013), a film about the environmental costs, health risks, and economic unsustainability of hydraulic fracking in contemporary Argentina.
La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game]
Authors: Harley Jeremy
Published: September 2018

La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game] is a 1939 humanist film by Jean Renoir satirizing the French aristocracy. Premiered at the brink of World War II, the film’s subject matter angered audiences, despite its gentle tone and a lack of any direct reference to politics or world events, and was subsequently banned with cuts ordered. The inspiration for what Renoir called a "more classical, more poetic" film (Durgnat 1974: 192) came to the director while working on his naturalist film La Bête humaine [The human Beast] (1938); however, his characteristic realism remained intact in La Règle du jeu. Renoir took an improvisatory approach to the film, beginning with a script inspired by French writers, including de Musset and Marivaux, and then revising it constantly according to the performances of his actors. The film is known for its pioneering use of deep focus, which had become technically difficult after the start of the sound era, and influenced the modernist directors of the Nouvelle vague [New Wave]. François Truffaut, in particular, called it "the greatest film in the history of cinema" (De Baecque and Toubiana 1996: 35). While the original negatives of La Règle du jeu were destroyed during the war, the film was later reconstructed in 1956, and has continued to influence generations of filmmakers.
Tokyo Monogatari; 東京物語
[Tokyo Story] (1953)
Authors: Anderson Joel Neville
Published: September 2018

Tokyo Monogatari [Tokyo Story] (1953) is a Japanese family drama co-written and directed by Ozu Yasujiro at Shochiku Studios. Renowned as one of the greatest films ever made, Tokyo Story regularly tops "best film" lists devised by domestic and international critics alike.

Tokyo Story portrays three generations of the Hirayama family who are brought together by the visit of their retired grandparents to postwar Tokyo from the town of Onomichi. The elderly couple (Ryu Chishu and Higashiyama Chieko) receive little attention from their children who are preoccupied with work and their own young children. Upon returning home, the grandmother falls ill and dies. Their mistreatment is contrasted with the generosity of their veteran son’s widow (Hara Setsuko), who the grandfather encourages to remarry in order to live a happy life. Ozu’s films, including Tokyo Story, employ archetypal narratives that chart shifting family relations in Japanese modernity. Often ending where they begin, these stories appear circular. However, Donald Richie describes them as spiral narratives that do not close the circle completely, "often beginning a new if similar film in the final minutes" (Richie 1974: 161). Ozu has been credited with applying traditional Japanese aesthetics to modern film form (including narrative ellipses and negative space in composition), and for emulating early Hollywood comedies—Tokyo Story is itself partially inspired by Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937).
Trnka, Jiŕí (1912–1969)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

Jiŕí Trnka (pronounced "Yershy Trinka") was the foremost Czech puppet animator and a major influence on all subsequent Eastern European puppet animators. He trained under master puppeteer Josef Skupa, but his attempt at running his own puppet theater failed. After successes in painting, stage design, and children’s book illustration, though, Trnka turned to animated film in 1945. Eschewing the Disney model, he directed a few cartoons, notably Pérák a SS [The Chimney Sweep] and the surrealistic Dárek [The Gift] (both 1946), employing modernist elements which significantly influenced Eastern European animation (more angular character design, simple backgrounds, emphasis on end poses). He then founded his own puppet animation studio and made the first Czech animated feature, Špalíček [The Czech Year] (1947). Trnka’s shorts and features often dealt with traditional Czech subjects and virtually always featured human characters rather than anthropomorphic animals and displayed a satiric component. His wooden puppets’ faces generally had immobile painted features; personalities and emotions were conveyed through gesture, framing, and lighting. Though most Trnka films earned awards and critical praise, his last short, Ruka [The Hand] (1965), remains his most renowned work—a grim tale of artistic freedom and oppression. It depicts a little sculptor/potter confronted by a giant hand demanding that he make a monument in its image. Resisting to the end, the artist dies and then, ironically, is memorialized by the hand. The communist Czech government banned The Hand for two decades.
Vigo, Jean (1905–1934)
Authors: Pringle Thomas Patrick
Published: September 2018

Jean Vigo was an anarchist and social realist French filmmaker responsible for four short yet influential works. Famously honored as "the cinema incarnate" by Henri Langlois, Vigo had a large impact on French New Wave [Nouvelle vague] directors despite producing just 165 minutes of film during his short life. Born to militant anarchist parents in 1905, Vigo grew up in boarding schools after his father, radical agitator Miguel Almereyda, died in prison. Plagued by illness throughout his life, Vigo read the impressionist film theories of Jean Epstein and Louis Delluc while in hospital, and there he met his wife "Lydu" Lozinska. The couple moved to Nice and Lydu’s family bankrolled Vigo’s first film, À Propos de Nice (1930), an experimental documentary inspired by Dziga Vertov. Vigo then completed his masterpiece, Zero de Conduite [Zero for Conduct] (1933), a short film about an insurrection enacted by children at a boarding school. The film is autobiographical, referencing his parents’ politics, as well as characters and incidents from Vigo’s life, while aesthetically playing between Realism and a surrealist sensitivity prone to play and mischief. A few weeks after the release of his social realist film about love on a canal barge, l’Atalante (1934), Vigo passed away from tuberculosis.
Wajda, Andrzej (1926--)
Authors: Ionita Maria
Published: September 2018

Andrezj Wajda is a Polish film and theater director, best known for his politically engaged films exploring Polish history, and his collaboration with the actor Zbigniew Cybulski.

In 1940 Wajda’s father was killed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest massacre. In 1942 he joined the Polish Resistance, fighting in the Army of the Interior, which had ties to the Polish government in exile in London, rather than to the Soviet Union. He would later translate some of his wartime experiences in his highly acclaimed film trilogy, A Generation (1955), Kanał (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).

The heroes of these movies are young and desperate: in A Generation they are communist partisans. In Kanał they are Jewish fighters during the bloody Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The intensity and passion of their struggle stands in stark contrast to the historical hell they are traversing (Kanał’s descent into the Warsaw sewers is shot to resemble a Dantean inferno). Nowhere is this more evident than in the masterful Ashes and Diamonds, which takes place in the immediate aftermath of the war and details a minor episode in the murky struggle for power between the communist partisans and the Army of the Interior.
Acéphale
Authors: Elder Bruce
Published: September 2018

The name Acéphale refers to two related projects: one is a journal, founded by Georges Bataille (1887–1962), published between 1936 and 1939, whose articles often extolled Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy; the second refers to a secret society that formed around Bataille. That the term derives from the Greek ἀκέφαλος (akephalos, "headless") made it an appropriate name for the counter-religion Bataille aimed at founding to revitalize the mythic experience of plenitude: the head, Bataille maintained, stands for hierarchical organization and God, so the society and journal that gave the gnostic-inflected counter-religion expression should be headless.

Bataille’s interest in an atheological counter-religion was grounded in the principle of expenditure that he saw manifested in unproductive forms of consumption, which have no end beyond themselves, and thereby constitute an irrecoverable loss. This anti-Platonic, anti-renascence social body would be headless because it would recover, within the isolation that confines modern humans, the vitalizing experience of the sacred—that is, of a privileged moment of communal unity and convulsive communication of ordinarily suppressed sensations. It would headless, too, because the Dionysian-orgiastic rituals of the secret society would be aimed against both reason and identity. Bataille’s conviction that ultimate expenditure is "the gift of the self" led the participants in Acéphale to an interest in sacrifice.
Alienation
Authors: Bradd Christopher
Published: September 2018

From the Christian doctrine of original sin, through G. W. F. Hegel’s conception of freedom, and the situated subject of existentialist thought in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s pronouncement that "God is dead," Western experiences of alienation can be understood as taking three basic forms: the individual’s estrangement from nature, self, and society. The loss of established values, no less than the burdens of tradition, have each been held responsible for widespread experiences of dislocation within industrial society, where nature has come to appear as either a resource to be exploited or as a force of decay. For Karl Marx, alienation is a result of historically specific social and economic contradictions characterizing capitalist society; specifically, it results from the exploitative conditions estranging workers from the means of production, the products of their labor, their fellow workers, and ultimately, themselves. Often associated with a feeling of forced passivity, alienation became a primary experience and critical concept for many modernists. Fractured by the contradictions manifest in Western societies, the individual appears as a fragmented subject of experience. Sigmund Freud argued that consciousness is estranged from itself, maintaining an unconscious reserve of repressed traumatic experience that continues to unwittingly motivate our conscious decisions. Plumbing the depths of alienation, T. S. Eliot wrote: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
Anti-Semitism including the Holocaust
Authors: Schuster Joshua
Published: September 2018

Anti-Semitism, a term coined in Europe at the end of the 19th century, is the hatred of Jews and Jewishness, the latter being perceived in widely varying and contradictory ways. By the early 20th century, Jewishness was associated negatively with capitalism as well as with Communism and an adherence to ancient, outmoded beliefs and keenness toward urban and modernist sensibilities. Purveyors of anti-Semitism drew caricatures of Jews to fit a variety of exclusionary agendas, casting blame on the minority group for upsetting Christian, nativist, and purist values in politics, nationalism, religion, or culture. Modernist artists who were prone to agree with arguments that foretold the decline of civilization drew on the figure of the Jew to embody a series of malaises, depicting Jews as unwanted, archetypal Others to Western cultural values.
Eugenics
Authors: Gardett M. Isabel
Published: September 2018

Eugenics is the attempt to improve human traits through intervention in genetic lines, generally for the stated purpose of increasing the proportion of so-called positive human traits and decreasing the proportion of (or eliminating) so-called negative traits. The term "eugenic" was originally coined by Francis Galton (half-cousin to Charles Darwin) in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883). Galton also laid out the approaches to eugenic manipulation that would become common, focusing on them especially in the last chapter of his autobiography, "Race Improvement." In particular, he advocated that those "afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism" should not be allowed to propagate freely. Eugenicists generally embraced Galton’s belief that human beings have a "duty" to improve the human race by genetically promoting the "higher" human qualities such as beauty, intelligence, and morality, although how to do so has always been a matter of debate, even among advocates—as has the perhaps more consequential debate over who has the right to determine which are "higher" and "lower" qualities, or "desirable" and "undesirable" traits.
Monk, Thelonious (1917–1982)
Authors: Garlitz Dustin
Published: September 2018

Thelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. One of the earliest performers in the bebop movement of modern jazz dating from the mid-twentieth century, namely the 1940s in New York City, Monk performed original compositions in neighborhoods there such as Harlem and Greenwich Village, as well as the thriving 52nd Street district of jazz nightclubs. The pianist performed with other leading figures in modern jazz including bebop progenitors Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and avant-garde saxophonist John Coltrane, all of whom performed and recorded Monk’s compositions. Monk’s compositions are some of the most commonly performed jazz standards today. Giddins and DeVeaux (2009) argue that Monk’s compositions are the second most frequently performed standards written by any one composer in jazz today, after those of pianist and big-band leader Duke Ellington.
Pater, Walter (1839–1894)
Authors: Silcox Heidi M.
Published: September 2018

Walter Pater was a man of letters and art critic associated with the Art for Art’s Sake movement. Pater was a notably quiet Oxford don. However, in 1873 he published Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the conclusion of which scandalized his peers at Oxford for its perceived hedonism. Pater dedicated a chapter of the book to the German art historian Johann Winckelmann, who identified the underlying paganism in all religions borne out in Renaissance art. Winckelmann’s appreciation of male beauty and his assembly of youthful followers served as a model for Pater’s own circle of acolytes at Brasenose College. Pater’s Renaissance influenced a generation of aesthetes, including Oscar Wilde, who were inspired by art and criticism free from moral constraint. Pater advises readers to cultivate their awareness of worldly phenomena because experience itself is a desirable human end in a world of constant flux. Pater emphasizes the importance of experience in Miscellaneous Studies where he depicts man as tabula rasa, molded individually by happenstance. Marius the Epicurean details Pater’s theory of aesthetic experience. Art, by means of its strangeness, allows the spectator to capture an impression (a mixture of subjective response and objective quality) of reality that transcends the ravages of time and finite existence.
Quantum Theory
Authors: Atkinson Kate
Published: September 2018

Developed in the early 20th century, quantum theory is a branch of theoretical physics that concerns the unpredictable quality of particles at the quantum, or subatomic, level. In 1900 Max Planck (1859–1947) inaugurated inquiry into quantum mechanics when he challenged the classical theory that light behaves as a wave, proposing instead that it is emitted in quanta, or discrete units. By 1927 this groundbreaking theory had been more clearly articulated by Niels Bohr’s (1885–1962) "Principle of Complementarity" and Werner Heisenberg’s (1901–1976) "Uncertainty Principle." Heisenberg proposed that all physical phenomena that can be observed are subject to a degree of indeterminacy and suggested that the act of scientific observation of a quantum system would change that system. These new proposals of quantum theory unseated the authority of classical deterministic physics and challenged the perceived objectivity of science. Attracted by quantum theory’s revolutionary ideas, various modernist critics adapted its principles of uncertainty and indeterminacy to studies in the humanities. For instance, I. A. Richards (1893–1970) and William Empson (1906–1984) employed Bohr’s concepts in their work on irony, ambiguity, and paradox. Heisenberg suggested, however, that both modern artistic innovations and quantum theory were the products of "profound transformations in the fundamentals of our existence" (1958: 95).