bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Watts, Myrtle Eugenia ‘Jim’ (1909–1968)
Authors: Murphy Emily Christina
Published: September 2018

Myrtle Eugenia Watts, known variously as Jim, Jean, or Gina, was a Canadian foreign correspondent for the Spanish Civil War, theatre artist in the Theatre of Action, and patron of Canadian leftist literary and theatre culture in the 1930s. In her short career, Watts had a significant impact on Canadian leftist modernist culture.

Jean Watts was born in Streetsville, Ontario to a wealthy family. By 1920, Watts’s family had moved to Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, where Watts’s social and artistic circle would eventually include such prominent Canadian cultural figures as writers Dorothy Livesay and Stanley B. Ryerson, and theatre artists Toby Gordon Ryan and Oscar Ryan. Watts and Livesay would spend their adolescences as self-identified bluestockings, attending lectures by prominent feminist Emma Goldman, and reading the literary works of European and British modernists. Beginning in her early adulthood, Watts contributed significant resources to the Worker’s Theatre (later the Theatre of Action) and to the establishment of the leftist literary journal New Frontier (1936–1938), for which her husband Lon Lawson was editor. In early 1937, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Watts took up a position with the Canadian Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Clarion (1936–1939), as a foreign correspondent stationed at the Blood Transfusion Unit outside Madrid.
Webb, Phyllis (1927– )
Authors: Dalgleish Melissa
Published: September 2018

Phyllis Webb, OC is a Canadian poet, teacher, and broadcaster. She was born in Victoria, British Columbia and attended the University of British Columbia and McGill University. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, a selection of prose, and a collection of broadcast scripts, essays and reviews published as Talking (1982). Her first collection of poems was published alongside work by Eli Mandel and Gael Turnbull in Trio (1954). Webb’s first full-length collection, Even Your Right Eye (1956) was followed by The Sea is Also a Garden (1962). She began working at CBC Toronto in 1964 and acted as the producer of the ‘Ideas’ programme from 1967–1969. Her 1965 collection Naked Poems marked a point of departure with its compact forms and erotic evocation of lesbian desire. After returning to the West Coast, Webb did not publish another full-length collection until Wilson’s Bowl (1980). She won the Governor General’s Award for The Vision Tree (1982). Webb’s interest in the Persian ghazal form inspired Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti-Ghazals (1982) and Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals (1984). Her consistent concern with form manifests itself in her formal experimentation and her meticulous crafting of poems.
Werfel, Franz (1890–1945)
Authors: Howard Christian
Published: September 2018

Franz Viktor Werfel was a Jewish-born Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his works of historical fiction, including The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) and The Song of Bernadette (1941). Werfel also greatly contributed to the development of expressionist poetry in the German language, and in 1929, he was awarded the Grillparzer Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his dramatic work. Very well connected within the literary scene, Werfel married Alma Mahler in 1929. The couple relocated to Los Angeles in 1938, and several of Werfel’s works were subsequently turned into films. Werfel died of a heart attack in August 1945.
Windrush
Authors: Brown J. Dillon
Published: September 2018

‘Windrush’ is a term used to describe the post-World War II generation of writers from the English-speaking Caribbean who were published (and most often lived) in Great Britain. Although generally associated with postcolonial or Caribbean literary studies, many of these writers—including authors such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon—were seen by their contemporaries as inheritors of the tradition of modernism. Adapting the formally experimental tendencies of pre-war modernism to anti-colonial critique, members of the Windrush generation were widely celebrated in the British literary world as a vibrant new group of writers along the lines of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Pioneering figures in the emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature, they also represent a lesser-known strain of late modernism, one that seized on the unruly, oppositional, and utopian energies characteristic of modernist writing and focused them more firmly on issues of race, ethnicity, and empire.
Lautner, John Edward (1911–1994)
Authors: Bryant-Mole Bart
Published: September 2018

While the American architect John Lautner may not have considered himself a modernist, he nevertheless made a significant contribution to the branch of modernist architecture that emerged in Southern California during the mid-twentieth century, pioneered by architects such as Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Though he was wary of being seen as an imitator of Wright, under whom he had worked as an apprentice for six years, Lautner’s work does reflect several of his mentor’s architectural principles, such as flowing space, harmony with nature, and site-specific designs. Lautner’s visually arresting buildings, however, took these ideas further than ever before. His ambitious projects, as well as being architecturally innovative, were feats of modern engineering. These daring structures stood in stark contrast to the minimal, machine-influenced International Style buildings that had dominated modernist architecture since the 1930s. Lautner’s residential projects, in particular, gained widespread attention through the photography of Julius Shulman, their appearance in Hollywood films, and their endorsement by the rich and famous of Los Angeles. While contemporaneous critics were divided in their opinions of Lautner’s work, he later achieved international acknowledgment and respect, and is now considered an important figure within the Mid-Century Modern design movement.
Mavo
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

Mavo was a coterie of vanguard artists, designers, and poets centered on Tokyo between July 1923 and late 1925. It sought to politicize art amid the repressive ultra-nationalist atmosphere of interwar Japan. As such, it was the first Japanese movement to break with conventional academic practices like painting and sculpture, and explore the intermedial spaces of collage, assemblage, architecture, theater, dance, typography, and the mass media. Some of these artists, like Masamu Yanase and Shūzo Ōura, had formerly worked in a Cubo-Futurist idiom. Yet, Mavo signaled a turn away from the hegemony of Paris and salon painting, toward a dialogue with the anti-art of German Dadaism and Russian Constructivism.
de Maistre, Roy (1894–1968)
Authors: Johnson Heather
Published: September 2018

Roy de Maistre was born in New South Wales and is recognized as an initiator of modern art practices in Australia. Aware of the new European painting schools of Post-impressionism and abstraction only through reading, de Maistre worked to devise a method of allying color tones with musical notes and used the findings to produce works stylized in form and colour. This interest in color, music, and decorative geometric form would characterize his future work. De Maistre also worked in design, first in the field of colour therapy for shell-shocked soldiers and later producing a colour wheel—patented as ‘‘The De Mestre Color Harmonising Chart’’—which gave directions for the matching of colours and tones and became very popular with interior decorators. In the 1930s, after moving to England, de Maistre joined the avant-garde group of painters centred round Herbert Read and the Mayor Gallery, London. He later became known as a painter of mainly religious works depicted in his highly coloured decorative cubist style. Besides being known for his own work, de Maistre is recognized for his formative influence on the British painter Francis Bacon and the Australian writer Patrick White.
Millán, Manuel Mujica (1897–1963)
Authors: d’Auria Viviana
Published: September 2018

Considered the most significant neocolonial/neo-Hispanic architect in Venezuela. In the course of his career the versatile Manuel Mujica Millán demonstrated a pronounced capacity to reconcile modern design and functionalist layouts with the revival and reinvention of vernacular forms and architectural dialects. As part of a larger neo-Hispanic "awakening," Mujica Millán found fertile terrain to manifest his eclecticism, stemming from the appreciation of pre-existing architectural production and the exigencies of directing future urban development in Venezuela. There as in other areas of the Latin American continent, the wider debate on national identity embraced that of modernization and the physical manifestation that overall progress would take not only in the case of new neighborhoods and their configuration, but also in that of important state buildings, public spaces, and company headquarters.
Rietveld, Gerrit Thomas (1888-1964)
Authors: Johnson Michael
Published: September 2018

Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch furniture designer and architect associated with the avant-garde movement known as De Stijl (The Style). Influenced by the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian, Rietveld’s work emphasized pure geometric form and primary colors. As the principal interpreter of the De Stijl aesthetic, Rietveld demonstrated how Mondrian’s abstract style could be translated into three-dimensional design objects and buildings. His work helped to formulate many of the principles that became integral to modernist design of the 1920s and 1930s.
Van de Velde, Henry (1863–1957)
Authors: Cesare Carla
Published: September 2018

Architect and designer Henry van de Velde was born in Antwerp, Belgium, the sixth child in a middle-class family. The influence of Symbolism on his initial training as a painter, in particular the movement’s emphasis on the relationship between meaning and form, led to his eventual definition of the importance of the line as a motivating impetus in his work. This emphasis on line, combined with a growing interest in design reform, led to his career as a pre-eminent modernist, most prominently through his role as a founder of the Art Nouveau movement, and later work with the Deutscher Werkbund. Van de Velde began his professional life as a painter. He studied from 1880 until 1883 at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. Through Georges Seurat, van de Velde developed his interest in the line. By 1892, nearly ten years after he had finished art school, van de Velde discovered the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris in England, which led the artist toward his training as an architect and designer.
Rumba
Authors: McMains Juliet
Published: September 2018

Rumba refers to a genre of Afro-Cuban dance music played on hand percussion, including the subgenres of rumba yambú, rumba guaguancó, and rumba columbia. It is danced by a single couple or solo dancer in an African style with playful improvised steps featuring segmented movements of the hips, torso, and shoulders. Rumba, which evolved in late-nineteenth-century working-class, black neighborhoods of Matanzas, Cuba, was marginalized by Cuba’s white elite until the Castro regime embraced it as a symbol of modern national identity in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, rumba increasingly became a major feature of Cuban cultural export and cultural tourism, figuring prominently in Cuba’s modernization strategy through sale of state-sponsored folklore.

Rumba also refers to a style of modern ballroom dancing that developed in the 1930s in the United States, England, and Europe that was loosely based on the Cuban music and dance form called son. In its early practice, ballroom rumba was characterized by a small box step incorporating swaying of the hips and partnered turns borrowed from American ballroom dances.
Georgi, Yvonne (1903–1975)
Authors: Toepfer Karl Eric
Published: September 2018

Yvonne Georgi was a major figure in the evolution of modern dance in Germany. She amplified the scale of modern dance performances by expanding the size of ensembles operating in a modernist idiom, enlarging the narrative structures that motivated dance performances, and by increasing the complexity of the movement vocabulary used in modern dance performances. In pursuing these ambitions, she strove to reconcile ballet techniques with modern dance theory, so that ballet would assume greater significance in the modernist project. Modern dance in turn would achieve greater impact institutionally when it incorporated the organizational and choreographic discipline of ballet to build large-scale works with large ensembles for theater audiences generally, not just dance audiences. Georgi was also important in deepening appreciation of German modern dance in the United States when she toured the country with Harald Kreutzberg in 1929–30 and in developing a distinctly modernist ballet in the Netherlands, where she worked during the 1930s and 1940s.
Kraus, Gertrud (1901–1977)
Authors: Rottenberg Henia
Published: September 2018

Gertrud Kraus, a Jewish dancer, choreographer, and teacher, was a prominent representative of Viennese Ausdruckstanz and later a key figure in establishing modern dance in her new homeland of Israel. She performed her solo recitals on stages in the capitals of Europe and the Middle East with great success, and choreographed for her own dance group and for theater and opera. Characterized by a search for self-expression that was associated with deep social consciousness and humanism, her works resulted from her profound personal identification with struggles for social justice. Exemplary was the cycle Songs of the Ghetto, set to music by Russian-Jewish composer Joseph Achron and performed at the 1930 Dancers Congress in Munich. Although such works brought Kraus international success, the rise of National Socialism and the Nazi threat to Jews and leftists led to her emigration in 1935 to Eretz Yisrael, as the land of Palestine was called by Zionists at the time. Arriving at a time of conscious creation of Hebrew culture, Kraus soon became a dominant figure in the dance scene of the 1930s and 1940s, and she is considered one of the founders of modern dance in Israel.
Palucca, Gret (1902–1993)
Authors: Giersdorf Jens Richard
Published: September 2018

Gret Palucca took a distinctive improvisational and pedagogical approach to German modern dance in a career spanning four different political systems in Germany. After studying and performing with Mary Wigman, Palucca founded her first school in Dresden during the years of the Weimar Republic. Personifying the androgynous and career-oriented New Woman of that era with her slight, boyish frame, bobbed hair, energetic leaps, and thriving solo career, she and her dancing became the subject for many artists affiliated with the Bauhaus schools in Weimar and Dessau, among them Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marianne Brandt.
Sokolow, Anna (1910–2000)
Authors: Kosstrin Hannah
Published: September 2018

In her seventy-year career, Anna Sokolow contributed to dance fields in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. A child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Sokolow rose to prominence in the 1930s as a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and as an independent choreographer of her own leftist dance group. She infused her formalist compositions with substantive accusations against authoritarian power structures, highlighted Jewish themes, gave voice to underserved populations and marginalized countercultures, and composed lyrical love ballads and tributes to artists and social figures she esteemed. Sokolow’s early choreography exposed societal ills and indicted fascist governments.
Decadence
Authors: Ingelbien Raphaël
Published: September 2018

Decadence was a word used to refer, often disparagingly, to late-19th-century European writers and artists whose credo of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ (Dictionary of Art Historians) went hand in hand with an open disdain for morality and for the values of their own societies. Often associated with modern French literature and its influence, decadent tendencies were observed in many different countries. In England, its main representatives were Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and various figures who were inspired by French examples and by the aestheticism of Walter Pater (1839–1894). Its main features were a cult of beauty, refinement and artificiality; a fascination for the paradoxical, the bizarre, the exotic and the perverse; and an iconoclastic attitude towards dominant values. While manifestations of decadence did earn a place in fin-de-siècle London culture, the phenomenon did not survive the spectacular fall of Oscar Wilde in 1895, but some of its ideas and attitudes point forward to modernism.
Music and Dance
Authors: Steichen James
Published: September 2018

The histories of modernist music and dance are vast and inextricably related, so much so that it is as daunting to consider them in tandem as it is challenging to study each in isolation. In lieu of a strict chronological survey, this entry discusses different ways in which music and dance mutually influenced each other over the course of the modernist movement. Like Modernism in general, music and dance gave rise to a variety of modes of new expression, with innovations in each field spurring changes in the other. Music and dance created new idioms of sound and movement and would also re-imagine and appropriate older musical repertoires and movement vocabularies to new expressive ends. Modernist composers and choreographers borrowed freely from so-called ‘primitive’ cultures and vernacular themes and trends, but also pursued the highest levels of abstraction. All told, modernist music and dance engaged in a complex and fruitful exchange that challenged the underlying assumptions of each individual art as well as the terms that had previously governed their collaboration.
Odets, Clifford (1906–1963)
Authors: Filewod Alan
Published: September 2018

One of the foremost American playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, Clifford Odets is best known for his social realist plays and screenplays, of which Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938) have attained canonical status. A committed leftist and briefly a member of the Communist Party, his meteoric trajectory from actor in the experimental Group Theatre in New York to Hollywood screenwriter has been narrated, first by Harold Clurman in The Fervent Years and then by generations of subsequent critics and biographers, as the tragedy of a tormented and politically ambivalent visionary who struggled to reconcile his radical beliefs with the rapid celebrity that took him to Hollywood. During his later life, his reputation was tainted as a result of his voluntary if ambivalent testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy inquisitions. Odets’ importance to theatrical modernism rests on his first play, Waiting for Lefty, which enacted the cultural politics of the Popular Front by absorbing the militancy of agitprop in the social humanism of dramatic realism.
Persona
Authors: Humphrey Daniel
Published: September 2018

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (Sweden, 1966) is often described as an intense drama about the relationship between a famous actress and the inexperienced nurse assigned to care for her after she suffers an emotional collapse and falls mute. As the film advances, the lines between reality and fantasy blur greatly. Concurrently, a palpable sense of sexual desire on the part of the women arises. Persona stands as its writer/director’s most formally radical feature, complete with recurring references to its status as a film via the sound of a rattling projector, shots that go in and out of focus, a celebrated moment when the film seems to actually break, and a narrative that inevitably raises questions about the connection between communication and consciousness; acting and agency.
Robins, Elizabeth (1862–1952)
Authors: Gates Joanne E.
Published: September 2018

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1862, Elizabeth Robins established herself in the American theater and then relocated to London in 1888. She epitomizes the grasp that the plays of Henrik Ibsen held on performers in the 1890s. Indeed, she outshone other professionals by laying claim to performing and producing the first English-speaking Hedda Gabler (1891) and the first Hilda Wangel (1893, in The Master Builder).

She felt that the stage-management system prevented women from having a say in their profession, and therefore she welcomed the Independent Theatre Movement. She formed the Joint Management Company with American actress Marion Lea, her stage partner and co-producer for Hedda Gabler, and she organized several subscription series to mount not only Ibsen’s plays but also other artistic theater. Her feminist play Votes for Women (1907) was at the vanguard of pro-suffrage drama.

Performances organized by Robins of Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder were rivaled in impact only by the initial sensation created by Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer in her London production of A Doll’s House in 1889. Robins’ other Ibsen roles included Martha in The Pillars of Society, Asta in Little Eyolf, Agnes in a production of Act 4 of Brand, Ella Reintheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs Linde in A Doll’s House, and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm.
Porter, Edwin S. (1870–1941)
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Edwin Stanton Porter was an American film exhibitor, producer, and director. He started his career in cinema in 1896 as a traveling exhibitor and moved on to become the motion picture operator of the New York Eden Musee wax museum. He also built motion picture machinery, which he continued doing until well after his retirement in 1925. As an operator and programmer, Porter edited short films into programs with narrative structures, effectively acting as producer and director. When the Edison Company was reorganized in 1900 he was hired to improve their cameras and projectors, but quickly became a cameraman, producer, and director. He produced over a hundred short films for Edison by collaborating with theater-trained directors, and became an important driving force behind the creation of modern, elaborate multishot films, the most famous of which is undoubtedly The Great Train Robbery (1903). Musser and Everson see Porter as a technician at heart—an editor who did not fully grasp the possibilities and principles of editing or acting, but who had an instinctive understanding of "continuity," or the safeguarding of smooth, continuous action through the combination of fragmented shots. Though Porter had been instrumental in lifting cinema out of what Tom Gunning has dubbed the "cinema of attractions" era, he arguably never realized his full potential as he was unwilling to invest himself in narrative film. When his methods had become antiquated in 1909, Edison fired him.
Anemic Cinema (1926)
Authors: Mitchell Ryan Robert
Published: September 2018

Considered one of the important experimental films of the prewar European avant-garde, Anemic Cinema (1926) is a short experimental film by Marcel Duchamp, who authored the film under his pseudonym Rrose Sélavy.
Anthology Film Archives
Authors: Alfaro Kristen
Published: September 2018

Anthology Film Archives ("Anthology" hereafter) is an experimental film institution that was founded in 1970 by experimental filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Ken Kelman, and film critic P. Adams Sitney. Based in the Joseph Papp Theater in New York City, Anthology was funded primarily by Jerome Hill. According to its founders, Anthology was the first film museum dedicated to film art and, as stated in their manifesto, the institution aimed to define film study and exhibition with a film art canon (Essential Cinema) and a theater (Invisible Cinema). In addition, Anthology created the Film Study Center, a space for archiving, preserving, and examining films and film-related journals, ephemera, and paper documents.
Lumière, Auguste (1862–1954) and Lumière, Louis (1864–1948)
Authors: Leskosky Richard J.
Published: September 2018

The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, invented the Cinématographe, a motion picture camera and projector, and used it to create the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) in 1895. The Lumières’ public performances began on December 28, 1895 with a program of ten titles in Paris. Louis Lumière was already an accomplished photographer with a keen eye for visual compositions, and he shot most of the brothers’ first films, while August appeared frequently in front of the camera. Even the earliest films demonstrated Louis’ sophisticated visual sense and contained the seeds of several genres including comedy and documentary. The Lumières sent cameramen around the world to record images of other lands and cultures in order to show the world to their audiences. The Lumières held on to their invention and the advantage it afforded them for public exhibition for a couple of years, but from 1897 onwards they began selling Cinématographes to other companies, which helped spread the cinema around the world more quickly. After some financial setbacks, the brothers ceased producing films in 1905 but continued research in still photography.
Di Khalyastre (1922–1924)
Authors: Koenig Raphael
Published: September 2018

Di Khalyastre (also Di Khaliastra, ‘The Gang’ in Yiddish) was a major Yiddish avant-garde movement and literary magazine active in Warsaw between 1922 and 1924. Influenced by German Expressionism and Russian Cubo-Futurism, it took part in an international network of artistic and intellectual exchanges that connected it with Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris. The group was formed in Warsaw and published the first issue of its namesake literary magazine in 1922; the second and last issue was published in Paris in 1924. Distancing itself from both naturalism and neo-Romantic idealizations of Jewish traditions, Khalyastre was characterized by its praise of chaotic forms and explosive imagery, its angst-ridden, often nightmarish themes, and its innovative use of graphic design. Marc Chagall created most of the illustrations, including the cover design of the second issue. More of an association of like-minded writers and visual artists than a unified artistic movement, Khalyastre was founded by Yiddish poets Peretz Markish, Uri Zvi Greenberg (also Tsevi Grinberg), and Melech Ravitch. Prose writers Oyzer Varshavski and Israel Joshua Singer, and poet H. Leyvik were also associated with the group. Divergent political choices led to its dissolution in 1924.
Goitia, Francisco (1882–1960)
Authors: Caplow Deborah
Published: September 2018

Francisco Goitia, born in Fresnillo in the state of Zacatecas, studied painting at Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos from 1898 to 1904. His teachers were José Maria Velasco, Felix Parra, Julio Ruelas, Leandro Izaguirre, and Germán Gedovius. His fellow students included Diego Rivera, Roberto Montenegro, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. In 1904 he left Mexico to study art in Spain and Italy, mostly in Barcelona. In Spain he saw the paintings of Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya, and was particularly impressed by Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. Returning to Mexico in 1912, Goitia joined the Mexican Revolution in the army of Francisco (Pancho) Villa and worked as an artist under the command of General Felipe Angeles. His paintings from 1914 to 1918 depict the atrocities he saw in the aftermath of battle, in contrast to his earlier work, which consisted of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes in an expressionistic, post-impressionist mode. After the Revolution, Goitia created paintings that explored themes of death, such as his 1927 Tata Jesucristo, his Paisaje de Santa Monica [Landscape of Santa Monica] (1950) and Cabeza de ahorcado [Head of a Hanged Man] (1959). In the 1950s, Goitia also produced a number of self-portraits that showcased his eccentric personality.
Ophüls, Max (1902–1957)
Authors: Pringle Thomas Patrick
Published: September 2018

Max Ophüls is an important critic and filmmaker of the postwar period, known for his opulent set design, kinetic long-takes, and proto-feminist melodramas, a source of inspiration for the French New Wave. Born into a family of wealthy Jewish textile industrialists in Saarbrücken, Germany, the young stage director changed surnames from Oppenheimer to Ophüls to spare his relatives the shame of his pursuing a career in the arts. He directed five films in Germany before fleeing to Paris after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. He subsequently escaped Europe in 1941 and joined the Jewish émigré directors in Hollywood. After several years of unemployment, Ophüls directed his best-known American features: The Exile (1948) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).
Politics and Cinema
Authors: Fairfax Daniel
Published: September 2018

The relationship between politics and the cinema is probably one of the most vexatious questions to have occupied the academic discipline of film studies, and thinking on the cinema more broadly. In their landmark 1969 text "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism," Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni declared that "every film is political," but this article will focus on those works that explicitly seek an engagement with political subject matter.
Slapstick Comedy
Authors: Hilsabeck Burke
Published: September 2018

The term "slapstick comedy" refers to film comedies in which the humor relies upon physical gags and stunts. The slapstick—a wooden paddle to which a second piece of wood was attached by means of a hinge—was a tool of the Italian commedia dell’arte. When swung against an actor’s body, it made a loud thwacking noise that helped to emphasize an act of stage violence.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is an American silent film directed by German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, who was renowned for his Expressionistic films including Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), and Faust (1926). Murnau was part of a wave of successful European directors who were lured to the United States by studio moguls to increase the artistic prestige of American cinema in the 1920s. Sunrise was produced by the Fox Film Corporation, and starred George O’Brien as The Man, and Janet Gaynor as The Wife. The Fox Movietone system made it the first fiction film to be released with an optical soundtrack. Carl Mayer wrote the screenplay for Sunrise, which is based on Hermann Sudermann’s short story Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Trip to Tilsit) published in 1917. The story pits the hectic modern excess of the city against the calm of country life: it finds a farmer fall prey to the charms of a city woman who nearly drives him to kill his beloved wife. The film boasted a stylized aesthetic that had an enormous artistic and critical impact—its carefully construed montage sequences, haunting double exposures, pictorial lighting, and impressive tracking shots injected European modernism into classical American cinema. The film won three awards at the first Academy Awards in 1929: Unique and Artistic Production, Best Cinematography, and Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Grosz, George (1893–1959)
Authors: McCloskey Barbara
Published: September 2018

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art.

Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.
Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945)
Authors: Jones David
Published: September 2018

Known as Il Duce (the Leader), the son of a Marxist blacksmith, Benito Mussolini was the ruler of Fascist Italy (1922–43). A master of populist rhetoric, editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti! (1912–1914), Mussolini shaped the fascist movement as a party leader before rising to state power with his October 1922 March on Rome. He invaded Ethiopia in a brutal war for a new Italian Empire (1935–36), aided Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and fought on the side of Nazi Germany in the Second World War (1940–45). His fascist ideology made use of ideas offered by Italy’s ‘philosopher of fascism’, Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), and manifestos written by the founder of Futurism, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). Mussolini’s personality cult influenced dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco, and at times earned the admiration of Winston Churchill (Samuel) and Franklin Roosevelt (Schivelbusch, 2006, 31). On April 29, 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed, his body gruesomely displayed (‘Execution of Mussolini’). His legacy has spawned fascist movements throughout the world, from Oswald Mosley’s (1896–1980) English Blackshirts to Pierre Gemayel’s (1905–1984) Christian Phalange in Lebanon.
Piaget, Jean (1896–1980)
Authors: Ghazban Niusha , Boudreau Jean-Paul
Published: September 2018

Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean William Fritz Piaget pioneered the field of cognitive developmental psychology using empirical methods to study children. Like Walter Benjamin, Piaget was one of the few modern thinkers to take children seriously, and his enduring impact is attested by the fact that he is the second most cited psychologist in the twentieth century after Sigmund Freud. A precocious student, who had published his first scientific article at the age of ten, Piaget received his doctorate in zoology at the age of twenty-two.
Syndicalism
Authors: Perlea Georgiana
Published: September 2018

Syndicalism is a social and political program advocating an economic system based on equal ownership of production and democratic rule by federated trade unions. Peculiar to the industrial proletariat, the syndicalist agenda inspired by Proudhon, Bakunin and Sorel acquired political weight with the creation in 1895 of the French CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), most influential in the years leading up to the First World War. Unlike state Socialism, liable to degenerate into a disguised economic aristocracy of its bureaucratic elite, Syndicalism emphasizes the horizontal ties at work in co-operative confederations and mutual aid.
Tarde, Gabriel (1843–1904)
Authors: Merrill Trevor
Published: September 2018

Gabriel Tarde was a French social psychologist, sociologist, and criminologist. In The Laws of Imitation (1880), he suggests that imitation drives the development of language and the evolution of institutions and the arts. The interrelated categories ‘invention’, ‘imitation’, and ‘opposition’ stand at the heart of Tarde’s sociology. New ideas spread via imitation, those that resemble existing norms being more readily imitated. There are three laws of imitation: (1) the law of close contact; (2) the law of imitation of superiors by inferiors; and (3) the law of insertion (where new behaviors either reinforce or replace customary ones).
The Vienna Circle
Authors: Murray Peter
Published: September 2018

In 1922 Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) transformed the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society), a weekly reading group concerned with logical positivism, into an international assembly of academics known as der Weiner Kreis, or the Vienna Circle, which responded to recent developments within analytic philosophy by leading thinkers Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Early members included Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). In 1929, Neurath published Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle), a pamphlet delineating the group’s rejection of metaphysics in favour of a scientific worldview predicated upon empirical phenomena.
Theory of Relativity, The
Authors: Bradley Adam James
Published: September 2018

The Theory of Relativity is the name given to two separate theories put forth by Albert Einstein (1879–1955): ‘Special Relativity’ and ‘General Relativity’. When first published in 1905, Einstein’s ‘Theory of Special Relativity’ upended Newtonian Mechanics and was in agreement with James Clerk Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. The theory opened up new avenues for particle physics and is thought to have ushered in the nuclear age. Relativity was also used to predict the existence of black holes and other cosmological phenomena. Special Relativity, Einstein’s theory of small particles, includes possibly the world’s most famous physics equation: E=mc², which predicts the relationship between mass and energy where energy is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by the speed of light squared.
Zweig, Arnold (1887–1968)
Authors: Tan Rachelle Ann
Published: September 2018

Arnold Zweig was born on November 10, 1887 to a Jewish family in Glogau, Silesia (now Glogów, Poland). As an anti-war and anti-fascist activist as well as an author who mostly wrote in the German language, Zweig’s work is often classified as ‘Exilliteratur’, a category used to describe works written by people of Jewish origin or with communist sympathies, and which exhibit an anti-Nazi attitude. Zweig is best known for his six-part cycle on the First World War, Der große Krieg der weißen Männer (1927–1957). Traditionally realist, Zweig’s novels explore the topics of humanity, war, and justice, and investigate the human predisposition for evil.
The Arts and Letters Club
Authors: Winter Caroline
Published: September 2018

The Arts and Letters Club is a Canadian private club for artists and their patrons. For more than a century, the Club has played an important role in Canadian culture, providing a meeting space for and fostering a community of visual and literary artists, actors, musicians, designers, and architects. It is housed at St. George’s Hall in downtown Toronto, Ontario, a building of National Historic Significance.

The Arts and Letters Club was founded in 1908 by Augustus Bridle, an arts journalist, to promote the arts in Canada. The Club is best known for its connection with the Group of Seven. The original Group of Seven, established in 1920, included Frank Johnston, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederic Varley, Franklin Carmichael, and A. Y. Jackson. Members to join after the Group’s founding included Edwin Holgate, A. J. Casson, and LeMoine FitzGerald. The Group of Seven is known for their paintings of the Canadian landscape. These artists met frequently at the Club to socialize and share ideas.
Gregory, Augusta (1852–1932)
Authors: Pine Emilie
Published: September 2018

Born Isabella Augusta Persse in County Galway, Ireland in 1852, Lady Augusta Gregory was a playwright, folklore collector, essayist, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Following the death of husband Sir William Gregory of Coole Park in 1892, she became a leading member of the Irish Revival, working to establish Irish culture as an alternative to colonial culture and rule. To this end, she published several collections of Irish folklore and established a branch of the Gaelic League at her home at Coole in the west of Ireland. In addition, Gregory hosted and fostered writers at her home in Coole Park, which became a site of meeting and inspiration for writers, including William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, George Russell, and Sean O’Casey. Her most significant contribution to Irish cultural life was through her collaboration with W. B. Yeats, with whom she and Edward Martyn established the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Gregory also co-wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902) with Yeats, and the two launched the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, together with J. M. Synge. Gregory wrote plays for the Abbey stage and piloted its development as one of the nation’s most important institutions, overseeing productions of key works by J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Sean O’Casey.
Proust, Marcel (1871–1922)
Authors: Drouin Jeffrey , Christie Alex
Published: September 2018

Proust was a French novelist and essayist known for his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. Proust was born into a wealthy middle class family. His father, a Catholic, was a prominent physician, while his mother, who was Jewish, was well read and influenced his intellectual development. Though he did not practice the Catholic faith under which he was brought up, it nevertheless informed the penetrating observation of French culture and history that characterizes much of his work.
The Introspectivists
Authors: Millar Usiskin Jana
Published: September 2018

The Introspectivists (Inzikhistn), the first group of modernist Yiddish poets in America, were part of the Jewish American Renaissance and flourished in the years following the First World War. The movement was headed by Jacob Glatstein (Yankev Glatshteyn), Aaron Glanz-Leyeles and N. B. Minkoff, and later by Yehuda Leyb Teller. The Introspective poets rejected traditional, highly-stylized forms, instead employing narrative fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, free verse, word play and neologisms and irony in their work. Glatstein, Leyeles, and Minkoff formalized the movement’s aesthetic principles in the first anthology of Introspectivist poetry, In Zikh (‘In Oneself’).
New Verse
Authors: Padilla Javier
Published: September 2018

New Verse was a British literary magazine founded by Hugh Ross Williamson (1901–1978) and Geoffrey Grigson (1905–1985). Essentially Grigson’s hobbyhorse, this little magazine would become an influential player in London’s literary and publishing circles during the 1930s, with the young editor serving as chief publisher and curator for the entirety of New Verse’s six-year run (roughly thirty issues, ranging from January 1933 to May 1939). The publication – with its emphasis on observation, the everyday, and socially attuned poetry, however contradictorily channeled through Grigson’s editorial choices – played a key role in the dissemination, commentary, and early praise of the so-called New Country poets: Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and, most centrally, W.H. Auden.
Southwest Modernism
Authors: de Baca Miguel
Published: September 2018

Southwest Modernism refers to modern artists who were drawn to the style and subject matter of indigenous and Spanish colonial culture in the American Southwest, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. For some, the appropriation of uniquely American subject matter helped distinguish their practice from European Modernism at a time of great transatlantic collaboration. The rugged landscape, distinctive architecture and colorful Native American and Hispanic religious artifacts appealed to those who had grown weary of modern city dwelling. Such an appropriation of rural, native and non-Western visual and material culture has always been vital for the development of Modernism.
Zigomar
Authors: Adriaensens Vito
Published: September 2018

Zigomar was the criminal mastermind of French writer Léon Sazie’s eponymous serial novel, or feuilleton, which appeared in the newspaper Le Matin between 1909 and 1910. It was in 1911, however, through a cinematic adaptation in six episodes by the Éclair Film Company and its leading director, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, that Zigomar and his Z-gang shot to worldwide fame. Serial detective fiction was certainly not new at the time, Éclair and Jasset led the way in 1908 with the famous Nick Carter series and multiple adaptations and imitations of Sherlock Holmes that had flooded the screens for years; however, the elevation of a criminal figure was still a very recent phenomenon—with Danish precursors such as Dr. Nikola (Viggo Larsen, 1909), Zigomar helped pave the way for classics such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas series (1913–14). Abel argues that Jasset’s Zigomar, played by Alexandre Arquillière, strengthened Sazie’s by transforming him into an immoral bourgeois gentleman, "a capitalist entrepreneur pushed to the point of excess" (Abel 1998: 358). As such, Zigomar was one of the first modernist antiheroes to grace the silver screen, an illustrious criminal who undermined bourgeois society by upsetting the social order and preying on its members— not, coincidentally, the cinema’s target audience.
Paraskevaídis, Graciela (1940-)
Authors: Vázquez Hernán Gabriel
Published: September 2018

Graciela Paraskevaídis is a composer, musicologist and educator who lies between referents of Latin American music production. Born and solidly formed in the city of Buenos Aires, Paraskevaídis has resided in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, since 1975. Paraskevaídis’ musical and theoretical work has had an extensive reception and dissemination in Latin American and international spheres. A powerful and expressive concentrated load characterizes her musical production. Her works often have a restricted set of sound materials and expressive use of silence that are combined with non-mechanical reiteration processes. Paraskevaídis has developed an important role as musicologist alongside teaching and composition.
Russolo, Luigi (1885–1947)
Authors: Curtin Adrian
Published: September 2018

Luigi Russolo (b. Portogruaro, 1885–1947) was a painter, inventor, and musician. He was an Italian Futurist who responded to Filippo Marinetti’s call to revolutionize art and embrace the dynamism and affective power of modernity. Russolo, following Francesco Pratella, developed futurist music by working to transform worldly noise and make it musically meaningful. In his 1913 manifesto L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), Russolo argued that the sounds offered by a symphony orchestra were a poor match for the acoustic force and timbral complexities of a modern city. He proposed to transform noise using newly invented instruments, aestheticizing and spiritualizing it in the process. Russolo devised a system of enharmonic notation, and, with the help of the painter Ugo Piatti, constructed the intonarumori (noise intoners) that were to constitute the new futurist orchestra.

Russolo intended audiences to recognize the aesthetic value of noise when specially composed and presented in a performance context. Alas, audiences, on the whole, seem to have been more nonplussed than impressed with Russolo’s music; they frequently made competing noise of their own.