The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (October Books)
"Combining lucid readings of five central avant-garde films from the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey'sThe Filming of Modern Lifecogently challenges the clichés of academic film history. The readings support his insight that these films respond to a subtle range of ideas about mechanization. Turvey sees the avant-garde cinema as a coherent nexus of reactions to the evolution of film syntax and genres rather than a repudiation of bourgeois modernity or the competing assimilations of cinema to Dada, surrealism, or constructivism."P. Adams Sitney, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, and author,Visionary Film"The Filming of Modern Lifeincisively challenges conventional accounts of avant-garde film theory and practice in the 1920s. In readings both subtle and historically astute, Malcolm Turvey unpacks conceptual ambivalences that animate five canonical films in individual essays, each a model of lucid critical writing and perfectly gauged for seminar discussions. He raises provocative questions that will reignite consequential debates even as they reaffirm the complex ethos informing classical modernist cinema."Stuart Liebman, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center