Harmony + dissent : film and avant-garde art movements in the early twentieth century

Author:Bruce Elder

Summary:"R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the lively manifestos that announced the appearance of new artistic movements shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that these arts might take on attributes of the cinema. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Elder argues, the cinema became a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape." "To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity's cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar - and highly questionable - epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder advances the startling claim that the crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity gave rise to a peculiar sort of "pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology.""--Jacket