Modernism and Film

I've just sent by email some notes on Modernism and Film to those of you on the Modernism and British Poetry course. I hope you find them interesting. Please note that this is extra material for you to look at and incorporate into your work if you wish to do so.

Here are links to a handful of modernist films you may find interesting:

Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926)

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's short surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1928) - with its famous scene of a razor cutting into an eye: sometimes interpreted as an assault on the viewer, on we who watch the film. There are obvious parallels here with what we discussed in today's class concerning art as acid, a cleansing or surgical burning or cutting away of spiritual and aesthetic corruption. Here is an interesting essay on the film, Bunuel, Dali and Sigmund Freud.

Finally, here is a link to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), which shows the Tsarist soldiers shooting at the crowd.  This is a scene that has been the subject of many pastiches and parodies. As in your assignments you are writing your own pastiches of modernist poems, you might be interested in the following re-workings of Eisenstein's scene, the first from The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner, and the second from Terry Gilliam's Brazil - a personal favourite! (I'm sorry both of these are in Spanish - I couldn't find English versions online. I'm sure if you have time you can find English and/or Turkish versions.)