Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century

R. Bruce Elder argues that in the early decades of the twentieth century, the cinema became a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of artistic movements and 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 questionable epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. The author advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity engendered a peculiar sort of "pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology." Elder then shows that early ideas of the cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, "objectless" (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism.