Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

The Poiesis of Image-Signs in Modernist Cinema

This project uses a new scholarly form of film criticism—the video essay—to visually connect the logic of collage, which became prevalent in the early 20th century avant-garde movements, to the “high modernist” filmmakers of 1960s and 1970s. Members across avante-garde movements such as Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism proposed that their artist objectives were to “liberate men,” and this freedom could be attained primarily through a visual exchange whereby the work of art caused the viewer to see anew. This project examines in what way modernist cinema embodies and learns from this aesthetic legacy beyond its earlier incorporation into the work of directors and theorists of the 1920s and 30s.