American experimental cinema cycle's opening with films by Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey.
Early avant-garde cinema was torn between fetishistic enthusiasm and scepticism towards the industrial and technological progress in the aftermath of World War One. This cinema finds one of its central objects in the modern city, conceived as an organism of precise operation – resulting in the birth of the urban symphony. Manhattan juts out as the prototype of this utopian metropolis, for instance in Manhatta and Skyscraper Symphony. The combination of fascination and perplexity is also unveiled in the arrival of European avant-garde aesthetics: the sense of mechanistic comicality in Ballet mécanique, the tragic parody of the urban landscape and the anti-hero in The Life and Death of 9413, or, more conceptually, the inquiries into language and the vision set out by Marcel Duchamp in Anémic Cinéma.
Cycle's opening with films by Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey.