In addition to opening up the modernist canon, these studies assume a notion of modernism that is "more than a repertory of artistic styles," more than sets of ideas pursued by groups of artists and intellectuals. For more than a decade now scholars have been dislodging that genealogy and delineating alternative forms of modernism, both in the West and in other parts of the world, that vary according to their social and geopolitical locations, often configured along the axis of post/coloniality, and according to the specific subcultural and indigenous traditions to which they responded. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka to Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Arnold Schönberg to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Whether or not one agrees with the postmodernist challenge to modernism and modernity at large, it did open up a space for understanding modernism as a much wider, more diverse phenomenon, eluding any single-logic genealogy that runs, say, from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, from T. My focus here will be more squarely on mid-twentieth-century modernity, roughly from the 1920s through the 1950s - the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation - and the contemporaneity of a particular kind of cinema, mainstream Hollywood, with what has variously been labelled "high" or "hegemonic modernism." The juncture of cinema and modernism has been explored in a number of ways, ranging from research on early cinema's interrelations with the industrial-technological modernity of the late nineteenth century, through an emphasis on the international art cinemas of both interwar and new wave periods, to speculations on the cinema's implication in the distinction between the modern and the postmodern. My inquiry is inspired by two complementary sets of questions: one pertaining to what cinema studies can contribute to our understanding of modernism and modernity the other aimed at whether and how the perspective of modernist aesthetics may help us to elucidate and reframe the history and theory of cinema.
In this essay, I wish to reassess the juncture of cinema and modernism, and I will do so by moving from the example of early Soviet cinema to a seemingly less likely case, that of the classical Hollywood film.
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