| "L 'Imagination Cinementale: The Cinematic Impression on Avant-Garde Art in France, 1913-1929" argues that the early twentieth-century rise of the cinema as a visual and cultural phenomenon had a much deeper influence on the avant-garde in France than has been previously historicized. Rather than simply revisit the avant-garde in the context of filmmaking practice, I present a conceptual model of the archive to answer the following questions: how did the cinema supply the avant-garde imagination with a new formal and perceptual framework? How did the cinema leave its trace on avant-garde art in France as a signifier for the experience of modernity and in turn assist the avant-garde in its dialectical awakening to twentieth-century radicality?; The conceptual model of the archive, or "shadow archive," is borrowed from Alan Sekula and is used in two primary ways. First, extrapolating from Jean-Francis Laglenne's brief reflection (1925) on the "imagination cinementale" in modern painting, I develop three conceptual rubrics: "ballistics," "optics" and "synthesis." These rubrics enable an examination of avant-garde art for the cinema's impression. Jacques Derrida's concept of "impression" is used to discuss the historical repression of the cinema's influence on avant-garde art and to establish the archive of formal traces that rehistoricize avant-garde artworks as post-cinematic oeuvres.; Second, this model also functions as an historiographic method with which to locate the avant-garde artist within the field of early cinema culture in Paris. The avantgarde artist is situated as a cinema spectator with a specialized gaze at the moving image. Early film-going is thus conceived as a practice of heterogeneous spaces, sounds, contexts, and geographies that contributed to the complex activity of avant-garde art production.; By supplying alternative, interdisciplinary research methods to historical and theoretical questions concerning early twentieth-century art and popular cinema in France, "L Imagination Cinementale: The Cinematic Impression on Avant-Garde Art in France, 1913-1929" reclaims the disciplinary no-man's land situated between film studies, art history, and comparative literature. |
