European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s Vekt i gram: The Filming
of Modern Life In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced
the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways.
Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as
filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements as Dada and
surrealism made some of the most enduring and fascinating films
in the history of cinema. In The Filming of Modern Life, Malcolm
Turvey examines five films from the avant-garde canon and the
complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity
they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique
(Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis
Picabia and Rene Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali
and Luis Bunuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga
Vertov, 1929). All exemplify major trends within European avant-
garde cinema of the time, from abstract animation to "cinema
pur." All five films embrace and resist, in their own ways,
different aspects of modernity.