TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0001
[modern cinema, art cinema, Europe, auteurship, auteurs, culture, modernism]
In the 1960s, cinema found itself in a distinguished cultural position within Western culture, with filmmakers able to consider themselves the eminent representatives of contemporary Western culture. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, cinephiles, critics, and filmmakers observed with growing embarrassment the decline of modern cinema, the disappearance of the modernist inspiration, and the reemergence of the classical or “academic” forms in art cinema. But the 1990s made it clear that not only was cinema as an institution still alive even in the face of the onslaught of audiovisual home entertainment, but art cinema as a distinct category within the European film industries became stronger and more institutionalized than in the past. This book proposes a historical taxonomy of various trends within late modern cinema in Europe covering the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. It also discusses the emergence of the notion of auteurship in modern cinema as well as the variations of modernist forms as characterizing different geographical regions, cultures, countries, or individual auteurs. (pages 1 - 4)
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Part One: What Is the Modern?
Theorizing Modernism - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0002
[modern art, modernism, avant-garde, modern, modernist, art film, modern cinema, film history]
This chapter presents several interconnected arguments about modern art cinema. First, modern cinema was a historical phenomenon inspired by the art-historical context of the two avant-garde periods, the 1920s and the 1960s. Second, modern cinema was the result of art cinema's adaptation to these contexts rather than the result of the general development of film history or the “language” of cinema. Third, as a consequence of this process of adaptation, art cinema became an institutionalized cinematic practice different from commercial entertainment cinema as well as from the cinematic avant-garde. And last, another result of this process is that modern cinema took different shapes according to the various historical situations and cultural backgrounds of modernist filmmakers. There are three terms—modern, modernist, and avant-garde—that need distinction and clarification at the outset so as to lead us to various possible conceptions of cinematic modernism. The chapter also examines the origins of the concept of the “art film” as an institutional form of cinema. (pages 7 - 32)
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Modern
Modernism
Avant-Garde
Cinema and Modernism: The First Encounter
The Institution of the Art Film
Modernist Art Cinema and the Avant-Garde
Theories of the Classical/Modern Distinction in the Cinema - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0003
[classical cinema, modern cinema, style analysts, evolutionists, Gilles Deleuze, film theory, modernism, filmmaking]
This chapter, which provides an overview of the typical distinction between classical and modern cinema, suggests some basic principles to use as it constructs the stylistic-historical aspect of cinematic modernism. In the history of film theory, two main patterns of theorizing cinematic modernism have emerged. Theoreticians of the first group, known as “evolutionists,” contend that modern cinema represents a higher degree of development of cinematic form (language) and—even if they acknowledge the values of classical cinema—consider modern film as more capable of expressing abstract ideas. It is their conviction therefore that modernism surpassed classical cinema. Theoreticians of the latter group, known as “style analysts,” hold that modernism is a stylistic and/or ideological alternative to classical filmmaking, whether by classical they mean a pre-modern form or a surviving standard norm. By far the deepest and most developed theory of modern cinema has been formulated by Gilles Deleuze in his controversial books on film. (pages 33 - 48)
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Style Analysts
Evolutionists
Modern Cinema and Deleuze
Modernism as an Unfinished Project
Part Two: The Forms of Modernism
Modern Art Cinema: Style or Movement? - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0004
[modern cinema, art cinema, modernism, visual style, movement, Europe, films, narrative, genres]
Modernism is not a particular style in the cinema; it is rather the impact of different modernist movements in the narrative art cinema, engendering different (modern) film styles. In film history, the notion of style is used in various contexts, but most often it refers to specific periods of a national film production and to the formal characteristics prevailing in the most important films of the given movement. It is also used to designate a systematic application of certain technical solutions, which can be a singular choice in a film of any period and any cultural context, such as the “soft lighting style,” the “long take style,” or the “deep focus style.” This chapter examines narrative, genres, visual style, and general compositional principles of modern cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, and provides examples from a corpus of 241 films in Europe during the period. (pages 51 - 55)
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Narration in Modern Cinema - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0005
[narration, modern cinema, storytelling, Gilles Deleuze, disbelief, modern alienation, David Bordwell, classical art film, modernist art film, abstract individual]
By far the most spectacular formal characteristic of modern cinema is the way it handles narration and how that relates to storytelling. Modern art cinema's problem regarding narration was summarized by Gilles Deleuze. All problems of storytelling stem from the disconnection of human actions from traditional routines or patterns of human relationships. This is what Deleuze refers to as the fundamental “disbelief” in the world, what is commonly referred to as “modern alienation.” Much of the work of mapping modern art cinema's narrative techniques has been done by David Bordwell in his seminal work Narration in the Fiction Film. This chapter explores the problems of the narration of the “modernist art film” in comparison with the “classical art film.” It also discusses the abstract individual and looks at Carl Gustav Jung's description of the “modern soul.” The chapter furthermore looks at Nöel Burch's analysis of the modern film, focusing on his views about the use of chance “in the creation of works with multiple modes of performance.” (pages 56 - 81)
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Classical versus Modernist Art Films
The Alienation of the Abstract Individual
Who Is “the Individual” in Modern Cinema?
The Role of Chance
Open-Ended Narrative
Narrative Trajectory Patterns: Linear, Circular, Spiral
Genre in Modern Cinema - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0006
[modern cinema, genres, forms, modernism, auteurs, melodrama, Michelangelo Antonioni, Eclipse, Jean-Paul Sartre, nothingness]
Narrative techniques frequently used in modern cinema became fashionable not as self-contained play with the form. They are the most appropriate tools for telling specific stories. Modern art cinema tells stories about the “individual” who has lost his or her contact with the surrounding world. Stories about the lonely, alienated, or suppressed individual are endless, but the forms in which these stories can be made intelligible are not. These forms are the essential genres of modernism. Modern films, just like modern narrative in general, are said to transgress the limits of narrative genres and conventions. In the works of early-period modern auteurs, the roots of traditional genres are easily discernible. Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini start out of Italian neorealist-style melodrama. This chapter describes the most frequent genres and plot patterns in modern films, and examines Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of nothingness and Antonioni's 1962 film Eclipse. It then discusses six elements or forms as most characteristic of modern genres: investigation, wandering, mental journey, closed-situation drama, reflexive genre parody, and the film essay. (pages 82 - 119)
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Melodrama and Modernism
Excursus: Sartre and the Philosophy of Nothingness
A Modern Melodrama: Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962)
Investigation
Wandering/Travel
The Mental Journey
Closed-Situation Drama
Satire/Genre Parody
The Film Essay
Patterns of Modern Forms - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0007
[Alain Resnais, modernism, form, modern art, modern cinema, continuity, discontinuity, Marienbad, Jean-Luc Godard, serialism]
Referring to Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima, Eric Rohmer provided a particularly concise and general formula about how he understood modernism in the cinema. Rohmer's formula is a particularly accurate summary of all the important basic principles of the form of modern film: modernist art has a fragmented view of reality; the modern artist uses general and abstract principles of composition to reconstruct the coherence of reality; the foundation of this reconstruction is always in its composition an abstract idea; the ultimate source of the form of modern art is its own abstract principles rather than empirical reality. This chapter describes the main tendencies of modern cinema using some general traits related to modernist principles of formal composition. The first distinction is made between styles based on radically continuous constructions and those based on radically fragmented ones. The chapter discusses continuity and discontinuity in a film, imaginary time in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, the fragmented form according to Jean-Luc Godard, and the link between serialism and the structural composition of the film. (pages 120 - 139)
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Primary Formation: Continuity and Discontinuity
Radical Continuity
Imaginary Time in Last Year at Marienbad
Radical Discontinuity
The Fragmented Form according to Godard
Serial Form
Styles of Modernism - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0008
[modernism, styles, modern cinema, minimalism, filmmakers, theatrical stylization, Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, abstraction]
This chapter looks at four main styles representing the most important trends that influenced art filmmakers during the late modern period. Not all these tendencies were equally strong or influential in all periods during late modern cinema. Some of the general forms are not late modern inventions. Minimalism, for example, appeared already in the early modern period. Some of the forms discussed in the chapter may also characterize classical films, such as theatrical stylization. What makes the styles genuine ingredients of modernism is their specific manner of depicting the main aesthetic formal principles: abstraction, subjectivity, and reflexivity. The chapter also discusses three main trends within modern minimalist form. The first is metonymic minimalism, epitomized by Robert Bresson's films. The second is analytical minimalism, represented by Michelangelo Antonioni's films between 1957 and 1966. The third is expressive minimalism, and its main representative is Ingmar Bergman in his films made between 1961 and 1972. (pages 140 - 167)
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Minimalist Styles
The Bresson Style
Abstract Subjectivity and the “Model”
Bresson and His Followers
Psychic Landscape?
Continuity
Antonioni and His Followers
Expressive Minimalism
Naturalist Styles - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0009
[naturalism, modernism, documentary, cinéma vérité, new wave style, post-neorealism, art cinema, new cinemas, realism]
The appearance of a certain naturalism in film style was the most general phenomenon characterizing the transition to modern art cinema from the classical expressive style that dominated the 1940s and much of the 1950s. Most of the European “new cinemas” debuted to some extent with a return to the representation of real-life experience, even if stylistically this did not mesh well with stylistic changes, such as in the case of new British cinema at least until 1962. While the emergence of “new cinemas” can definitely be associated with a more realistic film form, modernism proper is not to be identified with this realism. This chapter looks at films using the style in which documentary, or to use the French terminology, cinéma vérité (direct cinema), is predominant. It prefers to use the term “naturalist” rather than “documentary” as it is more evocative of a style than a genre, and because it wants to avoid discussing the problem of documentary and fiction. The chapter examines the emergence of post-neorealism, cinéma vérité, and the “new wave” style. (pages 168 - 174)
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Post-neorealism
Cinéma Vérité
The “New Wave” Style
Ornamental Styles - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0010
[modern cinema, modernism, ornamentalism, ornamental films, ornamental style, folklore, mythology, modern art, reality, fantasy]
The ornamental trend is a peculiar phenomenon of late modern cinema. Although traces of it appeared already at the emergence of modernism, it was characteristic of the second period starting from the late 1960s. Modern ornamentalism is not mere decoration or spectacular effect. Ornamental films may have theater as a cultural referential background, but most typically, their source is somewhere else. The source of modern ornamental style is either in different national folklore or in a religious or mythological context. Folklore and mythology for modern cinema is more an example of general human mental creativity than a set of ethnographic facts. Ornamental style in itself is not alien to modern art. The Viennese Secession and art nouveau are the most salient examples of modern ornamental styles in the early modern period. Ornamental elements in modern art are meant to convey some deeper meaning; they are meant to represent some kind of “inner reality” and express fantasy, emotions, or a psychological state of mind allegedly inexpressible by elements of surface reality. (pages 175 - 191)
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Theatrical Styles - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0011
[theater, theatrical style, modern cinema, artificiality, psychological realism, lighting, sets]
Theater was one of the main inspirations of late modern cinema, and it served as a characteristic stylistic background in many modern films. Historically, the close interaction between modern theater and cinema is also explained by the parallel activities of many modernist directors, from Andrzej Wajda and Ingmar Bergman to Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Jean-Marie Straub, Marguerite Duras, and Armand Gatti as well as Jacques Rivette Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard. There are two general characteristics of theatrical style in modern cinema. One is the excessively unnatural, exaggerated, abstract way of acting that emphasized artificiality rather than psychological realism. The other is the artificial look of the sets as well as artificial, expressive lighting. (pages 192 - 202)
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Modern Cinema Trends - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0012
[modern cinema, art films, style, genre, alienation, reality, nothingness, abstraction, subjectivity, reflection]
A variety of categories characterize modernist art films: style, genre, general aesthetic conception, and the cultural or artistic tradition a film refers to. This chapter imposes a certain order among these categories so that the general and homogeneous concept of modern cinema may appear as a coherent set of formal solutions characteristic of a given historical period. Three general thematic frameworks recur in modern films: disconnection of the individual human being from the environment, commonly called alienation; subjective, mythological, and conceptual redefinition of the concept of reality; and disclosure of the idea of nothingness behind the surface reality. These themes on the formal side appear as the “modern film genres,” that is, the most widespread story patterns that can be detected during this period. What we call “modern cinema” is made up of certain combinations of specific genres with specific narrative forms and visual styles. Three terms define the most general aesthetic particularity of the modern artistic form: abstraction, subjectivity, and reflection. (pages 203 - 214)
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The Family Tree of Modern Cinema
Part Three: Appearance and Propagationof Modernism (1949–1958)
Critical Reflexivity or the Birth of the Auteur - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0013
[modernism, modern art, modern cinema, reflexivity, abstraction, subjectivity, auteur, mass culture, mass society, Western civilization]
This chapter, which looks at the relevant appearances of basic formal principles of the second phase of modernism in the late 1940s and 1950s, examines the (re)emergence of the three most general principles of modern art in the cinema of the 1950s: reflexivity, abstraction, and subjectivity. The way and the circumstances under which these formal principles appear in the 1950s are quite different from those in the 1920s. Early modernism was essentially a phenomenon of industrial mass culture; late modernism was the first cultural manifestation of the information- and entertainment-based leisure civilization. At least forty years passed between the two modernist periods, and those years represented the most important phase in the evolution of modern societies: the period between the birth and the decline of the mass society based on heavy industry leading to the appearance of postindustrial Western civilization. The chapter first discusses another phenomenon that played a crucial role in modern reflexivity as well as in modern cinema in general as its fundamental ideology and one of its main distinctive features: the birth of the film auteur. (pages 217 - 237)
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The Birth of the Auteur
Historical Forms of Reflexivity
The Emergence of Critical Reflexivity: Bergman’s Prison
Reflexivity and Abstraction: Modern Cinemaand the Nouveau Roman
The Return of the Theatrical - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0014
[theatricality, modernism, sound, dialogues, theatrical adaptations, literature, modern cinema, Laurence Olivier]
The fight against the theatrical influence had been one of art filmmakers' oldest campaigns in their drive to achieve artistic independence. The “genuine film artist” considered theatricality in the cinema to be the antithesis of cinema's own aesthetic qualities. There were, however, two main reasons why theater could not be entirely eliminated from the cinema, and why postwar modernism had to face theatricality again. One obvious reason for the return of theatricality was the appearance of synchronic sound. Sound dialogues did not revolutionize narrative composition but instead modified the dramatic structure sufficiently so that rethinking the relationship between theater and modern cinema became necessary. Theatrical adaptations abounded in the 1940s and 1950s. Some very classical adaptations were created, such as the Shakespeare series played and directed by Laurence Olivier: Henri V (1946), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955). But the series of classical adaptations was only the beginning of a real aesthetic convergence between theater, cinema, and literature taking place during the 1950s. (pages 238 - 243)
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Abstract Drama
The Destabilization of the Fabula - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0015
[fabula, narration, voice-over narration, Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon, Alfred Hitchcock, films, subjectivity, film noir, modernism]
There is a wide consensus among filmmakers and theorists that one of the most important phenomena in the postwar period is the spread of stories fusing human acts, represented in narratives, with the representation of mental processes, or of stories of human acts that develop into tales about pure mental processes. Although the principles of modern film narration did not replace classical principles, modernist principles became a sort of parallel norm considerably influencing the development of audiovisual culture even after the decline of modernism as a mainstream artistic practice. Subjectivity in modern narrative means that conventional narrative patterns, which created solid interpretative schemes, dissolve before such narrative maneuvers. The main tendency appearing in the late 1940s is to create narratives that question the absolute value of the fabula. This chapter discusses the formal traits that emphasize subjectivity in narration during the period. It describes the spread of the voice-over narration, film noir and modernism, Alfred Hitchcock's films, and the alternative subjective narration in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). (pages 244 - 252)
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Voice-Over Narration
The Dissolution of Classical Narrative: Film Noirand Modernism
Fabula Alternatives: Hitchcock
Alternative Subjective Narration: Rashomon
An Alternative to the Classical Form: Neorealism and Modernism - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0016
[neorealism, modernism, film noir, literature, journalism, modern cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, Love Affair, Roberto Rossellini, Italy]
If film noir can be regarded as a deviation from the classical narrative, Italian neorealism offered other elements for a real alternative to it. Italian neorealism was a complex cultural phenomenon in postwar Italy integrating literature, journalism, and cinema. One of neorealism's main contributions to modernism was its suppression of the hierarchy between the narrative background and the narrative foreground, which thereby loosened up the narrative structure. There are two essential traits of neorealism that make it an antecedent to, rather than a part of, modernism. One is its fundamental social, sometimes clearly political, commitment; modernism instead focuses on abstract, universalistic concerns. The other trait is neorealism's total lack of subjectivity and reflexivity, both of which belong to modernism's major aesthetic strategies. This chapter, which examines neorealism and modernism in modern cinema, looks at modernism in Michelangelo Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair (1950) as well as neorealism in Roberto Rossellini's films. (pages 253 - 272)
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The End of Neorealism
Modernism in Story of a Love Affair: NeorealismMeets Film Noir
Rossellini: The “Neorealist Miracle”
Part Four: The Short Story of Modern Cinema (1959–1975)
The Romantic Period, 1959–1961 - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0017
[romantic period, modern cinema, art cinema, Europe, neorealism, new cinema, modernism, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Hiroshima, narration]
This chapter outlines the development of modernist art cinema between 1959 and around 1975 in Europe. It divides this history into three periods: the “romantic period,” “established modernism,” and “political modernism.” The last period could be divided into two periods: the first, preparing and bearing the influence of the political countercinema movement (1967–1970), and the second, which can be regarded as the period of dissolution of modernism and the transition into postmodernism (1971–ca. 1978). The categories of “new cinema” and “modernism” were not always overlapping. The chapter argues that European modernism started with a few individual, fairly dissimilar, films made between 1958 and 1961 in Italy and France, which became the basic models for other modernist filmmakers. It also examines the transition from socialist realism toward neorealism in Eastern Europe, heroism versus modernism in modern cinema, the works of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, forms of romantic modernism, genre and narration in the early years, sound and image, the background and foreground in films, Hiroshima and Last Year at Marienbad, and the production system of the “new cinema.” (pages 275 - 309)
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Neorealism: The Reference
Eastern Europe: From Socialist Realism toward Neorealism
Heroism versus Modernism
Jerzy Kawalerowicz: The First Modern Polish Auteur
The Year 1959
Forms of Romantic Modernism
Genre and Narration in the Early Years
Sound and Image
Background and Foreground
From Hiroshima to Marienbad: Modernism andthe Cinema of the Elite
The Production System of the “New Cinema”
Established Modernism, 1962–1966 - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0018
[modern cinema, established modernism, art cinema, Europe, Tony Richardson, grotesque realism, ornamental style, Miklós Jancsó, Federico Fellini, 8 1/2]
By 1962, modern cinema became a widely accepted movement throughout Europe. This was the period in which a cool aesthetic self-reflection of filmmaking as the trendiest intellectual and artistic occupation appeared, and when modernism's self-reflexivity became increasingly important. And this was the period also when the first important achievements of modern Eastern European cinema appeared. By 1963, modernism conquered almost all segments of European art cinema. It was not until Tony Richardson's third film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made in 1962, that conscious recognition of the modernist turn by a British film registers. Modernism in Richardson's film mostly amounts to the tribute it pays to the French new wave, and most specifically, to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Another important film that had a remarkable influence on the development of modern cinema was Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. This chapter, which discusses established modernism in European modern cinema from 1962 to 1966, examines grotesque realism in films from Czechoslovakia and considers ornamental style in the works of Miklós Jancsó. (pages 310 - 337)
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Western Europe around 1962
The Key Film of 1962: Fellini’s 8 1/2
Central Europe
Czechoslovak Grotesque Realism
The “Central European Experience”
Jancsó and the Ornamental Style
Summary
The Year 1966 - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0019
[modern cinema, modernism, 1966, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, auteurs, Ingmar Bergman, Blow-Up, Andrei Rublev, Persona]
The year 1966 was an important year in the history of modern cinema because it represents simultaneously a summit and a turning point. It was a summit because many of the most important films of modernism appeared in the period 1965–1966, and a turning point because many new trends or new periods started after this year. All the important filmmaking countries made their modernist turn by 1965, or at least attempts were made in this direction, such as in the case of West Germany. The second wave of modernist directors making their debuts before 1963 were already through their second films, while the first wave of modern directors were already regarded as “classical” masters. The filmmaker-auteur had achieved total autonomy over the film, and yet he remained alone. It was just this feeling of loneliness that provided the productive force to push on. The loneliness of the filmmaker-auteur appears as the central topic in three major films produced in 1966 by three great modern auteurs: Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up. (pages 338 - 348)
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The Loneliness of the Auteur
Political Modernism, 1967–1975 - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0020
[modern cinema, Europe, political modernism, reality, political action, narration, counter-cinema, Teorema, mythology, Sweet Movie]
There are four important interrelated but quite distinct points that shaped the basic trends of the post-1967 period of modern cinema in Europe. First, cinema has to reconstruct the concept of reality. Second, cinema can be used as a means of direct political action, and films should exercise a direct impact on social, political, or ideological debates. Third, cinematic narration is a form of direct auteurial and conceptual discourse. And fourth, the artist must create a self-contained ideological or mythological universe. This chapter, which examines the trends of the period of political modernism between 1965 and 1975, looks at counter-cinema and discusses political modernism in Teorema (1968), an Italian-language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It also considers the use of folklore or mythology in a film's visual style of narrative and analyzes Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974). (pages 349 - 382)
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The Year 1968
Conceptual Modernism: The Auteur’s New World
Reconstructing Reality
Counter-Cinema: Narration as a Direct Auteurial Discourse
The Film as a Means of Direct Political Action
Parabolic Discourse
Teorema
The Auteur’s Private Mythology
The Self-Critique of Political Modernism: Sweet Movie
Summary
“The Death of the Auteur” - András Bálint Kovács
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226451664.003.0021
[political modernism, modern art, nothingness, serial composition, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, auteur, Draughtsman's Contract]
It is not easy to make a distinction in the 1970s between films belonging to political modernism's mythical trend and those already transcending the modernist paradigm. It is easier to see the difference between the two categories through films that are distant enough in time from one another, but political modernism in the mid-1970s was just the transitional period where many elements of the postmodern were already present. This is true especially in some films of new cinema in Germany, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst Eats the Soul and Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass. Two basic principles of modernism are homogeneity of style and a sense of “objective reality,” both of which are closely related with the central role attributed to the “auteur.” This chapter examines the disappearance of the auteur in European modern cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and films made by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. It also discusses Tarkovsky's use of serial composition in Andrei Rublev and the disappearance of nothingness in films such as Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). (pages 383 - 400)
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The Last of Modernism: Mirror
Mirror and Serial Structure
The Disappearance of Nothingness
Appendix: A Chronology of Modern Cinema
Selected Bibliography
Index of Names and Movie Titles
