In the late 1940s, two highly significant cineclubs were founded in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, building on the work of Cine Arte del SODRE, an initiative of the state-run broadcaster and cultural agency Servicio Oficial de Radiodifusión Eléctrica, which sought to create a public space for the diffusion of alternative cinema beginning in 1944. Cine Club del Uruguay and Cine Universitario were preeminent institutions in Latin America, both for their large membership and for the consistency...

Arriving in Havana in 1948, eighteen-year-old Néstor Almendros (1930–1992), who would go on to become one of the most renowned cinematographers of the twentieth century, found that “Cuba was a privileged place to see films.” [1] Not only did he find a large range of moviegoing options with hundreds of movie theaters showing films from different nationalities in their original language, but he also encountered a burgeoning cinephile community. Significantly, that summer he also registered for a...

It is a little-known fact that two women, Victoria Ocampo and Lola Álvarez Bravo, brought the celebrated avant-garde film Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929) to Argentina and Mexico for the first time. Acting as cultural mediators, they successfully organized the film’s premieres in 1929 and 1938, respectively, at the Cine Club de Buenos Aires, where Ocampo was a key player, and the 16mm Cinema film society, which Álvarez Bravo ran. Álvarez Bravo and Ocampo’s intervention...

© 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press In May 1929, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition of German paintings under the banner of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” based on Gustav Hartlaub’s seminal 1925 show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the same title. [1] The Amsterdam leg of the tour exhibited many of the same artists included in the original program. Well-known painters such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Mense, and George Schrimpf hung alongside several other artists who did not...

Why moviegoing? Scholars assessing the imaginative contact between literature and early cinema have largely missed the moviegoer, who wanders off or risks getting lost in the dark. Image, close-up, montage, projection: these and other “technical” elements more quickly cohere, appear more self-evidently formal. As David Trotter put it in Cinema and Modernism, our understanding of literature’s relationship to cinema is all too often “committed . . . to argument by analogy.” [1] Within modernist...

This summer, as I was wrapping up my dissertation and packing my boxes in upstate New York, I started watching Satyajit Ray’s Jai Baba Felunath ( The Elephant God, 1979) after what felt like a lifetime. The film is based on a novel from Ray’s own children’s detective series featuring the celebrated Bengali private investigator Prodosh C. Mitter, aka Felu-da (“da” being an affectionate honorific for elder brother). In a 1980 review, Gene Moscowitz calls it “Ray’s bow to that Yank hardboiled...

Sometime last year, I came across an article in which the director Lee Isaac Chung described the formative influence of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia on his 2020 film Minari. I knew then that I needed to find the right person—or people—to explore these narratives of immigrant families in the harsh and beautiful environs of the rural United States, which form a tether from the modernist moment to the present. The result is this moving and insightful epistolary conversation between Rachel Warner, a...

Director Rebecca Hall’s recent adaptation of Nella Larsen’s exquisite second novel, Passing (1929), is visually stunning. I had the pleasure of seeing the film on the big screen, during its limited theatrical run and before its Netflix release. It was the ideal atmosphere for absorbing this cinematic rendering of Larsen’s eerie, anxiety-ridden plot: ensconced with a sparse audience (my companion and I comprising two of the four patrons for the 5:10pm showing) in a small independent theater in Manhattan, just a few miles from where the story is set, and with Halloween everywhere looming on this late-October evening.

In Germany in 1923 everyone was talking about their hormones. This was, in large part, thanks to the popular release of a medical education film called Der Steinach-Film. Der Steinach-Film was sponsored by the Universum Film-Akiten Gescellschaft (Ufa), a German motion-picture production company known for producing artistically outstanding and technically competent films during the silent era, and which from 1918 onwards included a cultural division that produced and distributed medical education...

How many feminist scholars and archivists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? There is no punch line to this set-up. Instead, we have spent the past two years curating a four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set on “ Cinema’s First Nasty Women,” a project that features 99 films from over a dozen international archives spotlighting the unrealized histories of feminist revolt and hellraising rebellion. Launched by a series of screenings at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Giornate del Cinema Muto), our set...