The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923

The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the relationships between early cinema and Cubism, abstraction, and Dada. Shifting attentions from the film to the horizon of possibility around, behind, and beyond the screen, Jennifer Wild shows how canonical works of modern art may be understood as responding to the changing characteristics of daily life in the age of cinema. Wild also challenges how we have told the story of moden artists' earliest encounters with cinema and urges us to reconsider how early projection, film stardom, and film distribution, transformed their understanding of modern life, representation, and the act of beholding.