Hans Johannes Siegfried Richter was a German Dada painter, graphic artist, avant-garde film producer, and art historian. In 1965 he authored the book Dadaism about the history of the Dada movement. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.
The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra is a 1928 American silent experimental short film co-written and co-directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapić. Considered a landmark of American avant-garde cinema, it tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a star; he fails and becomes dehumanized, with studio executives reducing him to the role of an extra and writing the number "9413" on his forehead.
Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American experimental silent short film directed by and starring wife-and-husband team, Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied.
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
Annie Winifred Ellerman, known by the pen name Bryher, was an English novelist, poet, memoirist, and magazine editor of the Ellerman ship-owning family.
In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no musical language, or modernist style, ever assumed a dominant position.
Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Robert Herring was a novelist, essayist and poet, remembered as an early writer on film, being film critic of The Guardian for most of the 1930s, a regular contributor to the modernist film magazine Close Up, and later editor of the literary magazine, Life and Letters To-day from 1935 to 1950.
David Edward Gatten is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. Since 1996 Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image, cataloging the variety of ways in which texts functions in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employee cameraless techniques, combined with close-up cinematography and optical printing processes. In addition to the ongoing 16mm films, Gatten is now making hybrid 16mm/digital works and has completed an entirely digital feature-length project called The Extravagant Shadows.
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.
The Seashell and the Clergyman is a 1928 French experimental film directed by Germaine Dulac, from an original scenario by Antonin Artaud. It premiered in Paris on 9 February 1928. The film is associated with French Surrealism.
Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was the wife and business manager of performer Paul Robeson.
The Pool Group were a trio of filmmakers and poets consisting of H.D., Kenneth Macpherson, and Bryher. Their work has been studied by poetry and film historians as well as by scholars of mysticism, feminism and psychoanalysis. The group produced four films of which Borderline is perhaps its best known, featuring the African American activist and entertainer Paul Robeson in the lead role. They also published a progressive and opinionated film journal called Close Up. The Pool Group were virtually forgotten for more than half a century after they broke up in the mid-1930s until the early 1980s when they were rediscovered by historians of 20th century arts and cinema.
Mildred "Chick" Strand was an American experimental filmmaker, "a pioneer in blending avant-garde techniques with documentary". Chick Strand contributed to the movement of women's experimental cinema in the early 1960s–1970's. Strand's film making and directing approach incorporates personal elements from her own life experiences and societal forces and realities. The film Elasticity (1976) is an example of Strand's attempts at autobiographical work that also incorporates Strand's specific standpoint on certain social issues. Feminist issues and anthropological inquiries about the human condition are frequent themes in Strand's films. However, because Strand's films and work were often deeply personal and subjective, they were often rejected from male-dominated academic circles of anthropologists and critiqued for being non-academic works.
Kenneth Macpherson was a Scottish-born novelist, photographer, critic, and film-maker, the son of Scottish painter John 'Pop' Macpherson and Clara Macpherson, and descended from six generations of artists. It is only in recent years that Macpherson's contribution to cinematography has come to be recognised with the re-discovery of his work, which, though limited in output, was far ahead of its time, both in subject matter and cinematic technique. In his work with the Pool Group (1927–1933), which he co-founded with Bryher and H.D., Macpherson also established the influential film journal Close Up.
Close Up was an influential literary magazine devoted to film, published by the Pool Group between 1927 and 1933. "It was the brain child of Kenneth Macpherson, a young man of independent means, not a little talent, and quite a lot of personal charm". The monthly magazine, founded at the group's 'headquarters' in Territet, Switzerland would be dedicated to "independent cinema and cinema from around the world". The first issue was published in July 1927 and described itself on the front cover as an "international magazine devoted to film art". Macpherson was editor-in-chief, with Bryher as assistant editor, and Hilda Doolittle ("H.D.") and Oswell Blakeston making regular contributions.
City symphony is a film genre encompassing documentary, experimental, and the avant-garde that emerged in the 1920s. Coming to prominence alongside modernist art movements such as futurism, constructivism, and radicalism, city symphonies reflect the historical development of city centers and technological hubs of advancement. As the art of cinema became more respected, filmmakers such as Walter Ruttman and Dziga Vertov gravitated towards works highlighting the beauty of cities, aiming to capture scenes of modern life from their narrative points of views.
