Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory And The Avant-Garde; Author: Leslie, Esther; Hardback; Book

Author: Leslie, Esther
Hardback; Book; 10 Colour and 30 B&w Photographs
350 pages
Published: July 2001
Verso
ISBN: 1859846122

With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy-tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, avant-garde art and modernist criticism.Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's film viewing affected their intellectual developmeAn investigation into the often subversive relationship between cartoons, cinema, philosophy and the avant-garde, all set in the commercial world of the golden age of Hollywood. An investigation into the often subversive relationship between cartoons, cinema, philosophy and the avant-garde, all set in the commercial world of the golden age of Hollywood.With ruminations on drawing, colour and caricature, on the political meaning of fairy tales, talking animals and human beings as machines, Hollywood Flatlands brings to light the links between animation, Avant-Garde art and modernist criticism.