Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde

ISBN: 1844675041

Author: Leslie, Esther

Condition: New

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 Adornos and Max Horkheimers film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisensteins famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disneys Hyperion Studios in 1930.