Little Tramp in a Big Factory

Chaplin created his “Little Tramp” character in 1914-15 as a bumbling vagrant whose aspirations to romance and gentlemanly dignity routinely fall short. Yet he always rebounds from setbacks, ready to try again.

For class today, I’m asking you to watch the final appearance of the Little Tramp character. The 1936 movie Modern Times dates several years after the end of the silent film era (1894-1929). While it draws on the idiom of silent movies, it makes abundant use of sound effects. And at key moments characters speak aloud.

Viewing: Chaplin, Modern Times, available via: Kanopy. (If this doesn’t work, try BOB).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Focusing on the initial sequence in the factory (00:00-19:10), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.
2. Focusing on the first part of the movie’s love story (42:00-1:00:00), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.
3. Focusing on the movie’s final sequence (1:09:00-1:27:10), point to a key detail and comment on its significance—whether political or artistic.

Collage and the Modern Age

Both scholars listed below agree on the centrality of collage to modernist art; they disagree only in how broadly they define Modernism. Greenberg focuses wholly on developments within the field of painting, while Hopkins speaks of culture in the broadest sense: literature, film, etc.

Scholarly Reading: Two Perspectives on Collage

• Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution” (1958) (Blackboard)
• Budd Hopkins, “Modernism and the Collage Aesthetic” (1997) (Blackboard)

Viewing: Analytic and Synthetic Cubism

• Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
• Georges Braque, Violin and Palette (1909)
• Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning (1911)
• Georges Braque, Homage to J. S. Bach (1911-12)
• Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music and Wine Glass (1912)
• Juan Gris, The Table (1914)

Reading: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, parts 1 and 2 (Norton 1154-1159). Edit: you may find it valuable to listen to Eliot’s poem read by professional actors Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins: YouTube. They bring to life the very different “voices” that form the patchwork of Eliot’s poem.

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. An American living in Europe (mostly London), Eliot was likely struck by the rigid class hierarchies of the old world. Where does class enter into The Waste Land?
2. Eliot’s poem is a challenging one—quote a line you find confusing. Then take a shot at making sense of it.

Photography and Motion

English photographer Eadweard Muybridge began his pioneering work into the study of motion in 1878. Using multiple cameras with high-speed film, Muybridge established for the first time the stride of a galloping horse, as well as a host of other motions too fast for the eye to follow. He changed the way we see the world. And, by breaking motion down into a series of static frames, his work beckoned the way to re-animation of static sequences as movies.

Around the same time, French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey perfected a method for superimposing multiple moments on a single photograph, as for example the image of a pelican landing.

Both photographers’ influence can be seen in one of the most famous works of Modernist Art, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, as well as Futurist works like Giacomo Balla’s 1912 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash.

• Muybridge, Horse’s Gallop (1878)
• Marey, Pelican landing (1882)
• Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
• Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

Loving the Machine

In the years leading up to World War I, a group of Italian artists came together under the banner of Futurism. Whereas Art Nouveau sought compromise with modernity, reshaping metal and glass in soft organic curves, the futurists welcomed the hard edges and high speeds of machinery.

When conflict broke out in 1914, it was greeted with enthusiasm across Europe, but for most that excitement gave way to horror as reports filtered back from the front lines of the meat grinder of trench warfare. Paradoxically, the era’s powerful technologies—machine guns, artillery shells—produced stalemate rather than speedy victory. But while this experience left many determined to make the “Great War” the “War to End All Wars,” the Futurists remained enamored of both machinery and armed conflict, believing that violence could reenergize Italy. Unsurprisingly, in the years after the war’s end in 1918, they allied themselves with the National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini.

Reading: “The Futurist Manifesto,” published in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the Parisian daily Le Figaro (Blackboard).

Viewing: examples of Futurist art:

• Luigi Russolo, The Revolt (1911)
• Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Car (1913)
• Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)
• Gino Severini, Memories of a Journey (1911)
• Gino Severini, Armored Train in Action (1915)
• Filippo Marinetti, In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front (1919)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point out a key contrast OR continuity in the Futurist art featured above.
2. Point out a key contrast OR continuity between Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto and one of the Futurist artworks.

The Painter and the Camera

In The Annotated Mona Lisa, Carol Strickland positions her chapter on the French Impressionists immediately after a section in early photography. While she doesn’t discuss the influence of photography on the Impressionists in particular, several recent museum exhibits have done just that, arguing for “the crucial role of early photography in inspiring [not only] Impressionist iconography, but also, and more emphatically, Impressionist style and particularly its strategies of asymmetry, cropping and the blurring of motion” (source).

Reading:

• Strickland, pp 92-96, 99-103, 106, 108.
• Elena Martinique, “How Did Photography Influence The Impressionists?” (link).

Viewing 1, some representative Impressionists:

• Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
• Édouard Manet, Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882)
• Edgar Degas, The Dance Class (1874)
• Mary Cassatt, Young Mother Sewing (1893)

Viewing 2, a close study of Claude Monet’s Houses of Parliament (1899-1904):

Monet created this exquisite series during a series of visits to London. Fascinated with the city’s fog and other atmospherics, he positioned himself across the river, in front of St. Thomas’ Hospital. The paintings were begun on site, then completed at his home in Giverny with the aid of photographs. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society showed that the paintings are sufficiently accurate as to provide a useful empirical record of London’s fogs—a phenomenon caused by urban pollution and consigned to history following the passage of environmental legislation in 1956 (source).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a stylistic or thematic pattern you see in some or all of these paintings.
2. Point to a striking detail in one particular painting.
3. Point to a painting that strikes you as betraying the influence of photography’s “way of seeing.”

Orientalism and Empire

When we touched on Orientalism last semester, it was in connection with Montesquieu and Montagu—writers from the 1720s who showed a fascination with foreign societies, and who used the perspective provided by cultural difference to critique European mores. In my lecture introducing those authors, I noted that Orientalism of this sort became more widespread but also changed in character over the next few centuries, as European nations forged worldwide colonial networks. Many agents who worked on the front lines of Empire became expert in local crafts and customs, but they did so from positions of power within an established hierarchy. When they returned home, these collectors brought their tastes and interests with them, leading to widespread fascination with exotic locales.

In France, painters catered to this interest as seen in the collection of images below. You Take a few moments to look over these paintings, then submit a short written response for HW.

• Jacques-Louis David, Madame Récamier (1800): this is a Neoclassical piece provided by way of contrast to the later works in this collection. Note the Roman costume and setting.
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque (1814). (Strickland provides an brief but interesting account of this image and its impact on tradition on pp 70-71.)
• Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers (1834).
• Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath (1852-62).
• Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (1879).
• Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Carpet Merchant (1887).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a pattern you see in these images, then speculate as to its significance.
2. Ingres lived in Europe all his life, working in Italy and France, while Delacroix and Gérôme both toured Africa and the Near East. Does this show in their work? Point to specifics, if possible.

Victorian Objectivity

Lest you come away thinking that the Victorians were wholly ruled by sentiment, it’s worth noting the counter-trend represented by clinical detachment, often under the mantle of science. This was a great era for empirical observation: Darwin’s 1851 On the Origin of Species mobilized bird beak measurements to shake the foundations of religious faith. And while sentimentality dominated in the arts, some poets and painters adopted the cold clinical pose of the scientist:

• Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (1842): a dramatic monologue written from the point of view of Alfonso II d’Este, a Duke of the Italian Renaissance suspected of having killed his wife (details here).
• Thomas Eakins, The Andrew Clinic, an unflinching painting of a surgery performed in front of an audience of medical students. Strickland has a sidebar presenting this remarkable painting on p86; I also recommend the close reading of the painting found here.