Migration As Avant Garde PDF Download

"This dissertation concerns intersections of migration and sexuality in the transnational art movements that flourished between the World Wars and came to be known as the historical avant-garde. The project focuses on films and photographs by artists with distinct experiences of migration and a shared interest in modern sexual cultures. Drawing on multilingual archival research, I focus on selected works by four such artists: The Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), the silent Hollywoodera filmmaker and actress Alla Nazimova (1879-1945), the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), and the German-born photographer Germaine Krull (1897-1985). My analysis stems from overlapping interwar debates on the ways migration and modern sexual cultures were changing the social fabric of Europe and North America. The works examined in this dissertation engaged with these debates with critical perspectives on the effects of cross-cultural encounters on minority cultures. I argue that this critical stance was achieved through images that captured surfaces in portrayal of the human body. This aesthetic choice resulted in works that evaded the aesthetic capture of the body's physical presence. Instead, selected works hinted at traces of bodies through the focus on faces, subtle bodily gestures, details of landscape next to portrayed bodies, and shadows coating human flesh. Chapter 1 examines Eisenstein's unfinished film on Mexico from the early 1930s as an anti-colonial project noteworthy for its representation of the faces of non-Western peoples. Through the focus on bodily movement, Chapter 2 shifts discussions about the inventiveness of Nazimova's 1923 film Salom{caron} from representation of same-sex desire to Nazimova's confrontation with American ideals of assimilation. Chapter 3 considers how Cahun's quaint outdoor self-portraits from the late 1930s made with her partner Marcel Moore devised a model of artistic collaboration that broke new ground in interwar artist circles. Chapter 4 analyzes Krull's Parisian work (1926-1937), with a focus on her photographic use of shadows as a visual meditation on the idea of home in times of global upheaval. My dissertation examines migrant modernity as a constellation of conflicting attachments to bodies, oppressive histories, visions of the future, and ideas about home." -- leaves ix-x