10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward
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Christophe Wall-Romana
Abstract
This essay considers 1913 as the year during which cinema as an intermedial theoretical concept burst into artistic creation, a moment that was, however, years in the making. Wall-Romana reconstructs the slow percolation of conceptualizing cinema and cinematic thinking in France from 1867 onward, as French philosophy, although it rarely used the words ‘cinema’ or ‘cinematograph’, talked about it obliquely but intensely, indeed obsessively. The new medium raised crucial intersecting issues concerning time, memory, the nature of light and motion, point of view, perception, panoramic vision, spectatorship, image-production, imagination, will, thought and movement, all of them key concepts for modernist aesthetics. Cinema offered thus a remarkably versatile frame for thinking through the aesthetic object and its creation.
Abstract
This essay considers 1913 as the year during which cinema as an intermedial theoretical concept burst into artistic creation, a moment that was, however, years in the making. Wall-Romana reconstructs the slow percolation of conceptualizing cinema and cinematic thinking in France from 1867 onward, as French philosophy, although it rarely used the words ‘cinema’ or ‘cinematograph’, talked about it obliquely but intensely, indeed obsessively. The new medium raised crucial intersecting issues concerning time, memory, the nature of light and motion, point of view, perception, panoramic vision, spectatorship, image-production, imagination, will, thought and movement, all of them key concepts for modernist aesthetics. Cinema offered thus a remarkably versatile frame for thinking through the aesthetic object and its creation.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures viii
- Notes on contributors xii
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Introduction 1
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 29
- 1 Prehistoric Proust 33
- 2 Fantômas and the shudder of history 54
- 3 Inventing, collecting and classifying in the margins 72
- 4 The anxious centre 88
- 5 1913, the year of the arrière-garde? 109
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 123
- 6 A modernism that has not yet been 127
- 7 On situating French modernism 145
- 8 Les Caves du Vatican and the real novel 163
- 9 1913, between peace and war 173
-
Acknowledgements
- Introduction 193
- 10 Camille Flammarion’s flash-forward 197
- 11 How ‘simultaneous’ is it? 220
- 12 Mallarmé’s modernity in 1913 237
- 13 Poetry displaced 252
- 14 Behind Picasso’s pins 274
-
Part IV: Coda: on modernism, beyond France and 1913
- 15 1913, the future in the past 299
- 16 The paradox and promise of the ‘new’ French Modernist Studies 310
- Index 325
