Vernacular Modernism and Reflexivity before Hollywood. A historiographic review about the cinema of the thirties

Abstract

For several decades, the approaches of the New Film History have been concerned with redefining the history of cinema in non-teleological terms. In doing so, they have destabilised categories that consecrate certain stylistic models such as the notions of modernism and classicism. In this article, I propose a review of some filmmaking practices and works produced outside the Hollywood industry and the framework of classicism – The Great Consoler (Velikiy uteshitel, Lev Kuleshov, 1933), Pie in the Sky (NYKino, 1935) and The Crime of Mr. Lange (Le crime de Monsieur Lange, Jean Renoir, 1936) – to explore how practices associated with the avant-garde movements appropriate certain classical features and at the same time, precisely because of that appropriation, constitute self-reflexive approaches. These practices of dislocation of the classical in certain films made outside and even within Hollywood during the 1930s prompt historiographical and conceptual reconsiderations of notions such as modernism that will be explored here.