Product Description

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, reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #276018 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Review
""Perceptive and elegant.""-- Times literary Supplement "in this incisive and profound study, you find such classic subjects as Adolph Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Leon Trotsky, Mickey Mouse, Nazism, Leni Riefenstahl, Theodor W. Adorna, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Dumbo, Betty Boop, the class Struggle, Piet Mondrian, Walter Benjamin and Walt Disney (along with much, much more)." -- Giannalberto Bendazzi, Animation World Net "Once in a long while, a book appears that meets all the high standards of scholarship. In the field of animation, Leslie's Hollywood Flatlands is that work ... groundbreaking." -- Choice - A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2003 "Brash and erudite, Hollywood Flatlands treats animated cartoons as an avant-garde taste and anti-illusionism as a Modernist problematic." -- London Review of Books "In an age when the Walt Disney Co. ... is completely lost to sober cultural debate, it is not insignificant to remember that, quite recently, the opposite was the case." -- Los Angeles Times "...is about much more than the House of Mouse, tracing with a deft hand the aesthetic precursors of film animation in the work of Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman and Dziga Vertov." -- Radical Philosophy "[a] vital new book" -- ASIFA

About the Author
Esther Leslie is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. She is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London, and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.