International Symposium

The first decades of the twentieth century constituted an extraordinary historical juncture on multiple levels. As society itself was evolving rapidly through the combined forces of technological change, economic upheavals and political revolution, the arts were undergoing their own seismic shifts, with the rise of modernism and the avant-garde, and the concomitant obliteration of previously unshakeable aesthetic conventions. Within this social and artistic maelstrom, a major role was played by the new medium of the cinema, which both visually traced the sweeping transformations of the era while also upending prevailing disciplinary demarcations among the more established art forms. Charting these cataclysmic events was a generation of critics across Western Europe and North America, who obsessively consumed audiovisual experiences in the movie theaters that were sprouting up at the time and played a decisive role in the advent of film criticism as a cultural practice. As Francesco Casetti has claimed, the writing produced by these critics represented the “eye of the century”.

One of the most important figures in this generation was the French critic Louis Delluc. Despite dying at the young age of 33 in 1924, Delluc’s contribution to film criticism and theory is hard to overestimate. Although it is fraught to speak of him as “the first film critic,” Delluc’s critical writings on cinema in the late 1910s and early 1920s were decisive for the recognition of critical writing on cinema to take hold. A prolific author, delivering several articles a week during his most productive moments for magazines such as Le Film, Cinéa and Ciné pour tous, Delluc’s output mixed film reviewing with more essayistic and even theoretical texts, helping to establish some of the major concepts in the study of film, which continue to be operative in the present day. Later, he turned to filmmaking himself, producing a small but influential body of work before his untimely death.

The conference “Critique and Modernity: Rediscovering Louis Delluc” will seek to provide historical context for the work of Delluc and peers of his such as Riciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Léon Moussinac, while also proposing his writings as a template with which contemporary scholars can engage with the sweeping transformations to the media landscape that are taking place in the present day.

More information and Programme on the website:
www.rediscovering-louis-delluc.de

Register for attendance with: Daniel Fairfax fairfax@tfm.uni-frankfurt.de

Venues:

Thursday, May 22

Deutsches Filmmuseum und Filminstitut
Schaumainkai 41
60596 Frankfurt am Main

Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24

Room EG.01
Normative Orders Building
Westend Campus, Max-Horkheimer-Straße 2
Frankfurt am Main

Organised by the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in cooperation with the Research Center Normative Orders and other partners