![]() ![]() This article thus offers an intervention in how we frame the purview of film history, arguing for an expansion of the intermedial scope of cinema’s impact, highlighting connections between fields usually deemed separate, such as transport and communication (thus also bringing film studies into the orbit of critical war studies, media theory and media archaeology, as well as art history). As such, the primary goal of this article is to uncover how the motion picture camera and the plane coevolved, albeit in imperfect alignment, as two exemplary movement, vision, and dream machines of early twentieth-century modernity. Of crucial importance here will be situating Léger’s comment within the context of the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars’s account of the painter’s experience of trench warfare as a vertically mediated encounter with “the world’s heavy gaze.” Īt their broadest, Léger’s words suggest a path for thinking about cinema and aviation as non-identical twins of modern technological progress. Beginning with an overview of the broad technological and cultural correspondences between cinema and aviation in the nineteenth century, I then move to analyzing their military convergence and divergence in the First World War, before exploring the aesthetic and conceptual impact of their affinities across a range of avant-garde writings and films from the period before 1931. ![]() ![]() At its broadest, this article asks: What can we learn from Léger’s coupling of cinema and aviation that adds to our understanding of the most fraught mode of modern perception-aerial vision-both at the point of its historical emergence and its controversial regeneration a century later? In order to answer this question, I historicize and theorize the forgotten conditions of possibility for Léger’s seemingly incongruous alliance of what most would today consider a mode of communication (cinema) and a mode of transportation (aviation). It would, therefore, seem to indicate that for Léger the key to unlocking cinema’s unique aesthetic potential lay in its mutually informing relationship with the origins and early evolution of aviation. They were born on the same day.įernand Léger’s curious throw-away line linking cinema and aviation appears in an essay he wrote in 1931 titled “Speaking of Cinema” (“A Propos du cinéma”), one of only a few short pieces that the artist, arguably the modernist painter most obsessed with the cinema, devoted entirely to film. The cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life. ![]()
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