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Focusing on the work of aesthetic and political revolutionaries of the inter-war period, Esther Leslie reveals how the animation of commodities can be studied as a journey into modernity in cinema. She looks afresh at the links between the Soviet Constructivists and the Bauhaus, for instance, and those between Walter Benjamin and cinematic abstraction. She also provides new interpretations of the writings of Siegfried Kracauer on animation, shows how Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s film viewing affected their intellectual development, and reconsiders Sergei Eisenstein’s famous handshake with Mickey Mouse at Disney’s Hyperion Studios in 1930.
“A broad, elegantly-crafted survey of the ironic links between the European avant-garde and the US cartoon industry . . . How important to be reminded today, as digital capitalism swallows film culture in yet another way, that we are once more watching modernity turning into commodity fetish.” … Norman M. Klein
“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
“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
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.
Publication
Cloth: August 2002
Paper: April 2004
344 pages
13 color & 33 b/w photos
Paper
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 504 3
£14 / US$19 / CAN$28
