Modernism as Reaction to Modernity in Film and Art
This paper examines whether modernism can be fairly described as a reaction to modernity, drawing on Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's 1928 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, Walter Benjamin's essay on surrealism, and Ken Burns' jazz documentary. The paper argues that modernist aesthetics — characterized by fragmentation, free association, and the subversion of linear time — emerged in direct response to the depersonalizing forces of industrialization and secularization. Through close readings of surrealist imagery and the improvised jazz riff as parallel aesthetic forms, the paper traces how modernist artists articulated the psychological and social disorientation of living between collapsing old orders and an alienating new one.
- Introduction: Modernism and the Modern Condition: Modernism defined as reaction to industrialized modernity
- Surrealism, Jazz, and the Fragmented Modern Mind: Benjamin on surrealism, juxtaposition, and jazz as parallel forms
- Between Two Epochs: Old Order and New Secularism: Modernism positioned between religious and secular orders
- Time, Memory, and the Integrity of the Body: Film's treatment of time, memory, and bodily integrity
- Language, Anti-Commercialism, and the Modernist Aesthetic: Adorno, anti-commercialism, and the subversion of regimented order
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses a concrete, well-chosen primary text — Un Chien Andalou — as its central analytical object, grounding abstract claims about modernism in specific cinematic images and sequences.
- It productively synthesizes multiple theoretical voices (Benjamin, Adorno) with artistic examples (Dalí, Buñuel, jazz), showing how different modernist practices share a common anti-regimentation impulse.
- The analogy between the surrealist film image and the jazz riff is an original and illuminating comparison that gives the argument a distinctive conceptual thread.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading in dialogue with theory: it doesn't simply describe Un Chien Andalou but interprets specific shots and narrative choices through the lenses of Benjamin and Adorno, showing how theoretical frameworks can illuminate formal artistic choices and vice versa.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by defining modernism and introducing its central analogy (surrealist film as jazz riff). It then situates the Dalí–Buñuel collaboration within Benjamin's account of surrealist consciousness. A third movement addresses the historical position of modernism between religious and secular orders. The fourth section performs a close reading of specific film sequences to examine modernism's treatment of time and memory. The final section applies Adorno's aesthetic theory to the film's anti-commercial, visually dominant form, closing with a synthesis of the argument.
Introduction: Modernism and the Modern Condition
Modernism is often defined as a chaotic, pastiche-style rendering of the difficulties of modern, industrialized life. The attempted regimentation of modernity becomes, in modernism, exposed for the absurdity it represents — through surrealist and other modernist aesthetics such as the improvised jazz riff. For example, in the 1928 film Un Chien Andalou by the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and the surrealist director Luis Buñuel, the pace of the film's absurd depiction of life is harsh, fragmented, and full of confusion. It seems to exist in no certain time or place, nor within a conventionally identifiable range of historical or social images, and is thus coherent with the impersonal nature of modern life. It is, to cite Ken Burns' documentary on music, like a "jazz" riff on the modern mind rendered through images rather than sound.
Surrealism, Jazz, and the Fragmented Modern Mind
The surrealist and modernist images evoked in Un Chien Andalou were inspired by the social realities of the modern condition, although one can never reduce any work of art to a singular, narrow reason for its existence. Walter Benjamin's essay on surrealism stresses the confused psychological as well as social consciousness reflected in the surrealist aesthetic. The constant movement back and forth between present and past — for example, as images from old Europe such as priests are transposed with a modern cyclist, but propelled by a man in a suit wearing a harlequin-like costume of an earlier era — suggests the angst-ridden reaction of the human mind and the artist to the constant juxtapositions of modern life.
Modern people, this suggests, are forever betwixt and between a barrage of modalities or ways of seeing the world — not entirely unlike their forebears, but more acutely so. Jazz is the musical accompaniment of surrealism: a string of free associations of the individual, flung against an apparently regimented factory existence that has no real reason for being, even as false constructs created by the church or aristocracy of the previous century had none either.
Between Two Epochs: Old Order and New Secularism
Buñuel, Dalí, Adorno, and Benjamin all saw the modern world as existing between two different epochs. It stood between the old religious order and the new secular order of depersonalization and industrial science, neither of which was truly comforting or intellectually and emotionally sustaining. Although the surrealists did not see their movement as primarily an intellectual one, it is difficult to read the Dalí–Buñuel cinematic collaboration as anything other than an expression that something about a perceived older order or form of comfort is gone, and that only individual free associations remain to allow one to psychologically survive.
Works Cited
Un Chien Andalou. Directed by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1928.
Benjamin, Walter. "Surrealism and Adorno." In Critical Theory and Society. Edited by Bronner and Kellner.
Jazz: A History of America's Music. Directed by Ken Burns, 2002.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.