The table of contents of this book reads like a veritable Who's Who of cinematic modernism, including such directors as Griffith, Eisenstein, Lang, Hitchcock, Murnau, Dreyer, Bunuel, Ford, Renoir, Chaplin, Riefenstahl, and Welles. Add to that the fact that every chapter offers a provocative and original take on a single masterpiece by each of these directors, and you have a truly remarkable volume. And to top it all off, the essays are written in accessible,
jargon-free prose and explore their subjects with a deep awareness of historical and theoretical contexts.
Scott W. Klein is Professor of English and Artistic Director of the Secrest Artists Series at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis: Monsters of Nature and Design the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of the 1928 edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, and with Mark Antliff the editor of the essay collection Vorticism: New Perspectives. He has
published essays in such journals as ELH, Modernist Cultures, Twentieth Century Literature, and The James Joyce Quarterly, and is on the editorial boards of the Oxford Complete Writings of Wyndham Lewis edition and of the The Journal of Wyndham Lewis.
Michael Valdez Moses is Professor of Literature and the Humanities in the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy and in the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University, and Associate Emeritus Professor at Duke University, where he was a faculty member of the English Department from 1987 to 2019. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), co-editor of Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish
Literature, 1900-1939 (2010) and Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present (2019), and editor of The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 1994) and Modernism and Cinema (special issue of Modernist Cultures, 2010).
He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, a Duke Endowment Fellow at the National Humanities Center, USIA Visiting Professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and at Université Cadi Ayyad in Marrakech, and the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colorado College. He is former Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Duke University and a founding co-editor of the journal, Modernist
Cultures.