Art and Film: Interactions

In the final section, “Art and Film: Interactions,” we consider the self-consciousness of both visual media in portraying themselves and each other. These interactions bring together the commercialism of Richard W. Sears’s catalogue items, such as film equipment and even advertising posters, with the insight of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose visit to the United States in 1908 embedded him forever in American intellectual thought. It is this acute awareness of the medium itself that connects these arts to their larger cultural context in science, psychology, and philosophy, and ushers in the modernist styles of the twentieth century.