``Rigorously researched, the book rarely leans on established studes of DADA/surrealism, but it combines study of films of these movements with the movement's noncinematic work. Its length notwithstanding, this is a readable, informative book. Summing Up: Recommended.''
R.P. Kinsman
Choice, January 2014, 201401 ``DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, Bruce Elder's superb companion volume to his earlier Harmony ... Read moreand Dissent, convincingly demonstrates that for the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, cinema was the model, the preeminent form that prompted a recasting of the other arts. This wide-ranging study shows that Dada artists created cinematic collages and transformative machines, whereas Surrealists developed the film script as a new literary genre. His brilliant analyses of Duchamp's Anemic cinema, Man Ray's Retour A la raison and Emak Bakia, and Bunuel's Un chien andalou and Las Hurdes are only surpassed by his intricate explication of Ernst's cinematic collage novels, which he relates as models for Lawrence Jordan's surrealist films. This is that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.''
Rudolf Kuenzli, director, International Dada Archive, University of Iowa
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