Karl Toepfer: Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (1997)

Empire of Ecstasy offers an interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of “modern identity.”

The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious “inner” conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy. With the help of much unpublished or long-forgotten archival material (including many little-known photographs), he investigates the process of constructing an “empire” of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy.

Toepfer presents the work of such well-known figures as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with less-known but equally fascinating body culture practitioners. His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.

Publisher University of California Press, 1997
ISBN 0520918274, 9780520918276
422 pages

Publisher

PDF’d HTML, HTML (from the publisher)

See also Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, 2000–.

Gerald O’Grady, Bruce Posner (eds.): Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America (1995)

Catalogue for “the most comprehensive retrospective of abstract films ever mounted”, covering the period 1920-1970, curated by Bruce Posner.

With texts by Bruce Posner, Gerald O’Grady, Vlada Petric, Fernand Léger, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, Raúl Ruiz, Stan Brakhage, Cecile Starr, Mary Ellen Bute, Dwinell Grant, William Moritz, Robert Haller, James Whitney, Rani Singh, Hy Hirsh, James Sibley Watson Jr., and a filmography and bibliography compiled by Bruce Posner and Sabrina Zanella-Foresi.

Publisher Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA, and Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1995
16 pages
via Vasulka.org

Exhibition review

PDF

Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975 (1979)

Catalogue for an exhibition held at Hayward Gallery, London, in May-June 1979, derived from a project originally conceived by Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath and shown at the Kunstverein in Cologne in the previous year.

With texts by Phillip Drummond, A.L. Rees, Birgit Hein, Wulf Herzogenrath, Malcolm Le Grice, Ian Christie, Peter Weibel, Deke Dusinberre and William Moritz.

Publisher Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1979
ISBN 0728702002
152 pages
via maxp

Exhibition review (John McEwen, The Spectator)

PDF (low resolution)