New critical methods and the films of the first avant-garde: 'Symphonie Diagonale and Entr'acte.'

Both of these recent books, then, have a connection with the avant-garde, though neither applies its own methodology to the exemplary films of the first wave of the avant-garde-that European-centered movement that flourished around the time of the First World War and extended through the 1930s, the era of futurism, dadaism, surrealism, and related movements. The closest thing offered by way of a description of how the critical process will work in practice is this: "[The measurer must] analyze the work of art into individual discoveries of relationships of which it consists, [and] determine by means of calculations the rarity of each discovery, that is the quantity of energy necessary to produce them" (147).