Can anyone help explain the term modernity with reference to cinema and films?
Architectural modernism, largely an elite cultural phenomenon in the United States, became a fact of life for many German city-dwellers through the Siedlungen designed by architects such as Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Ernst May, and Martin Wagner, and funded by social democratic political groups. Skyscrapers and machine production were celebrated in the United States, which is nowhere more evident than in The Fountainhead (1949). In Germany, however, they elicited fear and propelled writers and filmmakers associated with Expressionism to dystopian visions, exemplified in Metropolis. Such demonization later gave way to the romanticization of technology in the art and cinema of the New Objectivity, and it eventually mutated into the Third Reich’s “reactionary modernism” with its cult of the Volkswagen and the Autobahn, something extensively explored in the genre of the “Autobahn film.” Nothing in the American encounter with twentieth-century technological change compares to this rapid an
