Bingo's Quick Review: Esther Leslie's Hollywood Flatlands and Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise

Okay, so I know that one of these books is actually six years old, but since I read them in close succession and both have great importance to the understanding of modernism and post-modernism in film and music, I feel they should be paired in this review. I'll begin with Professor Esther Leslie's 2002 study Hollywood Flatlands, a deeply thoughtful and intelligent appraisal of the importance of animation in the understanding of broader social and cultural developments in the early 20th century. Professor Leslie assumes a Marxist perspective, analyzing the filmic developments of early Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin through the lens of intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. She insists, with Benjamin and Adorno, that Disney turned his back on the progressive animation style he championed in the 20s and 30s to arrive at a photo-realistic style that reached its pinnacle in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. For Benjamin and Adorno, this was a symptom of reactionary movements throughout all of the arts, culminating in the monumental styles of Leni Riefenstahl and other "artists" associated with totalitarian thought. Disney had left behind true invention, Leslie maintains, to present a realistic picture of the world. Although this work is dense with literary critical jargon and arcane references, Professor Leslie provides a wonderful insight into the excitement that surrounded the earliest days of animation in Europe and America.
Alex Ross' 2007 history of 20th century music attempts a similar understanding of competing views of modernism. Decidedly less academic than Leslie, Ross aims at a comprehensive analysis of the ongoing wars between Arnold Shoenberg and his atonal revolution and Igor Stravinsky and the High Modernists of classical music. Particularly interesting is Ross' look at music in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. Often, however, Ross forsakes analysis for strict accounting of the historical facts. The reader often desires to know a little more about the motivations and reasons behind the radically new styles of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Mahler, Strauss, and Aaron Copland. In any case, The Rest is Noise is a fantastic primer for the musically uninitiated.

Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, Esther Leslie, Verso 2002. (4.5 stars out of five on the Bingo scale)
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007 (4 stars out of 5)