The Modernist Studies Association has announced its short list for the MSA First Book Prize (for a book published in 2019).
"Do not mistake Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé for a niche author-study or for a peculiar footnote to a familiar art movement. This elegantly written, wide-ranging yet meticulous, constantly surprising work by James Leo Cahill shows how an extraordinary collaborative oeuvre of weird documentary emerges within French cinema to flood with sudden light a teeming, unexpected life at intersecting discourses and institutions of modern science, technology, art, pleasure, and violence. In Painlevé’s photographic entanglements with laboratory dogs, fashionable crabs, and enamoured seahorses, familiar ideas of what constitutes modernist cinema, modernist nature, and modernist social vision all suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange."