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Malte Hagener’s Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 offers a remarkably multifaceted and compelling historical study of the European cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and its considerable legacy in film culture as a whole. While a wealth of scholarship has traditionally engaged the film avant-garde in an object-centered and predominantly formalist manner as a set of stylistic movements, corpus of films, and groups of filmmakers, Hagener’s work joins an ever more substantial body of scholarly literature that treats avant-garde formations within their social, cultural, and institutional contexts. A materialist, archaeological approach of this kind has born many fruits over the past three decades in the historiography of such areas as early cinema and the classical Hollywood studio era, but the study of avant-garde film has, on the whole, been slower to pursue this path.

Hagener sets out to rethink the way the avant-garde conceived itself and to analyse the tensions that animated its internal debates during the 1920s and 1930s. By developing a more expansive frame of reference for studying the film avant-garde, he is able to revise the standard story often told about how the transition to sound in European cinema around 1930 led to the collapse of the avant-garde just when it had reached its peak, as experimentation succumbed to new forms of standardisation. In fact, as Hagener shows, this tale of rupture is too simplistic and obscures the wide-ranging influence that avant-garde film cultural practices and institutions have exerted on a host of subsequent developments in film culture.'

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