Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? pages 158-159

Seeing the art of the twentieth century in the light of the ancient Greek stage can help us to understand many things. Why, for example, Gert Hofmann and Agota Kristof chose to write in the first person plural, or why the attitude of so many artists to the objects they chose to depict changed radically from what it had been in earlier times. Kafka's first diary entry, for example, dated 1910, describes an event and not a person or even a group of people: 'The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past (Die Zuschauer erstarren, wenn der Zug vorbeifährt).' Kafka is interested not in the people on the station platform and not in the train but in what-happens-when-the-train-goes-rushing-past. Writing about his 1911 painting of a coffee mill, Duchamp puts it very clearly: 'Instead of making an objective, figurative coffee-grinding machine, I did a description of the mechanism. You see the cogwheel and you see the turning handle at the top, with an arrow showing the direction in which it turned, so there was the idea of movement.' The depiction of movement, which is such an obsession with Duchamp and which can be seen to lie behind such early filmic masterpieces as René Clair's Entr'acte and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, is not a result of the artists' obsession with the new and faster means of travel appearing at the time, as positivist historians assert; those means of travel, as well as the possibilities of film, rather, help artists return to those older principles of art: the imitation not of character but of action.