As Modernism/modernity—the title of the leading journal in modernist studies—makes clear, the major catalyst in the ongoing reassessment of modernism is the need to factor in "modernity." New Criticism, since it concentrated on the text "as text" and forbade the reader from looking up, delayed our now hyper-acute awareness of the constitutive interplay between modernism and modernity. Recently, Tom Gunning has characterized modernity itself as the result of cyclical opposition between the explosive energy of constant change and relentless mutability in modernity, and the equally tireless design of a systematic organization designed to not only contain that energy, but convert it into a useable force for some kind of forward motion: "Modernity involves systems of containment and control as much as a new, explosive energy" (Gunning 310; L. Marcus).¹ He goes on to illustrate this dynamic in the development of cinema where the explosive shots of Eisensteinian montage are both utilized, and yet contained, by simultaneous developments in the narrative cinema of D. W. Griffith and others.