Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
films, which broadly set up a different space for viewing from narrative drama, in which
stable perception is interrupted and non-identification of subject and image are aimed for.
Chien andalou
sets up another model, in which elements of narrative and acting arouse
the spectator's psychological participation in plot or scene while at the same time
distancing the viewer by disallowing empathy, meaning, and closure; an image of the
dissociated sensibility or 'double consciousness' praised by Surrealism in its critique of
naturalism.
Two further French films expand this strategy, which came with the sound film era and
the end of the first phase of avant-garde film-making before the rise of Hitler;
L'Age d'or
('The golden age', 1930) and Blood of a Poet ( 1932). Almost feature length, these films
(privately funded by arts patron the Vicomte de Noailles as successive birthday presents
to his wife) link Cocteau's lucid classicism to Surrealism's baroque mythopoeia. Both
films ironize visual meaning in voice-over or by intertitles (made on the cusp of the sound
era, they use both spoken and written text). Cocteau's voice raspingly satirizes his Poet's
obsession with fame and death ('Those who smash statues should beware of becoming
one'), paralleled in the opening of
L'Age d'or
by an intertitle 'lecture' on scorpions and an
attack on Ancient and modern Rome. Bufiuel links the fall of the classical age to his main
target, Christianity (as when Christ and the disciples are seen leaving a chateau after a
Sadean orgy). The film itself celebrates 'mad love'. A text written by the surrealists and
signed by Aragon, Breton, Dalí, Éluard, Peret, Tzara and others was issued at the first
screening:
L'Age d'or
, 'uncorrupted by plausibility', reveals the 'bankruptcy of our
emotions, linked with the problem of capitalism'. The manifesto echoes Vigo's
endorsement of
Un chien andalou's
'savage poetry' (also in 1930) as a film of 'social
consciousness'. 'An Andalusian dog howls,' wrote Vigo; 'who then is dead?'
Unlike Buñuel's film, Cocteau's is not overtly anti-theocratic, but even so his Poet-hero
encounters archaic art, magic and ritual, China, opium, and transvestism before dying in
front of an indifferent stage audience while he plays cards. Cocteau's film finally affirms
the redemptive classic tradition, but the dissolution of personal identity opposes the
western fixation on stability and repetition, asserting that any modern classicism was to
be determinedly 'neo'.
THE 1930s
Experimental sound-tracks and minimal synchronized speech in these films expanded the
call for a non-naturalistic sound cinema in Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's 1928 manifesto
and explored by Vertov's Enthusiasm ( 1930). This direction was soon blocked by the
popularity and realism of the commercial sound film. Rising costs of film-making and the
limited circulation of avant-garde films contributed to their decline. The broadly leftist
politics of the avant-garde -- both surrealists and abstract constructivists had complex
links to Communist and socialist organizations-were increasingly strained under two
reciprocal policies which dominated the 1930s; the growth of German nationalism under
Hitler from 1933 and the Popular Front opposition to Fascism which rose, under
Moscow's lead, a few years later. The attack on 'excessive' art and the avant-garde in
favour of popular 'realism' were soon to close down the international co-operation which
made possible German-Soviet co-productions like Piscator's formally experimental
montage film Revolt of the Fishermen ( 1935) or Richter's first feature film Metall
(abandoned in 1933 after the Nazi take-over). Radical Soviet film-makers as well as their
'cosmopolitan' allies abroad were forced into more normative directions.
The more politicized film-makers recognized this themselves in the second international
avant-garde conference held in Belgium in 1930. The first more famous congress in 1929
at La Sarraz, Switzerland, at which Eisenstein, Balàzs, Moussinac, Montagu, Cavalcanti,
Richter, and Ruttmann were present, had endorsed the need for aesthetic and formal
experiment as part of a still growing movement to turn 'enemies of the film today' into
'friends of the film tomorrow', as Richter's optimistic 1929 book affirmed. One year later
the stress was put emphatically on political activism, Richter's social imperative: 'The age
demands the documented fact,' he claimed.
The first result of this was to shift avant-garde activity more directly into documentary.
This genre, associated with political and social values, still encouraged experiment and
was ripe for development of sound and image montage to construct new meanings. In
addition, the documentary did not use actors; the final barrier between the avant-garde
and mainstream or art-house cinema.
The documentary -- usually used to expose social ills and (via state or corporate funding)
propose remedies -attracted many European experimental film-makers including Richter,
Ivens, and Henri Storck. In the United States, where there was a small but volatile
community of activists for the new film, alongside other modern developments in writing,
painting, and photography, the cause of a radical avant-garde was taken up by magazines
such as
Experimental Film
and seeped into the New Deal films made by Pare Lorentz and
Paul Strand (a modernist photographer since the age of Camerawork and New York
Dada).
In Europe, notably with John Grierson, Henri Storck, and Joris Ivens, new fusions
between experimental film and factual cinema were pioneered. Grierson's attempt to
equate corporate patronage with creative production led him most famously to the GPO,
celebrated as an emblem of modern social communications in the Auden -- Britten
montage section of
Night Mail
( 1936), which ends with Grierson's voice intoning a night-
time hymn to Glasgow -'let them dream their dreams . . .'.
Alberto Cavalcanti and Len Lye were hired to open the documentary cinema to new ideas
and techniques. Lye's uncompromising career as a film-maker, almost always for state and
business patrons, showed the survival of sponsored funding for the arts in Europe and the
USA in the depression years. His cheap and cheerfully hand-made colour-experiments of
the period treat their overt subjects (parcel deliveries in the wholly abstract A Colour Box
( 1935), early posting in Trade Tattoo ( 1937) with a light touch; the films celebrate the
pleasures of pure colour and rhythmic sound-picture montage. The loss of both Grierson
and Lye to North America after the 1940s marked the end of this period of collaboration.
Germaine Dermoz as the bored wife in Germaine Dulac 's
Smiling Madame Beudet
(
La Souriante Madame Beudet
, 1923)
HARMONY AND DISRUPTION
The now legendary conflict between director Germaine Dulac and poet Antonin Artaud,
over the making of The Seashell and the Clergyman (
La Coquille et le clergyman
, 1927)
from his screenplay, focuses some key issues in avantgarde film. Dulac made both
abstract films such as
Étude cinÉgraphique sur une arabesque
('Cinematic study of a
flourish', 1923) and stylish narratives, of which the best known is the pioneering feminist
work Smiling Madame Beudet (
La Souriante Madame Beudet
, 1923). These aspects of
her work were linked by a theory of musical form, to 'express feelings through rhythms
and suggestive harmonies'. But Artaud opposed this vehemently, along with
representation itself. In his 'Theatre of Cruelty', Artaud foresaw the tearing down of
barriers between public and stage, act and emotion, actor and mask. In film, he wrote in
1927, he wanted 'pure images' whose meanings would emerge, free of verbal associations,
'from the very impact of the images themselves'. The impact must be violent, 'a shock
designed for the eyes, a shock founded, so to speak, on the very substance of the gaze'.
For Dulac too, film is 'impact', but typically its effect is 'ephemeral . . . analogous to that
provoked by musical harmonies'. Dulac fluently explored film as dream state (expressed
in the dissolving superimpositions in La Coquille) and so heralded the psychodrama film,
but Artaud wanted film only to keep the dream state's most violent and shattering
qualities, breaking the trance of vision.
Here, the avant-garde focused on the role of the spectator. In the abstract film, analogies
were sought with nonnarrative arts to challenge cinema as a dramatic form, and this led to
'visual music' or 'painting in motion'. In Jean Coudal's 1925 surrealist account, film
viewing is seen as akin to 'conscious hallucination', in which the body -undergoing
'temporary depersonalization' -- is robbed of 'its sense of its own existence. We are
nothing more than two eyes rivetted to ten meters of white screen, with a fixed and guided
gaze.' This critique was taken further in Dalí's "Abstract of a Critical History of the
Cinema" ( 1932), which argues that film's 'sensory base' in 'rhythmic impression' leads it
to the
bête noire
of harmony, defined as 'the refined product of abstraction', or
idealization, rooted in 'the rapid and continuous succession of film images, whose implicit
neologism is directly proportional to a specifically generalizing visual culture'.
Countermanding this, Dalí looks for 'the poetry of cinema' in 'a traumatic and violent
disequilibrium veering towards concrete irrationality'.
The goal of radical discontinuity did not stop short at the visual image, variously seen as
optical and illusory (by Bufiuel) or as retinal and illusionist (by Duchamp). The linguistic
codes in film (written or spoken) were also scoured, as in films by Man Ray, Buñuel, and
Duchamp which all play with intertitles to open a gap between word, sign, and object.
The attack on naturalism continued into the sound era, notably in Buñuel's documentary
on the Spanish poor,
Las Hurdes
(
Land without Bread
, 1932). Here, the surrealist Pierre
Unik's commentary -- a seemingly authoritative 'voice-over' in the tradition of factual
filmslowly undermines the realism of the images, questioning the depiction (and viewing)
of its subjects by a chain of
non sequiturs
or by allusions to scenes which the crews -- we
are told -- failed, neglected, or refused to shoot. Lacunae open between voice, image, and
truth, just as the eye had been suddenly slashed in Un chien andalou.
Paradoxically, the assault on the eye (or on the visual order) can be traced back to the
'study of optics' which Cézanne had recommended to painters at the dawn of modernism.
This was characteristically refined by Walter Benjamin in 1936, linking mass
reproduction, the cinema, and art: 'By its transforming function, the camera introduces us
to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'
The discontinuity principle underlies the avant-garde's key rhetorical figure, paratactic
montage, which breaks the flow -- or 'continuity' -- between shots and scenes, against the
grain of narrative editing. Defined by Richter as 'an interruption of the context in which it
is inserted', this form of montage first appeared in the avant-garde just as the mainstream
was perfecting its narrative codes. Its purpose is counter-narrative, by linking dissonant
images which resist habits of memory and perception to underline the film event as
phenomenological and immediate. At one extreme of parataxis, rapid cutting -down to the
single frame -- disrupts the forward flow of linear time (as in the 'dance' of abstract shapes
in Ballet mécanique). At the other extreme, the film is treated as raw strip, frameless and
ageless, to be photogrammed by Man Ray or hand-painted by Len Lye. Each option is a
variation spun from the kaleidoscope of the modernist visual arts.
This diversity -- reflected too in the search for noncommercial funding through patronage
and self-help cooperatives -- means that there is no single model of avantgarde film
practice, which has variously been seen to relate to the mainstream as poetry does to
prose, or music to drama, or painting to writing. None of these suggestive analogies is