by Maurizio Roca
“Fixing a Hole” is a series whose purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. December will be “Avant-Garde Month.” Each week, three related films will be covered in one entry, with videos of the work included.
While Joel has selected the weekly theme, the films were chosen by this week’s guest writer. Today Maurizio Roca, last seen conducting the noir countdown on Wonders, investigates three of his favorite experimental films from the riches of the silent era.
In the 1920s, avant-garde filmmaking slowly emerged as more intellectuals started to take cinema seriously as an art form. The scorn and ridicule that greeted movies in earlier times gradually subsided and was replaced by a general enthusiasm for the medium’s possibilities. A few members of certain cultural movements, notably the Surrealists and Dadaists, started to realize that their philosophical and personal concerns could be administered quite effectively on celluloid. This was another area of visual art where the creator could manipulate the tools he placed in front of him to construct a result he deemed aesthetically satisfying. It’s no coincidence that many early directors in this new enterprise had already established themselves in other forms of art. Just scan some of the names that graced early avant-garde pictures—Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger—and you can see that a healthy dose of cross-pollination was occurring quite frequently. Yet this new cinematic form was also attracting young budding filmmakers that understood that the relatively cheap, independent spirit that lay at the heart of this new medium was a way to break into cinema without relying on a studio for finances. Many future narrative filmmakers that worked almost exclusively in motion pictures had gotten their start in the avant-garde films of the ’20s. In this essay, I will be focusing on three such films of that decade.
For some readers that are unfamiliar with what constitutes an avant-garde film (as it can be considered in the confines of the 1920s), one needs to look at prevailing elements that were generally found in such works. For one, the absence of a linear, chronological narrative is usually present (or at least fractured to an exorbitant level). Second, a strategic use of cinematic techniques is abundantly added to abstract and consciously alter the images for the viewer by rapid editing, out of focus imagery, animation, filtered lenses, expressive and exaggerated camera movements, optical effects and non-diegetic sound. Third, it provides a highly ambiguous or symbolic message (sometimes even being completely nonsensical) that is meant to be reflexive and/or opposite of what can be found in more mainstream fare. These pictures are basically designed to offer the audience a sort of contradictory experience to what they would generally find in most theaters back then.
Entr’acte (Rene Clair, 1924)
Entr’acte is a 24-minute short created by the French filmmaker and Dadaist adherent, Rene Clair. It was his cinematic debut and the first in a long career that would span over 40 years. In this time, Clair had tackled everything from early Parisian sound musicals to Hollywood mystery films. While Entr’acte can be described as part of the Dadaist movement, Clair would primarily stick to conventional filmmaking, which was his primary mode of artistic expression for the remainder of his career, pretty much staying away from avant-garde ones. An important and influential early French director, his output is quite varied and filled with worthy titles waiting to be rediscovered by a moviegoing mass that has largely forgotten him. Though some major film historians now regard him as a lesser artist whose reputation and standing has diminished over time, there is no doubt that a solid bulk of his work still contains moments of brilliance. Entr’acte, a personal favorite of mine, is a leading example of ’20s avant-garde cinema and incorporates multiple cameo appearances from other experimental art luminaries such as Duchamp, Erik Satie, and Man Ray.
The film begins with an image of a cannon on wheels rolling itself around a rooftop. We then witness two men jumping and conversing gleefully next to the now-stationary mounted artillery gun as they hop backwards before a missile appears to discharge slowly from the barrel of the cannon. This segment gives way to a disorienting series of striking visual spectacles which include a deflating balloon head audience and random sequences that seem to have no coherent meaning. We spy upon a chess match featuring Duchamp and Man Ray and marvel at Clair’s ability to juxtapose such illogical scenes with one another. What we have here is a great example of pure visual cinema, where gloriously entertaining fragments of imagery blend together seamlessly into a satisfying whole. We don’t need a plot or a story. Clair boils everything down to cinema’s most essential trait: the moving picture and our persistence of vision that allows us to process such effects into recorded movement. The absurd and playful disorientation slowly transitions around the quarter mark and becomes anchored by the slow-motion ballet dancer.
The balletic portion is filmed in highly idiosyncratic positions. Clair has no desire for standard or typical establishing shots or points of view that follow a normal approach. We see the dancer from below, engulfed in shadows from the side, and upside down with a slow, dreamy edited pace that feels like a forerunner to Busby Berkeley’s choreographed sequences in such films as Footlight Parade and 42nd Street. When the face of our ballerina is finally exposed to us, we chuckle at her need for a shave and the Dadaists fundamental concern in art, the absurdity and meaningless of everything modern. Nothing is to be taken at face value. Everything can and will be ridiculed. The dancer, once graceful and a vague presence of beauty, is now clumsy and Blackbeard-hairy. Back we go to a collection of arbitrary representations as Clair has punctured a hole in the first readily identifiable moment of his work. Nothing is what it seems or should even bother to be—the hunter looking to shoot a moving target that is never going to coalesce into an object of certainty; the funeral procession always eluding those that keep chase, but who can never hope to catch up to uncertainty and the unknowable.
Entr’acte premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. It played during the intermission of a production of Francis Picabia’s Relache. The music was composed by Erik Satie and both artists appear in the beginning of the short with the cannon. The movie was meant as a sort of manifesto to lay out the principles of the Dada movement. By exercising any semblance of plot, setting, and traditional characters, the Dadaists believed they could assault societal conventions that were firmly bourgeois. Here was a public opportunity to laugh at anyone who firmly toed the status quo line.
Emak Bakia (Man Ray, 1926)
Unlike Rene Clair, Man Ray was a photographer and a painter first and foremost. Filmmaking clearly did not seem like a priority and he only dabbled with it for a relatively short period from about 1923 to 1929. All his cinematic work was primarily avant-garde and never developed beyond these confines. Here was an artist who found possibilities in this ever-expanding art form and worked with it until he grew wearisome of the process (or perhaps lost interest with the advent of sound). It seemed that there was no grand design or plan to branch out into full length features. His first short Le Retour a la Raison was two and a half minutes long. He followed this up with the picture, Emak Bakia. While some lovers of experimental cinema find the later Les Mysteres Du Chateau Du De or L’etoile De Mer more satisfying, I have always considered his second effort from 1926 to be his avant-garde masterpiece. All four shorts can be found in Kino’s Experimental Cinema of the ’20s and ’30s, which also contains Ballet Mecanique, Menilmontant, and The Seashell And The Clergymen. Man Ray moved in the same social circles as Rene Clair, and one can’t help but see the similarities between the two works I am focusing on here.
Opening with a startling close-up of a man looking through a movie camera, we are quickly led to a barrage of abstract and animated images (some taken from the earlier Le Retour a la Raison) that instantly plunge us into a world of bewilderment. A similar tact was taken by Clair’s Entr’acte, when after a relatively docile opening, the filmmaker quickly pulled out the rug from under us with a swift journey into abstraction. Emak Bakia (at least in the Kino version) is greatly aided by the mournful string-heavy score that accompanies it. Early on, the visual focus, like Entr’acte, is centered primarily on slow-motion movement. We are given the various traits that make up film art and watch as they are applied in nonlinear and unconventional ways. The concentration always seems to be simply about reveling in this new medium’s impressionistic possibilities above all else. Where the dancer was the underlying image of movement that Clair returned to early in his short, Ray instead decides to devote his time with distorted depictions of artifacts we cannot make out clearly. They come and go with no established delineation other than to reveal the ability to gracefully move before our eyes.
Only after this introductory salvo is administered upon the viewer can we come across our first truly conventional image from Emak Bakia. A woman is now sitting behind the wheel of a car wearing goggles getting ready to drive off to further enhance our wonderment of motion. Perhaps Ray (other than abiding by Dada principles) is also contradictorily trying to convey to his audience the simple amazement that early movie viewers felt when peeking through a Eidoloscope or Vitascope. While what we begin to see on the screen becomes more and more material, the main purpose of emphasizing filmed activity is always the vital component that Ray stresses. Whether it be a pair of legs cutting a rug, water hitting the shore, or hand-carved blocks of wood circling in unison, the interest is always applied vigorously from frame to frame. If one can readily allow themselves to be put under the spell that these avant-garde pieces cast, then the hypnotic weaving of motion can certainly cast a hypnotic pall over the viewer. Perhaps for me, Emak Bakia is the Man Ray film that is best able to pull this trick off smoothly. The flow seems to be rather seamless and when we come upon the painted eyelids at the conclusion, I am undoubtedly sold.
Vormittagsspuk: Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1928)
Vormittagsspuk was Hans Richter’s sixth short of his career. It is also the one most readily available for viewing from his work in the ’20s. Unlike Rene Clair, Richter never went forth with a more conventional career in directing. He basically stayed in experimental films when he wasn’t busy pursuing other artistic endeavors. Still, he did continue to work in the medium and even made a 1947 feature film in color called Dreams That Money Can Buy. Ghosts Before Breakfast (English title) is a 9-minute short that combines animation with live-action footage. As opposed to his earlier Rhythmus series, the filmmaker’s 1928 short breaks away from the completely abstract and similarly designed Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling (which Richter worked on in its early stages) and uses actual actors and real life images. The earlier projects were the first of their kind and were keen on showing a sort of cinematic rhythm that could be applied visually. They had absolutely no connection to the type of silent movies that came before them and instead seemed more interested in displaying the type of cadences that both Ray and Clair would further develop a few years later with their respective works.
The similarities and connection to Entr’acte and Emak Bakia begin to show themselves quickly with the coming to life of inanimate objects—the collar of the distinguished gentleman, the floating bowler hats, and the mischievous bow tie that appears within the first couple of minutes of the picture. Like the two previous shorts, Ghosts Before Breakfast extols the absurdity of these moving objects and takes pleasure in showing the outcome of their revitalization. These “things” then break away and begin to form intricate patterns upon the screen. This segues to the random image of a target practice sheet and a man pulling out a revolver from his coat pocket, further illustrating the completely aimless (but evocative) sequences many avant-garde movies of the ’20s dealt with. Like a surrealist dream, every law of nature becomes discontinued and irrelevant. Rationality has no place anymore. The laws and structures of modern society have been severed and replaced with anarchistic chaos. For Richter, rigid order and explainability is thrust out for good. The world of Vormittagsspuk is only inhabited with non sequiturs and formless bedlam.
At barely nine minutes long, Ghosts Before Breakfast ends much too early. The experimental short proceeds to delight in all things ridiculous until the very last second. It is more captivating than the earlier Rhythmus trilogy since it incorporates live-action sequences that show Richter’s intent of torpedoing structured organization. When actual objects get put through the surrealist ringer, we can again appreciate Richter’s attempt at disorientation for his viewers. Like Richter’s duck in the basket that decides to go back into his safe haven, perhaps some audiences may retreat into their own ordered idea of cinema, preferring not to be affected by what these early experimental filmmakers were attempting.
Thankfully these artists tossed aside the rule book, which in turn led to a brand new cinematic syntax. In the ’30s, we would get L’Age D’Or and Blood Of A Poet, in the ’40s Meshes Of The Afternoon and Fireworks and so on, and so on until this very day. These three shorts are just a small portion of the work that avant-garde filmmakers were creating in the 1920s, although there is still much more to uncover for those whose interest has been piqued.
The floating clock is always ticking…The detachable hand is always waving.
For more from this author, please visit his archive.
Last week’s entry: Bambi
Maurizio,
Great essay and your command of prose here is based on great knowledge and understanding of avante garde cinema. These are new to me and I watched them here thanks for posting. I am far more familiar with stuff from the 30’s from Bunuel and Cocteau. I really like the Clair film, especially the Ballet sequence. The Slow mo, the concentration on the form. Nice reference to Berkeley as well. I can see this.
Thanks Jon. The screen-caps and films were actually posted by Joel. I supplied the words he supplied the visuals. Kino’s Avant-Garde compilation (volume one) which I mention in the piece contains two of these films and plenty of other good stuff for those interested.
This is an extraordinary presentation on a vital if sadly overlooked film genre that few have the interest to persue with the applicatiopn that Maurizio has done with here. Ed Howard of ONLY THE CINEMA has long promoted the form at his own place with impressive scholarship, but Maurizio’s work here reminds us of what we’ve been missing since his seminal film noir countdown showed his fecund brilliance. I have not yet seen the Richter of this trio, but will remedy that pronto. Your superlative lead-in framing the form is fascinating, but your analytical study of the three works is magisterial.
I guess I can safely say that the avante garde form in general is my own weakest and most underdeveloped area of the cinema, but I have long admired and reveled in the arly experimental work in Russian and German cinema, and am a huge fan of Maya Deren, whose MESHES IN THE AFTERNOON is my single favorite avante garde work. But there is so much that still needs to be investigated.
This is a truly brilliant work of scholarship, and the numerous you tube additions are remarkable in every sense.
Ah Sam before film noir became my favorite genre of choice early avant-garde was the form I most appreciated. Back in my college days I would make constant trips to the Museum Of Modern Art to go see early Bunuel’s and Cocteau’s. I still consider Dulac’s The Seashell And The Clergymen as perhaps the greatest of all. A countdown of this stuff must be implemented on the site at some point (along with documentaries which are both fairly unrepresented to the proper degree) for interested readers. Thank you for the compliments and I will certainly begin writing on the site in a more consistent manner (especially considering I have already agreed to various projects in the upcoming months).
Maurizio, I am hardly surprised that you had a museum run there, as your knowledge, scholarship and enthusiasm shines through this amazing post.
I completely concur that a countdown of avante garde works would be extremely beneficial for this site and its readers!
The Clair work is a stunner of course, as I just realized again after watching it. Your analysis is endlessly rewarding.
Yeah there is just something so magical about some of these films. You realize that a certain spirit of invention and trailblazing glory was inherently present. Truth be told we can say that about all good silents… they are like a time capsule to a place long gone.
Maurizio, you’ve compiled an exciting array of films possessing remarable wit and originality. The “liberty” factor of “Relache” is really palpable, making it a real treat.
Yeah in many ways the wit and charm is what remains the most enjoyable factor. Subversive hucksters looking to poke holes into what was considered normal by society at large.
Maurizio, thanks for the great contribution! I love how lucidly you convey the films & what they’re doing – this is the perfect opening salvo to a month I am really looking forward to.
I’m going to re-watch the three films & return to leave my thoughts on them specifically. Suffice to say that the slo-mo sequence in Entr’acte is one of my favorite ever (but I’m a sucker for in-camera slow motion), and the other two are – along with Le Retour a la Raison and Rhythmus 21 (uncoincidentally, by the same auteurs, and also Anemic Cinema, which reminds me of Godard) probably my favorites of this era.
I think the avant-garde countdown is a great idea – I would volunteer myself for it (though it would definitely involve seeing more than I’ve seen now) but as this will be my last venture on the site, I name you my successor. Get to it…
….but as this will be my last venture on the site……
This may well come to pass, but the history of this site and its numerous contributors suggests otherwise. If I have learned one thing since the beginning of WitD, it is that everything is relative and transient. the very notion of permanency is alien to the site’s foundations, and contrary to its spirit. It is best to take things one week, one month at a time, and then see what ground you are standing on and what direction you are facing.
If I returned, it would be a guest entry in a countdown (or if this series continues without me, as I hope it will, a guest entry in this). But let me put it this way: don’t wait for me to start the avant-garde countdown! Get one going right away – of course Maurizio has the rock one to do first, though.
The rock countdown has lost interest from me at the present moment Joel. We have the comedy and sci-fi lists coming up anyway (not to mention Ford and Kubrick projects). Since sunday was initially my day before noir countdown fatigue set in, I will continue The Fixing A Hole series after you are gone (which I have stated countless times I wish you would reconsider) if you wish. I will focus primarily on experimental and documentary films.
Excellent essay Maurizio! I’ve seen two of these shorts, and they are both really interesting.
I’d say that Entr’acte is a major point in the history of cinema, as it marks the point in which dadaism began to turn into surrealism, and as we all know, surrealism is the real deal when we come to experimentations, new waves and vanguardism.
I also saw Vormittagsspuk, and I have to say this: what’s the deal with dadaists and gentlemen’s hats?
Entr’acte: ****
Vormittagsspuk: ***1/2
The bowler hat was meant to represent bourgeois man. Freud had written about it I remember correctly.
It certainly means that in some places, but in others it has other meanings. Generally surrealism’s visual messages can be uncoded by looking at accompanying imagery (but they were interested in Freud obviously). For example, Magritte used a bowler hat to often represent himself in his works– and he certainly wasn’t calling himself a bourgeois man. Rather the basic, almost perversely generic shape of it was was he was after, it was a hat when accompanied with a basic suit allowed him (or any man) a degree of anonymity. The faceless nature of modern man (a point the Pierce Brosnan ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ understood, and so did Chaplin). Other surrealists dirtied it up a bit to represent the hordes of lower classes that urban life was suddenly turning out at unprecedented levels (remember the bowler was the hat of the working class in the Victorian era, and the one most worn to lay railroad track in the American west), while a few women wore it while posed nude using it was just an easy symbol of masculinity (thus resulting in an image of gender manipulation/contemplation).
While the Dadaists used it for anything, and nothing. Somethings just for a shape, sometimes to imply something that wasn’t there. Then sometimes as a icon for class (on either side) when dada became more interested in politics/class concepts and really became interesting in my opinion.
I am in awe of the brilliance of this comment from Jamie, though I am not prepared to embellish it in any way. Awesome and fascinating.
What can I say?????
I am not familiar with the films that Maurizio is speaking about here. However, this wonderfully written, passionate essay has done for me what it set out to do and I’m sure that inspiring discussion and creating a want to see these films was absolutely part of the authors intent.
This essay caught me off guard and is a little ironic for me as I was just saying to Allan Fish that the silent era is slowly but surely becoming my favorite period in the long history of cinema. Now Maurizio gives me even more reason to investigate its treasures.
Great stuff!!!!!
Way to go Maurizio!!!!!
I hope you check out the Youtube videos Joel provided Dennis. These experimental shorts are an important part of the silent era for sure. Nothing wrong with saying its anyone’s favorite period of cinema. Like I mention above, there is such a magical vibe to the pre-sound days of moviemaking which can never be replicated again.
I also can’t wait to see where Joel takes the rest of this Avant-Garde Month. I’m excited by his future selections, especially for the 30’s and 40’s.
There probably will not be too many 30s and 40s films – I can think of only one I plan to include at this point. Some of the big ones have already been covered by Allan, and others don’t fit into some of the themes I have in mind though that could certainly change. The approach I’m taking isn’t strictly chronological, but it will probably work out that the series moves from past to present overall, just by how I’ve arranged it. Especially with the last two entries, it’ll be a discovery process for me as much as anyone, because the forms those will take is still fluid. I have ideas of what I want the unifying theme to be but am not sure which specific films I’ll address. Should be fun.
Three pivotal avant garde works and a scholarly piece. Fine stuff.
Thanks Allan. You don’t throw out compliments often. Much appreciated.
Ok, now for my longer thoughts.
Entr’acte – My cousin was visiting today, with her 3-year-old son, and I decided to do an experiment: I put this on and watched how long it held his (the 3-year-old’s) interest. For five minutes he seemed quite absorbed, though unfortunately his mother and my sister eventually lured him into the other room with Disney Sing-a-Long Songs. It’s worth noting he only made it a couple minutes through those. He also was at rapt attention through several Betty Boop cartoons – even dancing along with Cab Calloway. A wise little man.
As for myself, this Clair film is a lot of fun, and I love the Satie score and slow motion. However, it’s probably my least favorite of the 3; it has its longeurs and I think what I respond to the most in avant-garde films (and really, in most films though I hardly ever convey it in my reviews) is editing – I think the cuts in this feel less dynamic than in the other 2. Still an excellent piece of work though, and a great kickoff to avant-garde month.
Emak-Bakia – This my favorite of the bunch. I’m completely carried away by the images, the fluidity of Ray’s vision – the dreamlike ambiance of the imagery. I also adore the music from the Kino discs, almost to the point of discomfort – wondering how much these 21st century scores are affecting my perception of these silent classics. At any rate, this score is one of the best (they’re all really good though).
Some of the visuals are just jaw-dropping, achingly beautiful, make you want to sprout wings and fly – especially those collars or whatever they are rotating and distorting, fluidly elongating and twisting and turning. “Fluid” – that’s what Ray’s doing here, capturing in motion what he manages to capture in still imagery (though often with the impression of motion) in his photography, a loose boundary between images and sensations. Love this one.
Ghosts Before Breakfast – A delight; when you mentioned you were doing this, I forgot that it was by Richter, who did Rhythmus 21. That simple little short is one of my favorites, and I can definitely see the continuity between that and this. The editing is rhythmic in a tensile way – he loves alternating, flipping between images, returning to them, switching directions; unlike the Ray film, in which a graceful flow determines the rhythm, here it’s all intensity and release, albeit with a very playful, loose air.
I also have some more thoughts on the avant-garde as a whole, and film art, but I’ll follow up with that in a moment. Perhaps I should save it for a post, but I’m not sure where it will fit in so I’ll muse on it now (it’s something I’ve mentioned before here and elsewhere, so apologies for those for whom this is redundant) and worry about repetitions later.
Great comment Joel. I love all three shorts equally. Your own little capsule reviews here definitely strengthen this thread.
I don’t want to go into it too much here because I may discuss it more in depth in a later piece for this series, but I’m often humored the idea of “four corners” of film art. As in a room, nothing is really in any of the four corners – they just orient you. Same goes for this – no film falls entirely into one area at the exclusion of the others, but still to one degree or another these ways of seeing (and making) affect all films. I think the Cahiers article on Young Mr. Lincoln might have influenced some of my thoughts on this, but it’s been a while since I read it so I can’t say precisely what’s mine and what’s theirs.
One corner is what we might call the fantasist, or illusionist, or Melies school. Here the goal is to essentially trick the viewer into “believing” the world onscreen. This is the type of movie that radical critiques of the cinema most target (and consider definitively bourgeois). I like these movies as much as the next guy – and indeed most narrative films (i.e. most of the film included in best or favorites lists) fall into this category. But it can be overrated and made too exclusively the focus, as if this is the crux of what cinema is capable of, making believe. Stylistically, this approach would usually entail close-ups, frequent (but hidden) cutting, and an eclectic use of film language, varying between different shot sizes, obeying rules of orientation and composition and so forth, following a pattern.
In another corner is a sort of vision which does away with the illusionistic tendencies of the first – call it the realistic (not sure about that world), observational, Bazinian approach. This form utilizes long takes and allows action to unfold in a way that, instead of immersing us in a half-wakeful acceptance of the images, engages us and makes us feel that reality is unfolding before us. This is the sort of imagery Bazin celebrated in the late 40s. It contains a spiritual sense of photography as something that reveals, rather than concocts or obscures, reality.
In the third corner is a movement partially a reaction to the first and the second (though I don’t think you could say it developed entirely after, or informed by, them). It’s a Brechtian/Marxist view which wants to highlight the artifice. It does not believe that long takes “show” reality but that they may in fact be even more convincingly illusionistic (because seemingly more “real”), obscuring the fact that a fiction is being created and that the camera affects everything it films. Indeed, if the second approach is the “cinema tells the truth 24 frames per second” the third is “cinema lies 24 frames per second.” This sort of filmmaking more aggressively confronts the viewer, and doesn’t allow them to dream away. I’d say it’s inclined towards montage (I think Eisenstein – despite making supposedly inspirational propaganda – falls into this category, and Vertov definitely does), but I think a certain dead-air long-take approach can also facilitate this (though that would also risk falling into the second view).
The fourth and final corner is, personally, my favorite. Like the first, it wants to weave a spell and is less interested in “waking up” the viewer to the material world (as are the second and third in their own ways) but it is not looking for escape but rather penetration. I think of this as the Jungian corner, and Lynch, the Quay Brothers, and Rivette (though he has strong elements of the second and maybe third corners in his work) are oriented more towards this. These works are subversive and transgressive – the spell they weave is something that takes us out of our everyday reality, rather than reinforcing it (as the first approach does), they bring us in to contact with the unconscious, and awaken our senses so that we look about us with sharper vision, seeing through the forms and structures of our surrounding world to the more fundamental currents beneath. Like the second, it is fundamentally a spiritual approach.
I mention all of this because I think many avant-garde films, and certainly most of my favorites, fall into this fourth category – may even be the purest examples of it. I don’t like to make utilitarian cases for art, so I tread cautiously here, but in addition to their own inherent appeal, I think experimental films also make us sharper viewers of more conventional films. Rather than watching them for the general, we watch them for the specific – awakened by the offbeat, purely sensory sensations of an avant-garde work we are more attuned to the non-narrative formal elements at work in all films. They are like palette cleansers in this sense, though, again, I don’t like the idea of them being viewed as primarily useful for returning to narratives and applying their lessons. They are also their own ends.
Are you sure that’s all you want to say Joel. Has the cat got your tongue?
Ha! Great, great stuff here.
Ah, so someone else loves those Kino Avant-Garde box selections, lol. They are pretty essential aren’t they? Add in the film that Allan covered months back, Ménilmontant, that is also included and you begin to see the great treasures contained therein.
I like your presentation here Maurizio, and that youtube has all the selections making any unfamiliarity with these now just a matter of clicking to watch. A time when avant-garde could almost have been called a genre (though surrealism and dada, even if having the same parents or initial concerns somewhat, are different ideological beasts) not the more general adjective it is now. Especially in cinema, the visual realm, these genres really blossom (I’m not a fan of most surrealist visual art, but dada yes), they need the combined interplay of images that all visual tropes up to then couldn’t offer (to flat). It’s why the written aspects of the genres are also so strong (poetry, essay, short-story) which also correlated to how those words were generally displayed as really the birthplace of what we think of modern graphic design (it was more of a trade up to then) is contained here too. They understood that to shake up anything you have to start with linguistics.
I also love the more American-centric Neo-Dada that came from Black Mountain/followers of Marcel Duchamp in the mid to late 50’s and early 1960’s.
Again, nice work. The whole of visual art to me virtually was all birthed right after WWI; de Stijl, Dada, constructivism, Bauhaus, Futurism, Primitivism, etc. It’s all there.
The Kino set is a wonderful collection for sure Jamie. It’s also worth noting something you say here about the availability of most of these films on the net. They are all easy to watch if one has the desire to do so. Not as easy when I was in college as opposed to now. Probably because most of these titles are in the public domain they just require a easy five second search to be seen and a visit to Youtube.
This is definitely an area I need to explore. I haven’t heard of these three, and know of few avante garde films I can identify. A remarkable study, auspicious and commanding.
Thanks Frank. When you get a chance watch some of those Youtube clips Joel posted. Three shorts in less than an hour…