BETWEEN 1920 and 1924, the French public forum open to writing on the cinema expanded dramatically. In the previous five years, under the constrictions of the war, a broad spectrum of “theories” of narrative and non-narrative films had been articulated within a limited range of discursive formats. Now those rough notions were extended, “systematized,” or even reformulated—by veterans such as Louis Delluc, Emile Vuillermoz, and Ricciotto Canudo as well as by newcomers, Léon Moussinac, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and René Clair. And they were disseminated widely, and debated enthusiastically, through a newly formed network of newspapers, journals, ciné-clubs, and conférences or exhibitions.1
Within two or three years of the war’s end, across the political spectrum, nearly every one of the major Paris newspapers had either a weekly page or daily column devoted to the cinema.2 The “big four” mass dailies, all supporters of the conservative Bloc National government, almost simultaneously launched daily film reviews in the fall of 1921—Le Petit Journal (René Jeanne), Le Journal (Jean Chataigner, André Antoine), Le Matin (Jean Gallois), Le Petit Parisien (J.-L. Croze). Daily or weekly columns also appeared in older papers associated with the Right—for example, L’Intransigeant (Boisyvon), Le Figaro (Robert Spa)3—as well as newer ones linked to the Left—for example, L’Oeuvre (Lucian Wahl, Auguste Nardy), Le Quotidien (Wahl), L’Humanité (Léon Moussinac), and Paris-Soir (Chataigner, Jeanne).4 At least four Paris papers, however, were particularly influential during the period. Le Temps retained some prominence through the biweekly film review column of Emile Vuillermoz. Le Petit Journal presented a model cinema page, which was widely imitated, because young René Jeanne offered space in the paper to major French filmmakers and other film reporters and critics.5 Bonsoir, the leftist evening paper affiliated with Gustave Téry’s L’Oeuvre, but similar in tone to Le Canard enchainé, provided probably the liveliest discussions of the cinema through the reviews of Auguste Nardy, Pierre Seize (Joseph-Michel Piot], Marcel Achard, and Louis Delluc.6 And Comoedia, once revived, dominated them all (under the direction of J.-L. Croze), particularly by 1922, when it invited Vuillermoz to write a weekly column and then devoted a series of reviews and articles to Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922–1923)—pieces written by Vuillermoz, Moussinac, Jean Epstein, Fernand Léger, and Gance himself. The cinema’s cultural significance finally had reached the point where journalists such as Jeanne, Wahl, and Croze could now maintain a quasi-independent status outside the film industry, by reviewing films and editing newspaper sections devoted to the cinema.
As a sign of the cinema’s acceptance as a legitimate art form, the literary and intellectual journals also began, on a consistent basis, to open their pages to essays on the cinema as well as to film reviews.7 Beginning in 1920, for instance, the prestigious Mercure de France took a turn to the left and invited Léon Moussinac to contribute a lengthy trimonthly film column, which soon developed into a model review form.8 The conservative Revue hebdomadaire established a regular column for André Lang to do a series of film interviews and reviews, which he reprised in the even more staid Annales politiques et littéraires. Jean Galtier-Boissière’s maverick Le Crapouil-lot published several special issues devoted to the cinema (in 1920 and 1923) as well as a third film review column by Moussinac. Another key avant-garde journal, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s monthly L’Esprit nouveau (1920–1925) promoted pieces on the cinema by Delluc, Epstein, B. To-kine, and the art historian, Elie Faure.9 And Ricciotto Canudo’s short-lived Gazette des sept arts (1922–1923) turned over much of its space to proselytizing for film art. In 1922, a new weekly review journal, Larousse’s Les Nouvelles littéraires, sought to rival Comoedia as the principal journal dedicated to cultural events in Paris; and it soon included an important cinema column by Canudo.10 A year later, another new weekly competitor, Paris-Journal, opened film review columns to Georges Charensol and the young Surrealist poet, Robert Desnos. Finally, the deluxe Théâtre et Comoedia illustré, now published by Rolf de Maré, manager of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, included a monthly film supplement (1922–1925) in which, after a brief stint by Claude Autant-Lara, René Clair wrote trenchant film reviews while young Jean Mitry transcribed some half dozen interviews with prominent French filmmakers.
The specialized press devoted to the cinema witnessed a similar explosive expansion. At least five weekly journals now were addressing the various sectors of the film industry—La Cinématographie française, Cinéopse, Filma, Ciné Journal, and Le Courrier cinématographique—and Filma took over from Ciné-Journal the strategy of publishing an important annual on the industry, Tout-Cinéma. The mass dailies and publishing houses were busy creating a market for popular weekly film fan magazines—for example, Jean Vignaud’s Ciné-Miroir [Le Petit Parisien), Pierre Desclaux’s Mon-Ciné and Le Film complet—as well as weekly or biweekly ciné-roman series—for instance, Tallandier’s Cinéma-Bibliothèque, Fayard’s Les Grands Films, and J. Ferenczi’s Le Roman complet.11 The most interesting development, however, came in the journals which were more or less independent of both the film industry and the mass press. When Diamant-Berger and Delluc left Le Film in 1919, and its influence waned, a number of new film journals vied to take its place. Pierre Henry’s biweekly Ciné-pour-tous (1919— 1923) and Delluc’s own weekly Le Journal du Ciné-Club (1920–1921) offered inexpensive alternatives to Le Film, but tended to stress up-to-date information on current film production and exhibition. Jean Pascal and Adrien Maître’s Cinémagazine (first published in January 1921), however, provided all this in addition to space for lengthy reviews and essays from important writers across the spectrum—from those closely associated with the industry like Guillaume Danvers and Juan Arroy to independents like Vuillermoz, or from those linked to the Right like Jeanne and Boisyvon to those on the left like Moussinac. The degree of its success soon allowed Cinémagazine to have its own reporter, Robert Florey, in Hollywood as well as publish an annual, Almanack du cinéma, which competed on a par with Tout-Cinéma. Probably the most influential of these new film journals, however, was Delluc’s deluxe weekly, Cinéa, whose purpose was to offer a platform for the cinema much as did the prestigious Comoedia illustré (for which he briefly wrote film reviews) for the theater. For at least a year and a half after its inception (6 May 1921), through the essays and reviews of Lionel Landry, Wahl, Epstein, Jean Cocteau, Delluc himself, and others, Cinéa did indeed function as the primary forum of discussion and debate on film art, especially an independent French film art. And its position was re-secured in late 1923, when Jean Tedesco took over ownership and editorship from Delluc, bought out Henry’s rival magazine, and merged the two into the deluxe weekly, Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous.
Even though much of his time was taken up now with writing and directing a series of fiction films, Delluc also continued to turn out a small set of published books on the cinema. These included another collection of reviews and essays in Photogénie (de Brunoff, 1920), an affectionate tribute to Chaplin in Chariot (de Brunoff, 1921), and probably the first collection of original film scripts in Drames du cinéma (Le Monde nouveau, 1923).12 Perhaps inspired by Delluc’s seemingly tireless example, and encouraged by Blaise Cendrars, Jean Epstein devoted a final chapter to the cinema in his first book, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un novel état d’intelligence (Editions de la sirène, 1921), and then focused exclusively on the new medium in Bon-jour Cinéma (Editions de la sirène, 1921).13 In this, the most significant book on the cinema of the period, Epstein not only collected his first important essays on the cinema (from his own short-lived Lyon film journal, Promenoir, as well as from Cinéa) but also produced a witty parody of a film program—with poster photos of film stars, adulatory “fan” poems, a “serial episode,” and several “features” (the central essays). Together, Delluc and Epstein’s books offered a sharp contrast to Ernest Coustet’s industry-oriented survey of early film history and current methods of production in Le Cinéma (Hachette, 1921), the second edition of Leopold Lobel’s La Technique cinématographique (Dunod, 1922), and André Lang’s collection of interviews with filmmakers, Déplacements et villégiatures littéraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des images ou entretiens cinématographiques (La Renaissance du livre, 1924), which highlighted a controversy sparked off by André Antoine’s diatribe against much of the French film industry.
Alongside the public forum of newspapers, magazines, and books, in the early 1920s, there also developed a special forum initially unique to France—the ciné-club movement. It was Delluc again who established in Paris the precedent of a public conférence on film—a combination of lecture, film screening, and discussion—first at the Pépinière cinema in 1920 and later at the Colisée cinema in 1921 and 1922. In addition to the critical discourse of his film journals, these conférences were the means by which he sought (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to create a mass ciné-club movement based on his faith in film as a popular art, a movement that would either change the policies and practices of the French film industry or else offer an alternative structure to that industry.14 One of these—the first Paris screening of Caligari (1919), in November 1921—even challenged the postwar antipathy to anything German in order to promote the cinema as an international art, much as Fernand Léger had fought for the inclusion of German art in the reopened Salon des Indépendents one year earlier.15 In 1921, Ricciotto Canudo then systematized Delluc’s conférence format within the context of a select group of cinéphiles—artists, writers, and professional filmmakers—who met regularly as the Club des amis du septième art or CASA. In contrast to Delluc, however, Canudo used his group to promote an elitist notion of high-art cinema, principally through the special expositions on film art which CASA sponsored at the prestigious Salon d’Automne, perhaps the most important annual exhibition of painting in Paris, beginning in November 1921.16 Other less elitist ciné-clubs soon emerged in imitation of CASA—notably the Amis du cinéma established by Cinémagazine (with branch organizations in several provincial cities) and the Club français du cinéma founded by Moussinac, the latter of which seems to have taken a position midway between Delluc and Canudo by explicitly attacking the commercial restrictions of the film industry as well as defending filmmakers as artists (with all the rights that entailed). In 1924, this emergent alternative cinema network culminated in a six-month-long exposition devoted to French film art, organized by Moussinac—as if in fulfillment of one of Canudo’s dreams—at the major Paris art gallery-museum, the Musée Galliera.17 And the high point of the exposition was a series of lectures and film screenings—including those of critics Landry and Moussinac, filmmakers L’Herbier and Dulac, and architect-set designer Robert Mallet-Stevens—a veritable public seminar on the cinema as an art form.18 With the Musée Galliera exposition, the French ciné-club movement seemed to have confirmed its dedication to the cinema as an elite art form.
In 1921, Lucien Wahl conducted an extensive survey on “The Future of the French Cinema” in the conservative weekly, La Renaissance.19 This survey can stand as representative of the spectrum of thinking on the much-lamented “crisis” that continued to persist after the war in the French film industry, especially vis-à-vis the American and German industries. Opinion ranged from Charles Pathé, who repeated his position of three years earlier, Jacques de Baroncelli, who argued oddly against overproduction, and Henri Etiévant, who demanded that French banks simply provide more capital investment, to René Jeanne’s call for an end to government censorship and the institution of import quotas, Ricciotto Canudo’s contention that only French artists and intellectuals could rescue the cinema from ruin, and Léon Poirier’s suggestion of an international consortium of film production and distribution.20 The crisis also quickly surfaced in the controversy, mediated by André Lang, over André Antoine’s scathing appraisal of French filmmakers and the industry in La Revue hebdomadaire, in 1923.21 During that controversy, Louis Delluc attacked the concept of mass production—recycling the same films week after week under slightly different labels—with characteristic irony; and Léon Moussinac cautiously called for a “revolution” against those who controlled the film industry.22 The actual changes in the industry during this period, however, either lagged behind the writers’ wishes or else were deflected in a different direction. The ciné-club movement, for instance, became associated with high-art institutions such as the Salon d’Automne and the Musée Galliera. Film production devolved into a cottage industry where a small number of producers such as Louis Nalpas, Diamant-Berger, Abel Gance, and Marcel L’Herbier briefly attempted to set up “schools” or ministudios of filmmaking. Yet most—for example, Baroncelli, Poirier, Delluc, Dulac, Jacques Feyder—were forced to operate on an individual basis, project by project, to maintain some semblance of independence.23
Aesthetic concerns, rather than those having to do with politics and the film industry, however, most preoccupied French writing on the cinema in the early 1920s, even more than they had during the war period. Historians of film theory and criticism have long seen this period as dominated by a single more or less coherent aesthetic of “French Impressionism.” Elsewhere I have argued against the limitations of this critical tendency to impose a unified aesthetic grid on the rather diverse and exploratory postwar film practice in France.24 Here I would like to reassert and extend that argument, in accordance with the previous introductory sections, by amplifying and analyzing the heterogeneity of French discourse on the cinema. Instead of privileging “French Impressionism,” I mean to reinsert it, “demystified” as much as possible, within the historical complex of voices that emerged from the war period. This complex of voices pulsated with as much polemical fervor as before, but now there was a certain degree of systematizing evident, especially in the writings of Canudo, Moussinac, Vuil-lermoz, Dulac, and, perhaps most singularly, Epstein. Although their work resists a consistent, mutually exclusive classification system, on the question of the cinema’s function and form these writers generally fall into at least four major, well-established “camps” or centers of gravity—mainstream narrative. Impressionism, Realism, plastic non-narrative—which competed for dominance in the early 1920s.
Due to the efforts of Diamant-Berger, Pathé, and others during the war, the once “progressive” mainstream concept of a narrative cinema now largely defined French film production and hence turned into an unarticu-lated assumption in most French writing. An exception appeared in Louis Feuillade’s brief introductions to his serials, Barrabas (1920) and Les Deux Gamines (1921).25 Ten years before, Feuillade had sought, rather prematurely, to make film an adjunct of painting as well as Realist fiction. Now, after six years of highly successful serial filmmaking, he defended the cinema’s value as a popular mass spectacle, in terms of a concise ideological formula. As the popular art of the time, the cinema functioned chiefly as entertainment, as a means of escape from the constrictions of ordinary life in an industrialized society and into an imaginary world “where our faculties find freer exercise.”26 What counted, therefore, was the story, anything else of interest was subordinated to and determined by the story. Feuillade’s position dovetailed with what René Clair and others eventually came to define (in current terms) as the classical Hollywood cinema: technique at the service of the progress of the story. Except that Feuillade insisted that a particular kind of story worked best, at least for the French—romantic adventure fiction, which soon actually came to dominate French film genres such as the serial and historical reconstruction film.27 And Louis Nalpas, even more than Feuillade, whether he was working as an independent producer or as the executive producer of Jean Sapène’s Cinéromans, proved especially adept at resurrecting such popular nineteenth-century French fiction in a string of successful serials—for example, Henri Fescourt’s Mathias Sandorf (1921), Rouletabille chez les bohemiens (1922), and Mandrin (1924).28
A further exception can be seen in the writings of André Antoine. In apparent opposition to the industry’s excessive predilection for adventure story entertainment, Antoine continued to advocate a counter position in a series of acrimonious articles written after Pathé forced him to abandon filmmaking in 1921. For Antoine, the cinema was still in a period of transition. On the one hand, he condemned Feuillade, Pathé, and Diamant-Berger for their “bad taste” in choosing stories to film and for their reliance on “conventional” methods of filmmaking.29 On the other, he criticized Gance, L’Herbier, and Delluc for an “artistic pretension” that, he thought, only upset most audiences who were unprepared to follow their work.30 Instead, the cinema ought to confine itself to adaptations of “famous novels and plays”—exemplified in the work of Baroncelli, Poirier, and himself— adaptations that would guarantee commercial success and at the same time, Antoine argued, allow filmmakers gradually to discover the artistic potential of film.31 Thus, the literary source text retained its privileged position in his “theory,” guaranteeing the cinema’s status as art. And the cinema’s function remained—as it had in his early theater work—simply to represent the external human behavior of the source story in a three-dimensional space with as much verisimilitude as possible. Antoine reiterated the principles of filmmaking he had laid out just after the war, with one addition. He now insisted on shooting a scene, especially on location, with five or six cameras running simultaneously, in order to be able to choose the shots that best conveyed the actors’ facial expressions and gestures at any one moment.32 What was becoming the norm for shooting scenes of spectacle in the French historical reconstruction films Antoine wanted to apply to smaller scenes involving just a few people. Consequently, despite the vehemence of his attacks, by now Antoine’s “theory” had become little more than a variation on the mainstream concept of a narrative cinema.
Whether perceived as American or French, this mainstream position provided a form of status quo against which, as a matter of course, most other French writers of the period rebelled along one of two divergent lines first developed by Vuillermoz and Delluc during the war. The elitist argument that the film medium was capable of producing “high art” or a form of art comparable to the established arts gained wider and wider credence. At one point or another, almost all French writers—including Delluc, Moussinac, and Epstein—paid lip service to this position, which, through a transformation of Delluc’s initial use of the term, became synonymous with “French Impressionism.”33 Clearly, its leading exponents, however, were Canudo, Vuillermoz, and Dulac, who consistently engaged in a Romantic- and especially Symbolist-inflected discourse. Replete with terms drawn from as well as references to the other arts, that discourse assumed that culture constituted “the deepest record, the deepest impulse, and the deepest resource of the human spirit,” the province of a secular and “natural” priesthood of artists.34 For these writers as well as many others, in an industrialized society that marginalized individual perception and devalued the “data” of the senses, the narrative cinema, then, ultimately ought to function as a pretext for personal vision and lyrical expression. In the hands of a true (read “alienated”) artist, Canudo hoped, this “new string on the eternal lyre” could “still the currents of inner life or feeling and crystallize them, . . . fix life’s elusiveness and synthesize its harmonies,” and eventually produce the individualized style of a master.35 The artist could speak to the spectator directly, “enter into communion with him,” reveal the “very soul of things,” or share his “intense inner life.”36 For the cinema’s uniqueness, according to Canudo, lay in its “extraordinary and striking faculty of representing immateriality.’’37
Audiences for such film art would be limited, Vuillermoz assumed, because not many spectators could understand the “cinegraphic language . . . stammered out by a few extraordinary artists.”38 The forms such film art took would be restricted as well. Within the commercial narrative cinema, Vuillermoz and Dulac tended to prefer “psychological films” for the latitude they offered in the expression of inner emotions or feeling.39 Meanwhile, Canudo continued to dream of the “synthetic” film that would “reproduce the emotion of life in its entirety” in a kind of “synthesis-temple” of all the arts—a notion that L’Herbier seems to have attempted to realize in L’Inhumaine (1924).40 Moreover, Canudo pushed for another, “purer,” conception of form—a conception that he actually put in practice through the CASA exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne.41 Here, as in Symbolist poetry, film art approached the condition of an “intransitive art”—as an end unto itself, a self-fulfilling passion. If it took a group of apostles or audacious snobs to proselytize for such an elite concept of film art, Lionel Landry proclaimed, then so be it. “Perhaps a milieu of snobbery is necessary,” Landry wrote, “for the blossoming of a new art form.”42 That label would later stick.
In contrast to this elitist position as well as the industry’s almost exclusive interest in story entertainment and adaptations, Delluc and his friend Moussinac persisted in their vision of the cinema as a “democratic art”— that is, a Realist narrative art of, by, and for the people.43 Only through this conception might the cinema resolve the sharp separation or alienation of culture from material social life, a separation that Canudo and Vuillermoz seemed to encourage. For Delluc and Moussinac, what continued to be crucial, principally through the example of American and Swedish films, was the story and particularly the natural landscape or urban milieu out of which it evolved.44 At its best, as Canudo summarized Delluc’s thinking (without reference), the cinema transformed nature itself or the ambiance of a natural landscape into a character.45 The subjects Delluc and Moussinac preferred, therefore, were original scenarios of simple, banal stories drawn from real life, especially working-class or provincial life.46 News items or faits-divers transformed into tragedy, as Moussinac put it, in praising Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and Delluc’s own Fièvre (1921).47 Here, in light of Gance’s La Roue, Canudo contributed a variation on this conception (looking back to Zola) with his celebration of the cinema’s representation of the “collective spirit” or “crowd psychology” of a particular social milieu.48 In fact, this Realist conception of the cinema generally echoed the French Naturalists’ valorization of the relative truth of simply representing the “local color” and factual data of a specific milieu. And it was complemented by the continuing French fascination for documentary films—for instance, The Shackleton Expedition (1920) and Nanook (1922)— as evidenced by both writers and audiences.49
Contrary to what was typical in the French film industry, Delluc and Moussinac also argued that the conception of the original scenario and its realization ought to be the work of a single individual.50 In order to be a film artist rather than a simple metteur-en-scène of adaptations, one had to become an auteur or cinéaste, to use Delluc’s favorite term.51 The two critics were just as insistent that the filmmaker must become an artisan or craftsman as well.52 Poet and scriptwriter Marcel L’Herbier, for instance, had become a kind of model filmmaker because he had learned through apprenticeship to be a fine film craftsman, just as Delluc himself had become a model critic by learning how to be part of “the crowd” or mass audience. In Photogénie (1920), Delluc reaffirmed his faith in the ability of most French audiences (especially working-class audiences) to understand and appreciate film art, whatever its national origin.53 And a similar faith asserted itself early on in Moussinac and later even in Robert Desnos.54 Now, however, Delluc and Moussinac were as ready to help educate those audiences as they were to learn from them. And they continued to be vague, despite Moussinac’s growing attachment to the French Communist Party, about the broad new social community—whether class-determined, national, or international—that they hoped the cinema was in the process of building.55 The possibility for such a community seemed to be fast disappearing in the context of a conservative political and socioeconomic swing that was then reaching a peak in France, the power of the growing multinational capitalist constituency of the film industry (especially as dominated by the Americans), and the success of Canudo and others in appropriating film into the framework of established art institutions.
In addition to these opposing Impressionist and Realist theories of cinema, the non-narrative, “plastic” conception of the cinema began to circulate ever more widely, especially in the writings of Elie Faure, Fernand Léger, and Jean-Francis Laglenn. Through them—perhaps because the first two worked in close association with the group of artists who published L’Esprit nouveau—the Modernist ideas previously articulated by Survage and Gromaire were reformulated, in part, within the context of a “Purist” theory of art.56 For Faure and Léger, especially, the fundamental nature of the cinema was not dramatic or psychological, descriptive or documentary; it was plastic—which meant it had to do principally with cineplastics, the representation of forms either in repose or in movement. Like Gromaire before them, neither advocated a film form that was completely abstract; but Léger, particularly after seeing La Roue, recognized the potential of films “where the mechanical element plays a major role, where the machine becomes the leading character, the leading actor,,”57 This insight led Léger to believe in the cinema as a means to celebrate the precision, order, and harmony of the machine or the mechanical in modern life; and it brought film as a medium within the scope of his own artistic practice—for example, Ballet mécanique (1924).58 The ideological implications of Légers “new spectacle” might be said loosely to parallel Delluc and Moussinac’s advocacy of the cinema as a “democratic art,” but a rather different ideology became explicit in Faure’s theory of cineplastics. On the one hand, much like Epstein, Faure dreamed of a kind of epistemological cinema that exclusively explored the interpénétration of the spatial and the temporal— for instance, bringing together decades or centuries of visual images within the spatiotemporal boundaries of a single film.59 On the other, he saw the current cinema serving an essential function in a modern industrial society ever more centered on machines of travel and the architectural hubs of transportation systems. “Cinéplastics will doubtless be the spiritual ornament sought for in this period [of rest and relay in travel]—the play that this new society will find most useful in developing in the masses the sense of confidence, of harmony, of cohesion.”60 Here the ideological trappings of the “new spirit” of Purism—synthesis, construction, harmony—and its confirmation of the new industrial social order find concise articulation. Faure’s text, in fact, could be taken as a credo for the famous 1925 Paris Exposition of the Modern Decorative Arts.
A singular exception to these more or less familiar positions erupted in the early writings of Jean Epstein. Using an idiosyncratic amalgam of languages drawn from philosophy, physiology, psychology, and poetics or literary aesthetics, Epstein began with a number of ideas shared by Delluc and Moussinac (as well as others by Faure and Léger) and transformed them into a theory that came close to being as elitist as Vuillermoz and Canudo’s.61 For Epstein, “situations” rather than stories constituted the real subject of the cinema. What fascinated him, according to Stuart Liebman, were situations endemic to the working conditions of a highly industrial society, especially those involving mental fatigue brought about by machine labor.62 Through its focus on such conditions, Epstein believed (translating the negative into the positive), the cinema could reveal and explore the non-linguistic, non-rational operations of the “unconscious” in human existence.63 Here the work of Freud first entered French discourse on the cinema, although Epstein took pains to try to distance himself from the Viennese psychoanalyst.64 For he was convinced that the unconscious had its own “grammar” or “logic” of knowing—he called it lyrosophy—that provided an epistemological or ontological basis for film art, as well as modern poetry.65 Sometimes, almost in anticipation of Antonin Artaud or Dziga Vertov, Epstein wrote as if the camera itself functioned like an analogous metal brain, independent of human agency, that broke through the conventional bounds of human perception, to reveal being itself or, in Berg-sonian terms, the change in duration of the universe as a whole.66 At other times, he seemed to insist on the filmmaker’s intervention—through his “experimental mentality” or “analytic propensity”—to make certain that what appeared on the screen exploded the prison of real space-time and opened literally onto another intuited world that would astonish and excite strong emotions in the audience.67 In either case, the cinema seemed to create a new system of “lyrosophical” knowing, by bringing the unconscious to consciousness, through the hyperextension of a single sense—that of seeing. Epstein, too, seemed to assume that most audiences could understand and appreciate this new form of consciousness, for he described what occurred between screen image and spectator as a mysterious relay of energy, as in breathing or taking the sacrament.68 Yet the esoteric, highly metaphorical nature of his own language—his texts actually can be read as an attempt to put that lyrosophy in play—tended to contradict that assumption.
One last conception of cinema finally began to coalesce during this period—that of the Surrealists. Early traces can be found in the essays and reviews written by Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault in the late 1910s; but it was Robert Desnos who, in his Paris-Journal review column, in 1923, began to articulate an explicitly Surrealist “theory” of cinema. What attracted the Surrealists to the cinema—particularly the popular serials and American comedies and westerns—was its power to overturn the laws of logic and social convention. “Its singular power of disorientation,” to use André Breton’s famous phrase, “cast us outside ourselves and at the same time awakened in us forces of which we were unaware.”69 For Desnos, the cinema acted as an enchanting substitute for the dream state or drugs, which gave access to the unconscious and to unexpected conjunctions.70 It constituted an everchanging “storehouse” of images, where the Surrealist spectator could freely associate among selected images and reorganize them at will. Specifically, the film image functioned as a double discourse of the manifest and the repressed—for Desnos, the sexual or erotic—that stimulated the poet’s transformation of the banal and the conventional into the marvelous.71 Therefore, as Paul Hammond argues, bringing a film’s secret life, its latent repressed content, to the surface had priority in the early “synthetic criticism” and cinematic poems of Soupault and his colleagues.72 In other words, Soupault’s “reviews” of Chaplin’s Sunnyside (1919) and William S. Hart’s Blue Blazes Rawden (1918) used a method somewhat similar to psychoanalysis: they attempted to distill the latent dream content from the manifest content of popular cinema.73 In contrast to Epstein’s early epistemological interest in the unconscious, the Surrealists considered the unconscious—in film and elsewhere—as essential to a project that was both aesthetic and sociopolitical. Desnos’s film reviews, Soupault’s “synthetic texts,” and even a few scenarios such as Benjamin Peret’s “Pulcherie veut un auto” (1923) were all part of an emerging Surrealist project radically to change perception and the experience of reality as the first step toward the actual, physical transformation of the world.74
On the question of the nature and function of film as an art form in French society, then, the spectrum of theories laid down during the war hardened in place, with the addition of at least two significant “bands.” What was strikingly different about the early 1920s, however, was the intense interest, sometimes to the point of exclusivity, in delineating the raw material of the film medium and the methods or techniques that most contributed to its transformation into art. “The cinema is no more literature than it is painting, sculpture, architecture, or music,” wrote Moussinac, “it is a profoundly original art which can borrow from the other arts certain elements of its definitive form but whose [governing] laws remain to be precisely discovered.”75 That the cinema was emerging as a new “language” was now commonly assumed by most French writers, from Vuillermoz to Moussinac or Epstein. Whether or not a film such as L’Herbier’s El Dorado (1921) would later be recognized for its original contribution to that emergence, as Lionel Landry believed, the French were unusually preoccupied with defining the parameters of that language.76 And whether or not the cinema constituted “a form of ideographic writing,” as Vuiller-moz put it early in 1920, film discourse was acquiring more and more autonomy and specificity.77 The aim of French critics and filmmakers, Epstein concluded, was “to establish the premises for a cinematic grammar or rhetoric . . . a grammar peculiar to itself.”78 Although the assumption never became explicit, this effort often seemed intent on establishing a uniquely French system of “film writing” in contrast to the then-dominant American system of spatio-temporal continuity editing. Here the similarities and differences among texts produced alignments that sometimes cut across or redistributed the expected divisions between theoretical camps.
In one sense, this search for cinematic specificity was undertaken from two complementary positions or perspectives, that of the filmmaker and that of the film spectator. In his 1920 statement on an aesthetic of the cinema, for instance, Vuillermoz summarized the first position quite clearly.79 There were two separate “creative acts” during the process of filmmaking. One involved choices made in writing the scenario or script and then in recording images on film—through framing, lighting, and arranging the actors and decors. The other involved choices made in assembling those images or shots into sequences that would constitute a complete film. Of the two, Vuillermoz argued, the “real construction” took place in the assemblage or editing. Both provided evidence that the cinema was an art, but the latter made it unique among the arts. Delluc and Moussinac perhaps best articulated the concept of cinematic specificity from the perspective of the film spectator. For them, too, editing seemed to take precedence as they focused attention on rhythm in film. Here Moussinac even tried, without much success, to provide scientific and philosophical arguments to support the idea that “rhythm is a spiritual need” and hence a crucial characteristic of film as art.80 Nevertheless, Delluc and Moussinac asserted (and Clair seconded them), two kinds of rhythm worked in conjunction within a film: an internal rhythm involving movement within the mise-en-scene of the shot and an external rhythm involving the length or duration of the shot as well as the kinds of transitions between shots.81 As a sign of their interest in the way external rhythm was controlled in a film, they redefined the concept of cinegraphie—which both Vuilliermoz and L’Herbier had first articulated during the war—to distinguish the rhythmical or structural ordering ofphotogenie throughout a film. As such, cinegraphie now came to occupy a crucial place both in Delluc’s and in Moussinac’s writing.
This simple division ultimately rested, however, on a more complex analysis of cinematic specificity. Here the French seemed to have reached a consensus on the parameters of film “language,” parameters that persist in one way or another down to this day. The basic unit of film was the shot, or to quote Dulac, “the image in its most isolated expressive form.”82 More specifically, that basic unit encompassed, to use Epstein’s phrase, those “photogenic elements” that operated within and between shots, namely, the specific features of mise-en-scene and especially framing in conjunction with editing.83 Writers remained uncertain whether these elements constituted a strictly regulated grammar with a complementary fixed lexicon or a loosely defined rhetoric with a flexible set of discursive strategies—and the terms, grammar and rhetoric, circulated almost synonymously. But they seemed to agree more or less on the multidimensional nature of the shot and its constituent elements. For Dulac, “the shot simultaneously defined place, action, and thought.”84 For Epstein, the rhythm of film images—their “photogenic mobility”—functioned formally, dramatically, and psychologically.85 For Moussinac, similarly, the cinégraphie of film images generated a plastic, representational, emotional, and intellectual significance.86 The assumption here was that the cinema operated as a large-scale form constituted of several codes or “notational systems”: formal, representational, narrative, and connotative or symbolic.87 And the interrelations among these existed at the level of the shot and its constituent elements. Potentially, any one system or combination of systems might override the others and act as the principle of continuity controlling the overall structure of a particular film.
Consistent with their interest in photogénie and cinégraphie, the French tended to focus debate on how the shot and its constituent elements could produce patterns of continuity other than those of the classical Hollywood cinema, which almost exclusively served the purpose of storytelling. Del-luc and Moussinac, interestingly enough, sometimes resisted this tendency. Delluc, for instance, praised Fairbanks’s Three Musketeers (1921) as far superior to Diamant-Berger’s Trois Mousquetaires (1921–1922) precisely because its rhythmic patterns were so neatly geared to the action of the Alexandre Dumas narrative.88 In effect, he was chiding his former publisher for failing to learn from his very own words in Le Cinéma (1919). Generally, both Delluc and Moussinac agreed, the French gave far too little attention to the “continuity” or decoupage, to the development of the scenario idea (both narrative and thematic) in the form of a shot-by-shot script.89 “Few have understood,” wrote Moussinac, “that the decoupage and montage, otherwise called the idea and its visualization, are as essential as the mise-en-scene.”90° The publication of four of Delluc’s scripts, in Drames du cinéma (1923), was offered modestly as a model. Here, in the “Prologue,” Delluc briefly singled out several sequences from Fièvre (1921) in order to explain how specific choices in the mise-en-scène, framing, and editing controlled the process of conveying atmosphere, action, and thinking or feeling.91 And he also suggested that one particular feature of film language dictated the development of a certain kind of story. “The possibility of rapidly alternating images . . . creates an extraordinary field for antithesis” in the cinema; and this, in turn, implies that “the confrontation between past and present, between reality and memory, . . . is one of the most seductive plots of this art of photogenie.”92 Delluc’s own film practice was indeed a testament to that.
At the opposite end of this debate on principles of continuity clustered a number of conceptions that sought to “purify” the cinema, to imagine it as an art of pure pattern and process. One particular conception especially tempted Moussinac. Here the lure of rhythmic specificity led to a fascination with technique for its own sake. “The technique [of the cinema],” claimed Moussinac, “is becoming richer with a speed and power that no other art has ever known. Everyone of us is in bondage to it.”93 By technique, he meant variable speed recording (especially slow motion), various optical devices (superimposition, vignette masks, distorting filters and lenses), “punctuation” devices (the fade, iris, and dissolve), and accelerating montage. These constituted a panoply of technological innovations (and more were expected) discovered during the process of shooting and editing “research” over the previous half-dozen years or so and now disseminated widely throughout the French cinema. Such technical features were unique to the cinema and, therefore, might define its material condition as separate from the other arts and perhaps as even more advanced (and open to further change). The French writers’ focus on such techniques, of course, continued the interest in technological research that had marked prewar writing on the cinema; but it also intensified, in part, because of their confrontation with a series of major films in the early 1920s. The conjunction of L’Herbier’s El Dorado and Wiene’s Caligari in the fall of 1921, for instance, led the French to valorize their own interest in “special effects” produced by the camera alone in opposition to the perceived German interest in a highly stylized mise-en-scène.94 The startling premiere of Gance’s La Roue, in the winter of 1922–1923, then extended their interest to the rhythmic effects of editing.95 This unusual attention to technique, it should be noted, could equally serve the purposes of Moussinac’s “Realism,” Vuillermoz and Canudo’s “Impressionism,” Faure’s “cineplastics,” or Epstein’s “lyrosophy.” But it reached the point, momentarily with Moussinac, where technological innovation in the cinema came close to becoming a privileged end in itself.96 Indeed, this valorization of technique provided support for Canudo’s effort, through CASA’s screenings of film excerpts at the Salon d’Automne, to define the cinema in terms of either individual or national styles. And Canudo’s notion of a “cinematic anthology was extremely valuable,” Epstein argued, “because, through these fragments of film, it drew attention to cinematic style: it isolated style from narrative.”97 The exclusive fascination with technique, then, provided a crucial basis for the later concept of a “pure cinema.”
The dominant principle of continuity, the one that supposedly most distinguished the French from the Americans, however, depended on the then widely accepted analogy between film and painting or, more especially, music. A few writers such as Faure and Léger privileged the “plastic” or formal relations within and between shots—for example, line, form, texture, color—as the principal basis for film art.98 Film existed solely as “a projected image,” Léger asserted, or as an orderly succession of “judiciously composed” images.99 The shot was like a painting or sculpture in motion, its graphic elements continually recombining in rhythmic, almost mathematical patterns. After the premiere of Gance’s La Roue, writers such as Moussinac and Clair even speculated on the possibility of an exclusively mathematical basis for cinematic rhythm, whether the subject be the movement of human bodies or machine parts or a union of the two.100 Nearly every writer, at one time or another, however, accepted Vuillermoz’s “musical analogy” as perhaps the crucial principle of editing continuity. “What was the cinema, after all,” in Gance’s famous formulation, “but the music of light.”101 Here the shot was analogous to a musical chord, in which the notes corresponded to specific features of the mise-en-scène and framing; thus a sequence of shots or a scene was analogous to several bars of music or even a stanza or a movement. Some writers such as Canudo and the composer, Arthur Honegger, suggested that this correspondence derived from an actual synchronization of film and orchestral accompaniment, whether that synchronization was defined rhythmically or emotionally. In La Roue, for instance, Honegger said he had sought to achieve an “absolute correspondence between the animating spirit of a fragment of film and its rhythmic musical corroboration.”102 Resurrecting Richard Wagner’s dream of a grand synthesis of drama and music, which he had first articulated before the war, Canudo also envisioned a new form of musical drama whose narrative rhythm would be generated by already existing compositions of music.103 Others such as Vuillermoz, Delluc, Moussinac, and Clair, however, acted as if filmic rhythm functioned like music automatically, that is, independent of any accompanying score. As Moussinac put it, the “veritable orchestration of image and rhythm . . . finally tempts us to close our ears in order to submit more completely to the [cinema’s] visual suggestions and transfigurations of feeling.”104 Cinégraphie itself thus played the role of orchestral accompaniment, with the potential to transcend any narrative pretext. As Clair confessed, however, precisely how that happened remained unanswered.105 Nevertheless, although both the “plastic” and “musical” conceptions of film language still assumed that a film image was representational in nature, if not necessarily narrative, together they, too, would foster the development of a “pure” abstract cinema.
At the time, the most sustained synthesis of this focus on technique and plastic or musical patterns in the cinema came from Dulac in her lecture at the Musée Galliera, in June 1924. That lecture served to confirm, by then, the dominance of Impressionism. Dulac’s task was to catalogue “the expressive techniques of the cinema . . . in short, the whole syntax of film”—illustrating them with excerpts drawn from her own films as well as others.106 Her catalogue overlapped to some extent with Moussinac’s panoply of techniques and clearly emphasized those having to do with framing and editing.107 Particularly significant for Dulac were the effects of camera placement (distance and angle) on the shot and the effects of the rhythmic alternation or juxtaposition of shots. “The psychological shot, the large close up as we call it”—for instance, “the large close up of Mme Lebas’ ear” in La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923)—“is the very thought of the character projected onto the screen.”108 “Superimposition is thinking, the inner life”—for instance, in Volkoff’s Kean (1924), when “the big, laughing mouth of the valet . . . seems to engulf Kean with contempt.”109 Finally, in Beudet again, the rhythmic alternation of “two characters . . . opposed ideals . . . different dreams” through a series of opening shots— for instance, close-ups of objects and actions (playing the piano/weighing money, reading a book/measuring cloth)—ends in a long shot that unites the two. “Suddenly, all the jarring incongruities of a marriage appear. It is a coup de théâtre.”110 As each of Dulac’s analyses of film excerpts demonstrated, proper technique served “to augment a fact by grafting onto it a feeling”—or, as Clair put it, “to combine harmoniously the sentimental rhythm of the action and the mathematical rhythm of the number of images.”111 In other words, technique served to express the psychology or inner life of a character, to expand and intensify the feelings latent in a story or situation. In Dulac’s theory, then, narrative ended up governing the overall shape of the film; the formal and connotative only seemed to override the narrative so that the filmmaker could “create a bit of inner life in the midst of the action.”112
Dulac’s lecture, like most of her colleagues’ writing on the cinema during this period, still depended on a general concept of language long prevalent in the broader culture. This was an idealist theory of language (whether Romantic or Symbolist) that assumed that “the transcendent human subject . . . was to be seen as the source and origin of all meaning.”113 Consequently, language functioned as a means of expression for the consciousness of one individual (supposedly separate from social reality) to communicate with another. Film language, whatever its system of grammar or rhetoric, then operated simply as a specialized version of expressive theory. Another concept of language, however, circulated half-submerged in a number of writings. This might be called a protostructuralist or protosemiotic theory of language since it assumed that meaning was produced or constructed as a material practice through the interplay of a textual system of signs. The meaning of a sign or a nexus of signs was not fixed, say, in denotation or connotation—consistently signifying a character’s thought or feeling. Rather, it could fluctuate, depending on the sign’s context among a sequence of other signs or images. This theory perhaps first finds partial articulation in Landry’s analysis of specific images—for instance, Sibilla in soft focus—in L’Herbier’s El Dorado.114 It lurks in Del-luc’s celebration of William S. Hart’s westerns: nature morte . . . plants or objects, exteriors or interiors, physical details, everything material . . . is animated according to where and how the composer of the film uses it.”115 It surfaces in Moussinac’s analysis of cinematic rhythm: “the beauty and value [of the film image] changes, is singularly diminished or increased, according to where those images are placed in time, that is, the order in which they succeed one another.”116 It even appears briefly in Dulac: “the work affects you through a purely cinematic technique, of contrasts and parallelisms [of images].”117 Here, then, the cinema produced texts composed of or deploying the multidimensional signs of several notational systems, texts whose own rules of “reading” were still developing or in flux.
Epstein’s early writings on the cinema represent a fascinating amalgam of these different theories of language. For he was very uneasy about yielding “to facile or misleading analogies” between film and verbal language.118 Sometimes, much like Delluc and Moussinac, he echoed the expressive theory of Dulac, Canudo, and others. More often than not, however, Epstein hesitated between privileging certain features of film language per se—for instance, the close-up and moving-camera shot, which, by intensifying and transforming perception, created a new form of consciousness—and exploring, much like Landry, how those kinds of shots, as a form of polysemous “hieroglyphic language,” could be arranged in the structure of a detailed decoupage.119 On the one hand, for Epstein, film language was animistic: it attributed “personality” to or made “the spirit visible” in both things and people. On the other, and simultaneously, its “photogenic mobility” could be shaped into a spatiotemporal system that simulated and then extended or challenged the conventions of perception and representation.120 In other words, it provided the basis for another kind of “counter cinema”—to use Thomas Elsaesser’s terminology for the Weimar cinema—in which the spectator as a constructed subject is rather openly or ambiguously inscribed within the process of narration.121
Much like his colleagues, Epstein gave little attention to specific instances of this structuring or inscription. But he offered at least two different, tantalizing glimpses of possible film forms. One would take a merry-go-round or dance as a crucial “poetic” situation for a narrative film. “An intelligent decoupage [would] reconstitute the double life of the dance,” Epstein wrote, “by linking together the viewpoints of the spectator and the dancer, objective and subjective, if I can put it that way.”122 This reconstitution would be constructed out of a (vaguely suggested) combination of close-ups, moving-camera shots, and accelerating montage. In actual practice, in what Clair called the “visual intoxication” of the carnival sequence in Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (1923), the relatively simple Romantic synthesis of the objective and subjective articulated here turned into a far more complex textual operation.123 Another possible form, however, appeared in Epstein’s very first book on modern poetry: that of the film poem, a form that apparently first attracted the young poet to the cinema.124 Here, representational images would be linked together, not through sequentially, but through simultaneity, so that their suggestive, connotative, or metaphorical significance would be foregrounded. By implication, just as in the poetry of Apollinaire and Cendrars, the precise meaning of these images would accumulate through patterns of similarity and difference, repetition and variation. Here was the germ—or quantum theory, if you will—of a cinema of simultaneity or discontinuity and dislocation. Within five years, Epstein believed, the French would be writing film poems: “150 meters and 100 images like beads on a thread that would approximate the thinking process.”125 His own films as well as others would prove him right, and this quasi-semiotic conception of film language would become even more evident in his writings of the late 1920s.126
French film reviewing deserves a final note here for it had reached the point where several critics could be taken as models in writing film criticism. Reviews in the daily newspapers and industry journals still tended to depend on plot summary, amplified by comments on the felicity of the film adaptation to its source in drama or fiction and evaluations of the separate contributions of each phase or component of its production. In the reviews of Vuillermoz, Moussinac, and Clair, however, traditional aesthetic standards were now beginning to assert their power. These critics tended to focus on the unity and coherence of the work as a whole, the controlling vision of the filmmaker as auteur, and the specific (often technical) contributions of the film to the development of film as an art form. Moussinac’s long review of Broken Blossoms, for instance, situated Griffith’s film in the context of previous “advanced” films, including Griffith’s own; singled out the technical originality and harmony of its visual composition, rhythm, and atmosphere; and objected to the philosophical pretension of his choice of subject as well as his lack of “lyricism.”127 Other subsequent reviews generally followed this format—for instance, the clusters of important texts that marked the premiere of El Dorado or grappled with the impact of La Roue or appraised Epstein’s first films. Here, Moussinac’s concise analysis of L’Auberge rouge (1923) was exemplary:
I note, for example: the wonderfully quick manner of the panoramic shots (especially before and after the execution: the background of trees and sky), the powerful nuances of the close shots, the calculated cutting in the scene where the hero leaves the tragic chamber in obedience to the violently opposed forces of his emotion, the mathematics of the montage at certain moments of pathos, the character types anchored with a loose faithfulness to life (the masks of the drinkers, the accordian player, the old woman, the gypsy, the judges), the details of atmosphere (produced by a combination of lighting and soft focus), the freedom with which the actors perform as an ensemble and particularly the astonishing photogenic performances of [Leon] Mathot and Gina Manes. All this puts L’Auberge rouge far in advance of the kilometers of filmstock bungled by our “old hands.” . . . In Jean Epstein, we have one more cinegraphist. We have so few!128
Moreover, several writers were beginning to engage in a “close analysis” of particular sequences or excerpts from a film. In her 1924 lecture, for instance, Dulac offered a series of specific “readings” of the process by which the composition and arrangement of shots in, say, the opening of La Souriante Beudet led the spectator to adopt a certain interpretation.129
At least one form of criticism, however, ran counter to these aesthetic standards of unity and coherence, technical competence, and even technological innovation. As might be expected, it was most evident in the writings of Epstein and Desnos. In order to promote discontinuities and the rupturing of conventional logic and “classical construction,” their own texts sought to produce frissons that would jar the reader/spectator into seeing anew—awakening to find the cinema opening onto “a new domain of poetry and dream.”130 And poetry, as Epstein wrote, in reviewing La Roue, is not only “harmony, balance, and good taste”; it “erupts like a storm” and is not without excess and horror.131
In the early 1920s, French writing on the cinema went through a paradoxical process conceptually—hardening in some ways and expanding in others, narrowing in focus yet also diversifying. Concern over the “crisis” situation of the French film industry failed to produce a consensus on what action ought to be taken to remedy it, which tended to hamstring the uncoordinated efforts of individual companies or producer-distributors. But economic and political issues generally were subordinated to aesthetic questions, for the latter still generated a good deal of excitement and probably a greater sense of potential resolution. The former balance between high-art and low-art positions shifted slightly as Vuillermoz, Canudo, and Dulac’s “Impressionism” gradually overshadowed Delluc and Moussinac’s “Realism”; but both were set off to some extent from the various “Modernist” conceptions of Epstein, Faure, Léger, and Desnos. Each position included writers—for instance, Vuillermoz, Canudo, Dulac, Moussinac, Epstein—who sought to systematize their thinking about the nature, function, raw material, and technique of the cinema. Yet, as before, their texts were often marked by contradictory assumptions. For instance, several different conceptions of language—expressive, revelatory, structuralist or semiotic—underscored their attempts to define film language, producing especially fascinating effects in the writing of Epstein, Moussinac, and Canudo. Whatever position they took, however, the French were engaged conscientiously in a search for cinematic specificity, even to the point of isolating uniquely cinematic techniques. Generally, now, the earlier concern for photogénie or the singularly transformative nature of the film image gave way to a concern for cinégraphie or the unique rhythmic principles that governed the placement, duration, and interrelation of film images. While some writers urged that these rhythmic principles—narrative, emotional, plastic, musical, poetic—ought to be synthesized in a film, others argued that one principle in particular could exclusively shape the formal system of a film, which implicitly set out the conditions for a kind of “pure cinema.” In this search for specificity, the French continued to draw occasionally on American films for models; but, more often than not, they now defined their positions in response to particular French or German films—for example, El Dorado, Caligari, La Roue, Coeur fidèle. An unspoken opposition to the American cinema thus fueled something close to a collective effort to establish distinctly French theories of cinema.
1. The next five paragraphs constitute a condensed and revised version of the initial sections of “The Alternate Cinema Network,” in my French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915— 1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 241–55.
2. This information is drawn from an examination of most of these newspapers, plus “La Presse cinématographique,” Almanach du cinema, ed. Jean Pascal and Adrien Maître (Paris: Cinémagazine, 1922), 85–86; “Journaux Parisiens,” Annuaire général de la cinématographie, ed. Jean Pascal (Paris: Cinémagazine, 1925), 559; René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le Cinéma etlapresse, 1895–1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 54–62; and Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, De 1871 à 1940 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 510–84.
3. Politically, Le Figaro took a turn to the right in 1922, when it was bought up by the perfume manufacturer, François Coty. Strangely, Action française (which was then probably enjoying its greatest influence on French intellectuals) as well as its complementary weekly, Candide, continued to show little interest in the cinema. For further information on Action française during this period, see Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century Trance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 172–201; J. Plu-myène and R. Lasierra, Les Facismes français, 1921–1939 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963), 15–28; and Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), 77–84.
4. In 1922, Henri Dumay began publishing Le Quotidien, which, along with L’Oeuvre, became the principal advocate for the left in the 1924 elections and then the “official” paper of the Cartel des Gauches government. Eugène Merle’s Paris-Soir, which grew out of the satirical weekly, Le Merl blanc, in 1923, also supported the left in the 1924 elections. For further information on the leftist press during this period, see Jean Touchard, La Gauche en France depuis 1900 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), 111–12, 145–46.
5. René Jeanne (1887–1969) was an influential film reviewer and industry reporter who, together with Charles Ford, would later write a five-volume Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma (Robert Laffont, 1947) as well as Le Cinéma et la presse (1961).
6. For a lively account of what it was like to work for L’Oeuvre and Bonsoir in the early 1920s, see Henri Jeanson, 70 Ans d’adolescence (Paris: Stock, 1971), 116–38. In January 1923, when the Camelot du roi “shock troops” of the Action française group sought to revenge the murder (by anarchist Germaine Berton) of one of their leaders, Marius Plateau, they took to street violence that ended in their wrecking the offices and presses of L’Oeuvre and Bonsoir—Weber, Action française, 139.
7. A good survey of the French literary and intellectual journals of the period, and their political affiliation can be found in Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, “Notes sur les revues françaises, pendant six ans (1914–1920),” L’Esprit nouveau, 1 (October 1920), 99–102.
8. Interestingly, the Mercure de Frances principal rival, the Nouvelle Revue française, did not give much attention to the cinema; nor did Henri Barbusses Clarté, which was allied with the French Communist Party and for which, since he was reviewing films for L’Humanité, Moussinac might have been expected to write.
9. B. Tokine, “L’Esthétique du cinéma,” L’Esprit nouveau, 1 (October 1920), 84–89. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” L’Esprit nouveau, 3 (December 1920), 349–51. ElieFaure, “Char-lot,” L’Esprit nouveau, 6 (March 1921), 657–66. Louis Delluc, “Pro Cinéma,” L’Esprit nouveau, 14 (January 1922), 1666–68. Jean Epstein, “Cinéma,” L’Esprit nouveau, 14 (January 1922), 1669–70. Here again, the heightened interest in the cinema shown by the formalist, even “classical” monthly, L’Esprit nouveau, contrasts with the diminished interest (or perhaps frustration) of the Dada-Surrealist journal, Littérature.
10. It was in an interview in Les Nouvelles littéraires (24 March 1923) that Jean Cocteau tried to explain why he chose to work in the theater rather than in the cinema throughout the 1920s.
11. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinéma et la presse, 170. Christian Bosséno, “Le Cinéma et la presse (II),” La Revue du cinéma: Image et son, 342 (September 1979), 94–97.
12. At the time of his death in March 1924, Delluc also left a nearly completed manuscript entitled “Les Cinéastes,” which he probably hoped to publish through Le Monde nouveau, an international journal and publishing house. See, for instance, his “Les Cinéastes à Paris,” Choses de théâtre, 1 (October 1921), 13–18; “Les Cinéastes,” Le Monde nouveau, 5 (15 August—1 September 1922), 34–44; and several articles on American filmmakers (Griffith, De Mille, Tourneur) in Cinéa. This manuscript was published for the first time in Louis Delluc, Le Cinéma et les cinéastes: Ecrits cinématographiques, vol. 1 (Paris: La Cinémathèque française, 1985), 123–194. Delluc also published the complete scenario for Fièvre in Le Cra-pouillot (16 March 1923), 22–27, and an excerpt from the scenario for La Femme de nulle part mCinémagazine, 3 (6 July 1923), 17–19.
13. Through Blaise Cendrars, then editor of Editions de la sirène, Epstein got a job as an assistant editor at the celebrated avant-garde publishing house, when he came to Paris from Lyon in the summer of 1921. Epstein’s Bonjour Cinéma received a good deal of attention in reviews—for example, Lionel Landry, “A propos du livre de M. Jean Epstein,” Cinéa, 33 (23 December 1921), 9–10; Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 January 1922), 219–21; and Maurice Raynal, “Les Livres,” L’Esprit nouveau, 15 (February 1922), 1745–46.
14. Delluc’s conception was more broadly based than, although perhaps not unrelated to, the prewar anarchist attempt to create a “Cinéma du peuple.”
15. See Theda Shapiro, Painters and Politics; The European Avant-Garde and Society, 19001925 (New York: Elsevier, 1976), 175.
16. See, for instance, Frantz Jourdain, “Le Cinéma, manifestation artistique très noble et très élévée accueilli en triomphateur,” Comoedia (28 October 1921), 4; Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Cinéma au Salon d’Automne,” Le Petit Journal (4 November 1921), 4; Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Cinéma,” Les Nouvelles littéraires (18 November 1922), 4; Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 December 1922), 521 ; “Le Salon annuel du cinéma au Salon d’Automne,” Gazette des sept arts, 1 (15 December 1922); advertisement for “Salon annuel du film au Salon d’Automne,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 1 (15 November 1923), 3.
17. Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 April 1924), 230–31.
18. Musée Galliera, Exposition de l’art dans le cinéma français (Paris: Prieur, Dubois et cie, 1924), 66–67.
19. Lucien Wahl, “L’Avenir du cinéma français,” La Renaissance, 35 (27 August 1921), 1–5; 36 (3 September 1921), 4–9; 37 (10 September 1921), 17–20; 38 (17 September 1921), 4–9. In an introductory note, Wahl suggests that his survey was sparked by a meeting with French legislators concerning the cinema, organized by the Confédération des travailleurs intellectuels. See, also, Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de F ranee (\ May 1921), 812–16; and René Jeanne, “Les Leçons d’une enquête,” Cinémagazine, 1 (21 October 1921), 14.
20. Pathé’s “Etude sur l’évolution de l’industrie cinématographique française” [1918], also was reprinted in Ciné-pour-tous, 31 (3 April 1920), 2–3.
21. Antoine’s diatribe and the responses to it were first published in La Revue hebdomadaire in the summer of 1923—see Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (15 October 1923), 515–21. Both were reprinted in André Lang, Déplacements et villégiatures littéraires et suivi de la Promenade au royaume des images ou entretiens cinématographiques (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1924), 184–234.
22. Delluc’s responses were reprinted from Bonsoir (24 July and 1 August 1923), and Moussinac’s was reprinted from L’Humanité (29 July 1923).
23. For an analysis of the production sector of the French film industry in the early 1920s, see Abel, French Cinema, 17–27. For an analysis of the transition of capitalism to its monopoly phase and of the relation of small firms to big capital in that transition, which might help explain developments in the French film industry in the 1920s, see Lucio Coletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 97–100.
24. See Abel, French Cinema, 279–94.
25. Louis Feuillade, “Préface,” Barrabas (Paris: J. Ferenczi, 1920), reprinted in Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade (Paris: Seghers, 1964), 113–14. Louis Feuillade, “Préface,” Les Deux Gamines (Paris: J. Ferenczi, 1921), reprinted in Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 116–17.
26. René Clair, “Les Films du mois: Coeur fidèle,” Théâtre et Comoedia illustré (1 February 1924). Vuillermoz and Delluc had begun to perceive a certain stabilization in the American cinema even earlier—see, for instance, Emile Vuillermoz, “Esthétique,” Le Temps (27 March 1920), 3.
27. See Abel, French Cinema, 71–85, 151–205. The following series of articles provides a good sense of the development of the serial in the early 1920s—Pierre Henry, “Les Idées: Le film en épisodes,” Ciné-pour-tous, 29 (20 March 1920), 2; Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Ciné-Roman en n épisodes,” Le Film, 183 (November 1921); Louis Jalabert, “La Littérature commerciale: Le ciné-roman,” Etudes, 171 (5 June 1922), 513–31, and 172 (20 June 1922), 675–89; Léon Moussinac, “Les Films à épisodes,” Le Crapouillot (1 March 1923), 27–29; and Albert Bonneau, “Le Film à épisodes,” Cinémagazine, 3 (17 July 1923), 125–28.
28. Mathias Sandorf was adapted from a Jules Verne novel; Rouletabille was based on Gaston Leroux’s famous detective hero; and Mandrin was drawn from Arthur Bernède’s novel about an eighteenth-century French Robin Hood figure. Bernède had created two of the most popular film detectives during the war—in Feuillade’s Judex (1917) and Pouctal’s Chantecoq (1917)—and for Louis Nalpas he would create a series of historical adventurer “outlaws”—in Jean Kemm’s Vidocq (1923) and Luitz-Morat’s Surcoeuf (1925) and Jean Chouan (1926).
29. André Antoine, “Le Cinématographe,” L’Information (30 July 1923), reprinted in Lang, Déplacements et villégiatures littéraires, 197–200. Antoine’s article basically reiterates what he had written in Le Film and Lectures pour tous, in December 1919.
30. Antoine, “Le Cinématographe,” 195–96.
31. Antoine, “Le Cinématographe,” 196–97.
32. Lang, “M. André Antoine,” Déplacements et villégiatures littéraires, 121.
33. For instance, the idea that the story served principally as a means to produce a certain “emotion” or “style” circulated as a given assumption in most writers. See Moussinac, Epstein, and Clair in the following section of “Selected Texts.” See, also, Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 January 1922), 216–21; and Louis Delluc, “De Rose-France à El Dorado,” Cinéa, 1 (6 May 1921), 13–14.
34. This definition of culture, which was fundamental to nineteenth-century Europe, is taken from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 15
35. Ricciotto Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art” [1923], L’Usine aux images (Paris: Etienne Chiron, 1926), 29–47. See, also, Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 February 1921), 802–3.
36. Lionel Landry, “Films français et américains,” Le Journal du Ciné-Club, 12 (2 April 1920) , 2; Jacques Baroncelli, “La Domaine du cinéma,” Le Petit Journal (18 November 1921) , 4; Emile Vuillermoz, “La Roue,” Comoedia (21 December 1922), 3.
37. Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 41–42. See, also, Marianne Alby, “Le Merveilleux à l’écran,” Théâtre et Comoedia illustré, 30 (15 March 1924).
38. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Esthétique,” 3.
39. See, for instance, “Germaine Dulac parle au CASA,” Comoedia (9 May 1921), 4, and Emile Vuillermoz, “La Souriante Madame Beudet,” Comoedia (19 January 1923), 3. Dulac’s own early efforts to achieve such “psychological films” included La Cigarette (1919) and La Mort du soleil (1922).
40. Ricciotto Canudo, “Cinéma et musique,” Comoedia (4 November 1921), 4. For an analysis of L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine, see Abel, French Cinema, 383–95.
41. Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 45–47.
42. Lionel Landry, “Le Snobisme prouvera que le cinéma est un art,” Le Journal du Ciné-Club, 1 (14january 1920), 13. For an attack on such snobism, see Léon Poirier. “Les Enemis du septième art,” Le PetitJournal(23 December 1921), 4. Cf. Pierre Porte, “Le Cinéma n’est pas un art populaire,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 12 (1 May 1924), 26–28.
43. See, again, Delluc’s heated response to Antoine, in Bonsoir (1 August 1923), and Moussinac’s even more caustic response, in L’Humanité (23 July 1923), reprinted in Lang, Déplacements et villégiatures littéraires, 209–10 and 219, respectively.
44. See, for instance, “Les Meilleurs Films de l’Année,” Ciné-pour-tous, 51 (22 October 1920) , 4–5, and Louis Delluc, “[Les Films suédois],” Cinéa, 2 (13 May 1921), reprinted in Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc (Paris: Seghers, 1965), 98–99.
45. Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 29–30.
46. Louis Delluc, “D’Oreste à Rio Jim,” Cinéa, 31 (9 December 1921), 14–15.
47. Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie: Le Lys brisé,” Mercure de France (1 February
1921) , 797–804; Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 November 1921), 787–88. Cf. Jean Epstein, “Présentation de Coeur fidèle” [January 1924], reprinted in Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 124. Antoine’s film project of L’Hirondelle et la mésange (shot in 1920–1921 and finally edited by Henri Colpi for the Cinémathèque française in 1983) may well have exemplified Delluc and Moussinac’s conception of the scenario.
48. Ricciotto Canudo, “Préface,” La Roue, après le film d’Abel Gance (Paris: J. Ferenczi, 1923), 3–4.
49. See, for instance, Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (15 July 1920), 529–32; “Le Réprésentation de la vie du film,” Ciné-pour-tous, 53 (19 November 1920), 2; Léon Moussinac, “Le Cinéma à l’école et le film d’enseignement,” Cinémagazine, 1 (9 September 1921), 8–9, 1 (16 September 1921), 24–25, 1 (30 September 1921), 2223; “Les Grands Films: Nanouk, l’esquimau,” Cinémagazine, 2 (3 November 1922), 156–58; Léon Moussinac, “Le Cinéma: Nanouk,” Le Crapouillot (16 December 1922), 28; Lionel Landry, “Documentaires,” Cinémagazine, 3 (26 January 1923), 154; Robert Desnos, “Les Documentaires,” Paris-Journal (6 May 1923), reprinted in Robert Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 106–8; and Lionel Landry, “Documentaires? La plus grande sincérité s’impose dans ce genre de production,” Cinémagazine, 4 (2 May 1924), 211–12.
50. Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 November 1921), 784— 86; Louis Delluc, “Prologue,” Drames du cinéma (Paris: Editions du monde nouveau, 1923), ii—iii.
51. See, for instance, Delluc’s series of essays on cinéastes—“De Griffith,” Cinéa, 47 (31 March 1922), 7–8; “Cecil B. De Mille,” Cinéa, 63–64 (21 July 1922), 11; and “Maurice Tourneur,” Cinéa, 69–70 (8 September 1922), 15. Canudo, of course, offered his own term for the film artist, écranist—see Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 36. A good sense of the French film production process, vis à vis the American, can be found in “Les Scénaristes ou auteurs des films,” Ciné-pour-tous, 54 (3 December 1920), 2.
52. Delluc, “De Rose-France à El Dorado,” 13–14.
53. Louis Delluc, “La Foule,” Photogénie (Paris: de Brunoff, 1920), 120.
54. Robert Desnos, “Le Rêve et le cinéma,” Paris-Journal (27 April 1923), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 104–5.
55. Moussinac became a member of the French Communist Party in 1924, the same year he organized the exhibition on French film art at the Musée Galliera—David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 75.
56. See, for instance, Christopher Green, “Léger and L’Esprit nouveau,” Léger and Purist Paris (London: The Tate Gallery, 1970), 49–72; Green, Léger and the Avant-Garde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); FernandLéger et l’esprit moderne: Une alternative d’avant-garde à l’art non-objectif, 1918–1931 (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1982); and Kenneth Eric Silver, Esprit du corps: The Great War and French Art, 1914–1925 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1983), 385–405. See, also, Jean-Francis Laglenn, “Le Peintre au cinéma,” Cinéa, 9 (1 July 1921), 14, and 42 (24 February 1922), 12.
57. Fernand Léger, “La Roue: Sa valeur plastique,” Comoedia (16 December 1922), 5.
58. Standish Lawder argues that La Roue and this essay provided the conceptual germ for Léger’s only completed film project, Ballet mécanique (1924)—Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 89–95. F°ra more recent and more thorough analysis of Légers project, see Judi Freeman, “Léger’s Ballet mécanique” DadalSurre-alism, 15 (1986), 28–45. see 1850. Abel, French Cinema, 394–95.
59. Elie Faure, “De la cinéplastique,” L’Arbre d’Eden (Paris: Editions G. Crès, 1922), 277–304.
60. Faure, “De la cinéplastique,” 303–4.
61. Epstein’s interest in Léger’s work, for instance, is evident in his essay, “Fernand Léger,” Feuilles libres, 31 (March-April 1923), 26–31.
62. Stuart Liebman, Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 1920–1922 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms Inc., 1980), 111–18. See, for instance, Jean Epstein, “Ciné-Mystique,” Cinéa, 6 (10 June 1921), 12.
63. Liebman, Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 119. For a fascinating attempt to read Epstein’s concept of photogénie exclusively in psychoanalytical terms, see Paul Willemen, “On Reading Epstein on Photogénie,” Afterimage, 10 (Autumn 1981), 43–47. Canudo also used the term, “unconscious,” but as a synonym for the conventional idealist notion of the immaterial soul.
64. See, for instance, Jean Epstein, “Freud ou le Nick-Carterianisme en psychologie,” L’Esprit nouveau, 16 (March 1922), 1857–64.
65. Jean Epstein, La Lyrosophie (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1922). Liebman, Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 1920–1922, 124–38.
66. Jean Epstein, “Le Sens 1 bis,” Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1, 85–87, 91–93. For a possible connection between Henri Bergson and Epstein, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 : The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 8–11.
67. Jean Epstein, “De quelques conditions de la photogénie,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 19 (15 August 1924), 7. The early writings of Béla Balâz on the cinema seem to incorporate or at least parallel much of Epstein’s language here—Gertrud Koch, “Béla Balâz: The Physiognomy of Things,” New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), 167–177. Here Epstein seems to share Bergson and phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s faith in intuition as an unconscious cognitive means beyond perception and ratiocination, yet for Epstein such cognition occurred through the camera and was mediated by human “analytic propensity”— cf. Martin Jay on Max Horkheimer’s critique of Bergson and Husserl in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 50–51.
68. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921), 104. Cf. Jean Epstein, “Le Cinéma et les lettres modernes,” La Poésie d’aujourd’hui: Un nouvel état d’intelligence (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921), 171.
69. André Breton, “Comme dans un bois,” L’Age du cinéma, 4–5 (August—November 1951), 27. See, also, Desnos’s first untitled film review in Paris-Journal (6 April 1923), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 95–97.
70. Desnos, “Le Rêve et le cinéma,” 104–5. Epstein also sometimes spoke of the cinema effect as similar to that of a drug.
71. Robert Desnos, “L’Eroticisme,” Paris-Journal (20 April 1923), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 101–2.
72. Paul Hammond, “Off on a Tangent,” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 5–6.
73. Philippe Soupault, “L’Homme aux yeux clairs—William S. Hart,” Littérature, 9 (November 1919), 29; Philippe Soupault, “Une Idylle aux champs,” Littérature, 12 (February 1920), 29.
74. Benjamin Peret, “Pulchérie veut un auto,” Littérature, 10 (May 1923), 17–23. See Hammond, “Off on a Tangent,” 6. Here the cinema began to play a significant part in the radical critique of the function of art instigated by what Peter Burger has called the “historical avant-garde”—see Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3–54.
75. Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de F ranee (1 November 1921), 786.
76. Lionel Landry, “El Dorado,” Cinéa, 12–13 (22 July 1921), 7–8.
77. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Esthétique,” 3.
78. Jean Epstein, “L’Elément photogénique,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 12 (1 May 1924), 7.
79. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Esthétique,” 3.
80. Léon Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” Le Crapouillot (March 1923), 9–11.
81. Louis Delluc, “La Cadence,” Photogénie (Paris: Brunoff, 1920), 71–72; Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” 9–11; Louis Delluc, “Cinégraphie,” Le Crapouillot (March 1923), 11–14; René Clair, “Les Films du mois: Coeur fidèle.”
82. Germaine Dulac, “Le Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Cinémagazine, 4 (11 July 1924), 67.
83. Jean Epstein, “Réalisation des détails,” Cinéa, 45 (17 March 1922), 12.
84. Dulac, “Le Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” 67.
85. Jean Epstein, “Rythme et montage” [1923], in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1, 121. See, also, Epstein, “De quelques conditions de la photogénie,” 6–8.
86. Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” 9.
87. I borrow several terms here from Williams, Marxism and Literature, 170–71, and from David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 142–43.
88. Delluc, “Prologue,” ix-x.
89. See, for instance, Louis Delluc, “Scénarii,” Comoedia (6 April 1923), 4.
90. Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” 9.
91. Delluc, “Prologue,” iv—vi.
92. Delluc, “Prologue,” xiii.
93. Léon Moussinac, “Technique commande,” Gazette des sept arts, 3 (10 February 1923), 11.
94. See, for instance, Lionel Landry, “El Dorado,” Cinéa, 12–13 (22 July 1921), 7–8; Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 November 1921), 789–91. L. Croze, “Les Grands Films: El Dorado,” Comoedia (1 November 1921), 1; Jean Galtier-Boissière, “L’Art cinégraphique,” Le Crapouillot (16 November 1921), 4; Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie,” Mercure de France (1 January 1922), 216–19; Jean Epstein, “Cinéma,” L’Esprit nouveau, 14 (January 1922), 1669–70; Jacques Pietrini, “Le Cabinet, du Dr. Caligari” Cinémagazine, 2 (3 March 1922), 264–66; Emile Vuillermoz, “Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari” Cinémagazine, 2 (24 March 1922), 353–54; Lionel Landry, “Caligarisme ou la revanche du théâtre,” Cinéa, 51 (28 April 1922), 12; Blaise Cendrars, “Sur Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari,” Cinéa, 56 (2 June 1922), 11; Ivan Goll, “Un nouveau film expressionniste: Le Cabinet du Dr. Caligari” Cinéa, 12–13 (22) 10–11; Robert Mallet-Stevens, “Le Cubisme au cinéma,” Comoedia (8 January 1923), 4; Jean Epstein, “Le Décor au cinéma,” La Revue mondiale, 153 (1 March 1923), 90–91; Ricciotto Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 32–33.
95. See, for instance, Jean Epstein, “La Roue” Comoedia (12 December 1922), 3; Fernand Léger, “La Roue” 5; Emile Vuillermoz, “La Roue” Comoedia (21 December 1922), 3, (31 December 1922), 4, and (12 January 1923), 3; Léon Moussinac, “La Roue” Le Crapouillot (16 January 1923), 13; Léon Moussinac, “La Roue” Comoedia (19 January 1923), 5; Emile Vuillermoz, “La Roue” Cinémagazine, 3 (23 February 1923), 329–31, and (2 March 1923), 363–65; René Clair, “Les Films dumois,” Théâtre et Comoedia illustré (March 1923); “Le Merle blanc siffle et persifle La Roue: Encore une catastrophe de chemin de fer,” Le Courrier cinématographique (17 March 1923), reprinted in Roger Icart, Abel Gance ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983), 160.
96. In the production of La Roue (1922) and Napoléon (1927), Abel Gance came close to turning technological innovation into an end in itself, in actual practice.
97. Epstein, “L’Elément photogénique,” 6.
98. See, also, Mallet-Stevens, “Le Cubisme au cinéma,” 4.
99. Léger, “La Roue” 5.
100. Gilles Deleuze privileges this form of cinematic rhythm in order to define the “French school” (by which he means filmmakers Gance, Epstein, L’Herbier, Dulac, Clair, and Grémillon) as being primarily interested in “the mechanical composition of movement-images”—Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 40–48.
101. Abel Gance, “Le Cinématographe, c’est la musique de la lumière,” Comoedia (16 March 1923), 4. David Bordwell offers a cogent critique of the musical analogy in “The Musical Analogy,” 141–46, and Ian Christie includes a shorter but no less substantive critique in “French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From ‘Specificity’ to Surrealism,” Film as Form: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910–1975 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979). 39, 4L
102. Arthur Honegger, “Adaptations musicales,” Gazette des sept arts, 2 (25 January 1923) , 4. Cf. Lionel Landry, “Le Musique et le cinéma,” Cinémagazine, 4 (30 March 1924), 363–64.
103. Canudo, “Réflexions sur le septième art,” 31–33. See, also, Canudo, “Cinéma et musique,” 4.
104. Moussinac, “Technique commande,” 11.
105. René Clair, “Rythme,” Cahiers du mois, 16/17 (1925), 13–16.
106. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Cinémagazine, 4 (4 July 1924),
107. David Bordwell’s analysis of what he calls “French Impressionist Cinema” rests, to some extent, on just such a catalogue of “techniques” that Dulac, Moussinac, and others drew up in the early 1920s—Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980).
108. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Cinémagazine, 4 (11 July 1924) , 68.
109. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” 66.
110. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” 67–68.
111. Clair, “Les Films du mois: Coeur fidèle”
112. For a fine introduction to Dulac’s work as a filmmaker and theorist, see Sandy Flit-terman, Women, Representation and Cinematic Discourse: The Example of French Cinema (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms Inc., 1982), 19–55. For a concise contextualizing of Dulac’s theory, see Stuart Liebman, “Introduction to Germaine Dulac’s ‘Integral Cinégraphie’,” Framework, 19 (1982), 4–5.
113. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 58.
114. Landry, “El Dorado,” 12.
115. Delluc, “D’Oreste à Rio Jim,” 14.
116. Moussinac, “Du rythme cinégraphique,” 9.
117. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Cinémagazine, 4 (4 July 1924), 15–16.
118. Epstein, “L’Elément photogénique,” 7.
119. Landry, “El Dorado” 12. It is worth recalling that Vachel Lindsay had a chapter on “Hieroglyphics” in his The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 199— 216.
120. Epstein, “De quelques conditions de la photogénie,” 7–8.
121. Thomas Elsaesser, “Weimar Cinema as a Specific Form of (Inter-)Textuality: Sexual Ambiguity and the Attenuation of the Hermeneutic and Proaretic Codes of Action,” paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New York University, 14 June 1985. Perhaps the clearest explanation of subject construction in film discourse can be found in Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 194–236.
122. Epstein, “Grossissement,” 95. Again, for a different analysis of these concepts in Epstein, see Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 40–48.
123. Clair, “Les Films du mois: Coeur fidèle.” For an analysis of the textual operation of this sequence in Coeur fidèle, see Abel, French Cinema, 364–65.
124. Epstein, “Le Cinéma et les lettres modernes,” 169–70.
125. Epstein, “Le Cinéma et les lettres modernes,” 177. Cf. Lionel Landry’s much more conventional thinking in “Simultanéisme,” Le Journal du Ciné-Club, 6 (20 February 1920), 11–12, and Francis Picabia’s repetition of Epstein’s ideas in “Instantanéisme,” Comoedia (21 November 1924), 4.
126. For examples, see my analyses of selected sequences from Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge (1923) and Coeur fidèle (1923), in French Cinema, 355–56, 361–63.
127. Léon Moussinac, “Cinématographie: Le Lys brisé,” Mercure de France (1 February 1921), 797–804.
128. Léon Moussinac, “L’Auberge rouge,” Le Crapouillot (1 August 1923), 16–17.
129. Dulac, “Les Procédés expressifs du cinématographe,” Cinémagazine, 4 (11 July 1924), 67–68.
130. Desnos, “Le Rêve et le cinéma,” 104.
131. Epstein, “La Roue,” 3.