THE STARTLING expansion of French writing on the cinema, generated by the end of the Great War and sustained throughout the early 1920s, actually increased at least twofold in the second half of the decade. Once again the increase seemed explosive rather than gradual. It was sparked by the heady growth of magazines and books devoted to film, by newly opened specialized cinemas, and by activist ciné-clubs which organized even more exhibitions and conferences on the cinema. It was fueled by a long, often rancorous debate revolving around the question whether there could or should be anything like a “pure cinema,” a debate that then touched off others as well. And it was fanned by a growing dissatisfaction with the economic institutions and sociopolitical practices in which the French cinema was enmeshed. This dissatisfaction led to a further politicization of French intellectuals and the formation of several influential groups on both the right—Les Jeunesses Patriotes and Le Faisceau—and the left—the Surrealists and the Philosophes. Of those on the left, some now even joined forces with the French Communist Party and came to espouse an interest in either a populist or proletarian literature and cinema.
During the late 1920s, the public forum for French writing on the cinema was probably more extensive than during any other period in the first half of this century.1 The daily newspapers and weekly magazines constituted perhaps the least important arena now, and few significant changes occurred in their ranks.2 Of the Paris dailies associated with the right, to which Le Temps and Paris-Soir had now shifted, the only film critic changes came at Le Matin (Jean Chataigner) and L’Intransigeant (Alexandre Arnoux). An important addition on the right, however, appeared in François Coty’s L’Ami du peuple, which unexpectedly reached a circulation of one million within two years of its launching in 1928.3 Much like L’Intransigeant before the war, despite its generally rightist political line, L’Ami du peuple attracted writers who supported the left on cultural affairs—its cinema page, for example, provided a forum for reviews by Louis Chavance and Paul Gilson. J. L. Croze (now the president of the Association professionelle de la presse cinématographique) continued to control the cinema page of the centrist Le Petit Parisien as well as the arts daily, Comoedia. On the left, as its influence declined somewhat with the fall of the Cartel des Gauches government in 1926, only one new small-circulation daily appeared—Alexis Caille’s Le Soir, for which Robert Desnos wrote weekly reviews in 1927.
The weekly journals devoted to political and cultural affairs played an even larger role than before as they continued to provide more and more space for articles and reviews about the cinema. The Revue hebdomadaire added another film review column to René Jeanne’s extensive list of writings; the Nouvelles littéraires changed film reviewers at close to one-year intervals (Jeanne, Jean Prévost, Arnoux); Le Monde illustré opened a film column to André Antoine; and Le Journal littéraire briefly included film reviews by Desnos. At least three new politically distinct journals emerged into prominence—the right-wing Candide (published by Arthème Fayard), for which Jeanne wrote yet another column; the international communist journal, Monde (edited by Henri Barbusse), to which Léon Moussinac contributed film reviews; and the much smaller, left-wing La Lumière (launched by Georges Boris), which published Georges Altman’s earliest film writings.4 Finally, the monthly literary magazines maintained a serious interest in the cinema. While Mercure de France failed to replace Moussinac after he left the magazine in early 1926, its rival, the Nouvelle Revue française, suddenly began to open its pages to the cinema, beginning with Prévost’s film reviews and Antonin Artaud’s scenario for La Coquille et le clergyman (1927).5 Jean Galtier-Boissière’s Le Crapouillot continued to devote a good deal of space to both filmmakers and film critics, and Georges Bataille’s short-lived Documents (1929–1930) published the last of Desnos’s essays on the cinema.
Most central to this public forum, of course, was a host of film magazines that seemed to grow in number annually. At the elite end of the spectrum, young Jean Dréville, for instance, edited no less than three different film journals over a two-year period: Photo-Ciné (1927), the deluxe, folio-format Cinégraphie (1927–1928), and On Tourne (1928), all of which especially supported the work of the French narrative avant-garde. Backed by the publishing prestige of Gallimard and the Nouvelle Revue française, in December 1928, Jean-George Auriol launched the deluxe monthly, La Revue du cinéma, which gave special attention to the Soviet and French Surrealist films and which published essays and reviews by Chavance, Gilson, Robert Aron, J.-Bernard Brunius, André Sauvage, and Lucie Derain among others.6 At the popular end of the spectrum, two major weekly film magazines also appeared late in 1928—Gaston Thierry’s Cinémonde (financed by Le Petit Parisien) and Alexandre Arnoux’s Pour Vous (financed by L’Intransigeant)—but their impact would not come until the 1930s. In the meantime, Cinémagazine continued to circulate as the most popular semi-independent film magazine of the 1920s, and its Annuaire général de la cinématographie maintained a position on a par with Filma’s Tout-Cinéma. Mon-Ciné prospered to the point of offering its own annual review of the cinema, while Ciné-Miroir (published by Le Petit Parisien) reached the extraordinary circulation of 100,000 copies per issue. Finally, Jean Tedesco’s deluxe Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous consolidated its position as the most important film journal encouraging discussion of a national as well as an international film art. It was here, after all, that Jean Epstein still published most of his essays and that the debate raged most fiercely over the concept of a “pure cinema.”
But there was another major component of the French public forum at least equal in importance to that of the specialized film magazines. One segment was comprised of special journal issues devoted to the cinema, which Le Crapouillot had initiated just after the war. Les Cahiers du mois published the most significant of these, in 1925, in two book-length issues: one (issue 12) a collection of unfilmed scenarios,7 the other (issue 16–17) an influential collection of lectures, essays, and notes on almost every aspect of the cinema, published in conjunction with the 1925 Paris Exposition of the Modern Decorative Arts. In the latter, Lucien Wahl cautiously described the work of a film reviewer—without establishing any clear-cut critical principles or rules—and called attention to the problems of maintaining some degree of independence from the film industry.8 The success of this second Cahiers du mois issue on the cinema spurred the publication of several other similar collections: Germaine Dulac’s Schémas (February 1927), Le Crapouillot (March 1927), La Revue fédéraliste (November 1927), and Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928). And it undoubtedly encouraged the Librairie Félix Alcan to publish and market a special collection of lectures and essays on the cinema in a serial format, much like the issues of a semiannual or triquarterly magazine. This celebrated L’Art cinématographique series collected four long pieces in each volume (almost every major French writer was represented here) and ran for eight volumes from 1926 to 1929.
Another segment of this forum was comprised of books devoted to the cinema, which numbered almost as many as were published throughout the rest of the first decades in France. Some were collections or revisions of essays and reviews written between 1919 and 1924: Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma (Povolovsky, 1925), Blaise Cendrars’s L’A. B.C. du cinéma (Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926), and Ricciotto Canudo’s L’Usine aux images (Etienne Chiron, 1926). Others were collections of more current writings: Epstein’s Le Cinématographe vu d’Etna (Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926), René Schwob’s Une Mélodie silencieuse (1929), Moussinac’s Panoramique du cinéma (Le Sans Pareil, 1929), Arnoux’s Cinéma (1929), and Georges Charensol’s Panorama du cinéma (Editions Dra, 1929).9 At least three books dealt extensively with the film industry in one way or another: G.-Michel Coissac’s Histoire du cinématographe: Des origines jusqu’à nos jours (Cinéopse, 1925), André Delpeuch, Le Cinema (Octave Doin, 1927), and Coissac’s Les Coulisses du cinema (Pittoresques, 1929). Finally, there were at least three original and influential books: Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet’s polemical defense of a narrative cinema in L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma (Haberschill et Sergent, 1925–1926), René Marchand and Pierre Wein-stein’s introductory survey of the Soviet cinema in L’Art dans la Russie nouvelle, vol. 1, Le Cinéma (Rieder, 1927), and Moussinac’s more extensive survey in Le Cinéma soviétique (Nouvelle Revue française, 1928).
This broad public forum of writing on the cinema was heavily indebted, even more so than in the early 1920s, to the interrelated network of ciné-clubs, specialized cinemas, exhibitions, and conférences which—as Moussi-nac was one of the first to document—now constituted an alternate system of exchange more or less independent of the dominant film industry.10 The year 1925 saw the establishment of two major ciné-clubs that would dominate the alternate cinema network for the rest of the decade—the Ciné Club de France, which Moussinac and others (Dulac, René Blum, Henri Clouzot) created out of a merger of CASA and the Club français du cinéma, and the Tribune libre, which Charles Léger formed around a nucleus of younger cinéphiles (Dréville, Auriol, Brunius, Marcel Carné, and Jean Mi-try). At the same time, two major specialized cinemas opened to become the “flagship” cinemas of a loose circuit of independent cinemas in Paris— Jean Tedesco’s Vieux-Colombier and Armand Tallier and Myrga’s Studio des Ursulines, both of which were joined later by Jean Mauclaire’s Studio 28. Together, these ciné-clubs and specialized cinemas, in imitation of the Musée Galliera exhibition of 1924, organized several series of public expositions and conférences—from the Tribune libre screening-discussions at the 1925 Exposition of the Modern Decorative Arts and the Ciné-Club de France conférences at the Vieux-Colombier, in the winter of 1925–1926, to the League of Nations’ International Film Congress (organized by the Comité national français de coopération intellectuelle) in the fall of 1926 and the Ciné-Club de France lectures for the College libre des sciences sociales, early in 1927. Many of the lectures and papers delivered at these sessions were later published in Cahiers du mois, L’Art cinématographique, and Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous.
By the end of the decade, then, just before the sound “revolution” hit France, there were over a dozen ciné-clubs flourishing in Paris (some with branches in the French provinces and in Switzerland or Belgium) and a half dozen specialized cinemas (including L’Oeil de Paris, Salle des Agriculteurs, Studio Diamant) catering to these ciné-clubs as well as to a mixed audience of intellectuals, artists, workers, and students. Perhaps the most interesting organization to emerge in this alternate cinema network— Amis de Spartacus (1928)—was founded by Moussinac and his French Communist Party colleagues not long after his return from the first international writers conference organized by the Association of Soviet Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in Moscow, in late 1927. This one truly mass ciné-club or “Cinema du peuple” had an overtly political orientation, which centered on the exhibition of the banned Soviet films at the Casino de Grenelle and Bellevillois cinemas. But it was also committed to the preservation of films of all sorts, in original negative as well as positive distribution prints.11 Although Spartacus was disbanded by the Paris police prefect not long after its foundation, it laid some of the groundwork for the Popular Front film organizations as well as the Cinémathèque française, which would come into prominence in the middle 1930s.
Despite a good number of disagreements and internal discrepancies, French writing on the cinema in the early 1920s had operated within a kind of loose consensus. Writers generally agreed on the commitment to search for and isolate some form of cinematic specificity, more precisely to define cinégraphie or the rhythmic principles that governed film continuity, and to establish distinctly French conceptions of cinema. This commitment continued to motivate writers in the late 1920s, of course, as evidenced in André Levinson’s “Pour une poétìque du film” (1927), where he concisely summarized the principles according to which film could be defined as an art form, could be differentiated from the other arts, and could be said to be unique—primarily in its editing.12 Generally, however, the consensus of the early 1920s seemed to break down or at least undergo some change in the late 1920s. Discourse became polarized and sometimes acrimoniously personal, drawing what seemed to be clear-cut lines between highly polemical factions. Assumptions once held in common came more and more under scrutiny. In one sense, this could be taken as a sign of health and vitality, a form of renewal or maturity. In another sense, however, this meant that the shared vision of a new art form that would transform the world—culturally, socially, even ontologically—seemed as far from realization as ever before. The French cinema once more seemed in a state of crisis, and the dimensions of that crisis informed much of French discourse on the cinema.
“The present situation is clear; we are on the brink of disaster,” Jean Sa-pène told a stockholders meeting of Pathé-Consortium early in 1925.13 Most writers seemed to agree with him—and as owner-director of the Société des Cinéromans (with controlling interest still in Le Matin), he was the leading figure in the French film industry at the time—but they did not necessarily agree with his analysis or conclusion. For Sapène, the solution lay in realignments and policy changes within the structure of the film industry: tighter controls over directors in film production and alliances with other European film companies in production and distribution. In this, he probably spoke for many in the industry who wanted to create a European cartel that could compete with the American film distributors at least in Europe, but one that also would preserve some national autonomy.14 By contrast, Marcel L’Herbier, Abel Gance, and Cendrars, for example, spoke for those who retained some faith in the old dream of a new international community predicated on the “democratic” constituency and “universal language” of the cinema as well as, by implication, on a benevolent form of capitalism.15 This position was representative of the idealistic, cooperative spirit of the 1926 Paris International Film Congress, whose 500 delegates sought to encourage the non-commercial—that is, intellectual and educational—functions of the cinema worldwide.16 Implementation of the potentially progressive resolutions of the congress came to nought, however, because of the American film industry’s refusal to participate and the growing weakness of its sponsor, the League of Nations. Despite this failure, Gance, for one, continued to lobby for a kind of cultural solution to what essentially was an economic and political problem, through international mediation—a League of Nations agency for worldwide film production and distribution—long after the idea could be said to be viable.17
More and more writers, however, were coming to see that the French cinema crisis was only part of a more fundamental crisis in the socioeconomic system that dominated Europe and the United States and that a “cultural revolution” led by the cinema could not alone effect significant social or economic change. In his analysis of modern spectacle, for instance, Fernand Léger took note of the need for an “economic revolution” that, instead of producing department store display windows to compel consumption, would create “the hoped-for new equilibrium” of human relations and make man a “beneficiary [rather than] a victim of the machine.”18 In somewhat more specific terms, René Clair advocated “a modification of the material conditions of the cinema,” namely, its “whole industrial organization.”19 After attending the RAPP conference in Moscow (along with Barbusse and others) and studying the structure and facilities of the Soviet film industry, Moussinac, of course, went even further.20 The only way that the cinema could become the “great form of collective expression” it had once promised, he argued, would be through “a cooperative system of production, coincident with a new economic system [which was] founded on the base of a new social organization.”21 For Moussinac, this meant a “socialist economy” modeled on that of the Soviet Union, which was “only possible through revolutionary means.” As a consequence, he turned his attention to the alternate cinema network in France, which still depended heavily on the status quo of the French social economy even though it may have developed into a quasi-independent exhibition system. Moussinac’s Amis de Spartacus, however, turned out to be an overly ambitious and mistimed attempt to break free of the status quo, encourage a revolutionary change, and move toward just such a new socioeconomic order.
Within this polarization of political and socioeconomic positions, more familiar oppositions either stabilized, dissolved, or else turned relatively unstable. The elite cinema advocates—for example, Dulac, Tedesco, Vuil-lermoz, Pierre Porte, Paul Ramain—consolidated their position within the alternate cinema network. But they came increasingly under attack from those who advocated a popular cinema, whether as a narrative form produced by a kind of industry status quo—for example, Jacques Feyder, Fes-court and Bouquet—or as a more heterogeneous form of spectacle produced by a new economic system—for instance, Léger, Moussinac, Desnos, André Sauvage. Among the latter, Léger seem to have been unique in situating the cinema as just one of several promising popular cultural forms of modern spectacle, each of which would be based on the dynamic rhythms and collisions of daily phenomena in the streets and organized in terms of “form, light, and color.”22 The elite cinema advocates also continued to argue strongly that the cinema ought to constitute a medium for the individual artist’s expression. Those within the industry, such as Sapène, of course, assumed a hierarchical concept of collaborative production, over which they could exercise more control and possession. Here, perhaps not so unexpectedly, Moussinac, Desnos (as a representative of the Surrealists) and others often sided with the individualist position, at least in their reviews of specific films. Although Moussinac would describe the collective or group method of production in the Soviet cinema as a model for imitation, he acknowledged, given the actual conditions in France, the value of individuals whose work offered alternatives to current practice. Yet even Moussinac’s survey of the Soviet cinema tended to privilege the individual genius of a Sergei Eisenstein, a Vsevolod Pudovkin, or a Dziga Vertov; and his reviews consistently assumed that certain “master” filmmakers were auteurs worthy of study on their own.23 Such an assumption now marked much of French writing on the cinema.
Abel Gance, perhaps the most prominent French auteur of the late 1920s, represented a highly visible convergence and fusion of the elitist and popular conceptions of cinema. Gance’s work during this period depended on what Norman King has called an “elitist populism”—a form of political romanticism quite widespread during the interwar years in France, notably in the writings of Elie Faure, whose book on Napoleon (G. Crès, 1921) became the primary source of Gance’s Napoleon (1927).24 According to Faure, King writes, although “the people remain the source of new energy” for social change and renewal, they need “a powerful authority with high ideals and strength of purpose” to galvanize and guide them25—in other words, a cult of the hero based on popular intuition and spiritual regeneration. For Gance, specifically, this called for a heroic figure such as Napoleon whose “personality” would express “the visible soul of things and of a people,” and whose history would offer a vision of the past and future for an entire nation. The filmmaker’s own characteristically immodest contribution to this elitist populism was to turn himself into a hero: “the [film] image only exists as the representation of the power of the person who creates it.”26 Consequently, he cast himself as the prophetic artist who sought to inspire such a regeneration through his ability to fuse the visionary and the scientific (the poetic and the technological) within the then-current forms of popular culture, namely, the melodrama. Such a transformation would create a “great film” synthesizing all the arts—a synthesis such as L’Herbier had previously attempted, but as high art, in L’Inhumaine (1924)—and constituting a mythic “bridge of dreams from one era to another.”27 Although Gance regarded himself as nonpolitical in making Napoleon, critics as disparate as Vuillermoz and Moussinac found the film ideologically repellant.28 Ultimately, as Moussinac feared, Gance’s work would feed the reactionary rightist mythologizing so cherished by Action française and other like-minded organizations.
Despite Gance’s visionary heroism, the French faith in technological innovation—whether defined generally as progress or specifically as an “avant-garde” end in itself—also came into question. Jean Goudal, for instance, broached the idea that the cinema had already reached a kind of perfection as an artificial, black and white simulacrum of reality, supported by music. The promised addition of sound, color, and three-dimensionality would only detract, Goudal argued, from its existence as a dreamlike hallucination.29 Moussinac also prudently stepped back from his faith in technological innovation. Although he and Vuillermoz might still laud the technical inventiveness of Gance’s Napoleon, for example, that inventiveness could not be extricated from what he perceived to be the fascist ideology of the film.30 Yet by the end of the decade, that faith seemed to return as Moussinac accepted the supposed neutrality of technology within the social economy, despite his awareness of the current American development of television—“Other than technique, in filmmaking everything must be destroyed—and everything remains to be created.”31 As if his stance were a marker of the period, Epstein hesitated. Along with André Obey, he concluded that technological innovation for its own sake seemed to be bankrupt: by 1924–1925, “the mechanical period of the cinema [was] over.”32 Yet he also cautiously encouraged the experiments in developing a viable color filmstock, no matter how ridiculous and simplistic the initial films using it might seem.33 Furthermore, Epstein recognized that his own films had changed significantly in their rhythm not only because of technological advances but simply because “the time it takes an ordinary spectator to read a cinematic image has decreased in five years by 30 percent.”34 A similar hesitation in attitudes would mark the French writers and filmmakers’ response to the coming of sound films.
The spectrum of theories that had developed during the previous ten years underwent a polarization as well. This is most evident in the central debate that animated French writing on the cinema, especially between 1925 and 1927, the debate over the possible existence and value of a “pure cinema.” So pervasive was the question that nearly every writer was forced to declare a position on it. The debate took shape in the public sessions at the 1925 Paris Exposition and at the Vieux-Colombier and, more importantly here, in the pages of Cahiers du mois, Cinêa-Ciné-pour-tous, Schémas, and L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma. The two poles of the debate were set by Fescourt and Bouquet’s provocative defense of the primacy of narrative cinema, in which they attacked the so-called avant-garde along with the very idea of a “pure cinema,” and by the spirited rejoinders of various “pure cinema” advocates.
Fescourt and Bouquet’s L’Idée et l’écran appeared in three booklets issued in conjunction with the release of their big-budget, four-part adaptation of Les Misérables, probably the single most important French film of the 1925–1926 season.35 These booklets functioned, therefore, as a justification of their own film practice at Sapène’s Cinéromans, which Feyder had supported implicitly in Cahiers du mois not long before. Because of poor production methods, lagging spectator education, and a dearth of original scenarios, Feyder argued, the French cinema had to rely on skillful adaptations of good French novels.36 Furthermore, Fescourt and Bouquet wrote their tract as playlets or pseudo-Socratic dialogues in which (speaking as a single voice) they easily manipulated a rather simple-minded “pure cinema” advocate into accepting their conclusions.
Fescourt and Bouquet begin with a sketch of cinema history that describes a line of French filmmaking that deviates from American practice— through Gance, Delluc, L’Herbier, and Epstein—and ends up in an “avant-garde” compendium of techniques—an overly simplified representation, which many others have since elaborated on. Thereafter, they run through several variations on their argument. Their central point is that narrative or story provides the subject for most art, which includes painting and music as well as almost any form of literature. Too many critics, they note, have equated narrative with theater and mistakenly thrown out both in trying to distinguish the cinema from the theater. As the very foundation of art, then, narrative functions as the primary source of any emotional or intellectual effects. At its simplest level, this means that the film image is not only plastic, but meaningful, for “movement produces a transformation of meaning as well as a transformation of plasticity.”37 In other words, they write, “the cinema depends on two aesthetic elements: luminous values and rhythm,” of course; but it also depends on “logic . . . the principle that coordinates shots into an ensemble.”38 Here, Fescourt and Bouquet’s argument returns to that articulated in far more detail by Diamant-Berger in Le Cinema (1919). In general, however, their purpose is more polemical than theoretical or practical. They do not consider, for instance, how each of the film image’s constituent parts interrelate; they do not look closely at any one film text; and they end up implicitly defending the American narrative cinema as much as, if not more than, the French narrative cinema. But Fescourt and Bouquet do conclude with a question that pinpointed the crisis that a good number of “avant-garde” filmmakers and writers were going through—for instance, Epstein and Clair, whom they villify repeatedly.39 What exactly was the French avant-garde—an end in itself or a movement in search of a new aesthetic? And, in either case, just what had it accomplished?
The “pure cinema” advocates were scarcely unanimous in their sense of avant-garde accomplishments; but, surprisingly, in light of Fescourt and Bouquet’s argument, they were no more unanimous about precisely how to define “apure, absolute cinema.”40 This was because the term actually covered a loose cluster of concepts of cinema—absolute cinema, abstract cinema, integral cinema, plastic music, visual symphony—over which it emerged briefly as dominant.41 “Pure cinema” represented, in fact, the culmination of several slightly different lines of thinking—from Survage’s “colored rhythm” and Vuillermoz’s “musical analogy” to Gromaire and Léger’s “plastic compositions” and Faure’s “cineplastics,” inflected by the general fascination with cinematic specificity that so marked the early 1920s. All these came together, in 1925, in what initially seemed an answer to the general French crisis of confidence and to Epstein’s call “for a new avant-garde.” Taken as a composite group, then, the “pure cinema” advocates seemed to act in implicit consort with Abbé Bremond who, in a famous series of articles in Les Nouvelles littéraires (from October 1925 to January 1926), popularized a theory of “pure poetry,” which undoubtedly helped energize, though hardly originate, the “pure cinema” debate and whose internal inconsistencies the theory of a “pure cinema” shared.42
In Cahiers du mois alone, several different ideas circulated under shifting labels. Dulac, for instance, articulates a concept of cinema in which the artist’s feeling or state of mind emanates through a “visual symphony made up of rhythmic [representational] images”—a visual symphony that she comes close to detaching completely from narrative cinema.43 While seeming to agree with Dulac, Henri Chomette (Clair’s older brother) instead argues for a cinema that eschews representation altogether, whether documentary or dramatic, and whose “kaleidoscopic” surface of rhythmic harmony alone could “move our sensibilities as well as our intelligence.”44 Here, Clair also singles out as essential the rhythmic relations within and between shots (echoing Moussinac), but he asserts that their value is partly determined by the “emotional quality” of actors and decors.45 In a separate note, Clair also suggests that something like his brother’s concept of cinema exists only in fragments (which recalls Canudo’s privileging of film excerpts); yet Chomette himself clearly intends an autonomous form for short films and modestly refrains from mentioning his own Le Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) and Cinq Minutes de cinéma pur (1925) as models.46 Léger and Charensol share Chomette’s desire to get rid of the scenario or narrative as the subject of film, but they relocate that subject in “the image of the object,” in the plastic and rhythmic conjunction or juxtaposition of representational “documentary” images.47 Strangely, while Charensol offers “the succession of . . . fixed and moving objects, machines, common utensils, and geometric forms” in Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924) as a model of “abstract cinema,” Léger himself concludes that “very few possess the plastic culture or training” that such a cinema entails, “apart from Marcel L’Herbier and René Clair.”48 Within the specific forum of Cahiers du mois, at least, “pure cinema” already constituted an unstable amalgam of Romantic and Modernist, representational and non-representational, expressive and formalist assertions.
Over the course of the next year or so, this amalgam held, especially in the short pieces of Pierre Porte, who, perhaps more than any other critic, repeatedly challenged Fescourt and Bouquet’s argument with a consistently limpid, modest defense of “pure cinema.”49 At times, as when he offers a brief catalogue of “schools” or individual avant-garde stylistic tendencies, Porte writes as if he were echoing Bremond’s concept of “a pure appreciation of poetry”: “pure cinema” seems to be little more than an abstract quality common to all “true” films.50 At other times, Porte assumes the Symbolist expressivity of a Vuillermoz or Dulac in asserting that the cinema can have “the same ideal as the other arts, the ideal of elevating the spirit above and beyond the material world,” in a kind of “transcendental poetry.”51 Then again, in the same essay, he can isolate and privilege the originality of the cinema as a material means—”the harmony and melody of plastic movements.”52 Here Chomette, Léger, and Charensol’s concept of an abstract or absolute cinema seems to become the “purest” of the “pure cinema” positions. Consequently, through his many essays in Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, Porte acted much like a point man among a broad coalition of avant-gardists.53
By late 1926 or early 1927, however, this amalgam had come unstuck. The good ship avant-garde, suggested André Obey, now seemed more like a bateau ivre lost at sea.54 Louis Chavance, for instance, successfully split off the concept of “visual symphony” from that of “pure cinema,” to the latter’s detriment.55 Pure cinema he identifies with a cinema comprised exclusively of geometric elements whose existence was fleeting and whose value was limited in comparison to the sustained orchestration of evocative representational images, for example, in Dulac’s “visual symphony” cinema. Thereafter, only a very few writers, such as filmmakers Hans Richter and Eugène Deslaw, chose to privilege the plastic side of “pure cinema,” by focusing exclusively on the rhythmic surface of the film image.56 A greater number, including Vuillermoz, of course, continue to emphasize the “musical analogy” as a theoretical basis for film art.57 Some, like Obey, echoing Canudo, argue for a synthetic formal composition of complementary music and film image.58 Others, like Dulac—especially in her rewriting of Fescourt and Bouquet’s historical sketch, in “Les Esthétiques, les entraves, la cinégraphie intégrale” (1926)—imagine a cinema entirely autonomous from narrative, in which “lines unwinding in profusion according to a rhythm dependent on a sensation or an abstract idea affect one’s emotions by themselves . . . solely through the activity of their development.”59 In several essays as well as in her own film practice, Dulac now repeatedly defends a nonrepresentational cinema that would bring to the surface from the depths an “imperceptible music.”60 This fragmentation effectively ended the brief, paradoxical reign of a theory of “pure cinema.” And it led to further attacks by writers who were perhaps even less enamored of mainstream narrative cinema—for instance, Artaud, Moussinac, Epstein, and Desnos.61 As a polemical convergence of more or less like-minded filmmakers and critics, at a particular historical juncture, however, the “pure cinema” advocates constituted a major chord of near harmony in the cacaphony of French voices debating the nature of the cinema in the late 1920s.
Between these two antagonistic poles of mainstream narrative cinema and “pure cinema,” a number of other theories either struggled to survive, underwent a dramatic resurgence, or were consolidated in iconoclastic positions. The Impressionist concept of a subjective cinema, for one, seemed to lose some of its force and to settle into a somewhat stable position, perhaps because it no longer required a polemical defense. The best sign of this probably was provided by Dulac, formerly one of its leading proponents, when she assigned “the psychological and impressionist film” a specific place of influence in cinema history (the early 1920s) and then described how “pure cinema” extended, purified, and superceded it.62 And when it did find an explicit defense now, it came in the shape of either Vuillermoz’s unoriginal “La Musique des images” (1927), Chavance’s critique of its narrow focus on technique, or Paul Ramain’s “theory” of an oneiric cinema or “symphonic daydream”—a half-baked synthesis of aesthetic idealism, new psychological concepts, and “pure cinema” techniques.63 Impressionism did receive implicit support, however, from several essays that explored the relations between film and fiction. In a ground-breaking argument (for the French) that film and novel “obey the same necessities and use the same means to affect their audiences,” André Levinson, for instance, pointed to, among other things, their shared concentration on a so-called “symbolic attitude,” their insinuation of “a state of mind,” and their similar progressive narration of action.64 More specifically, Pierre Quesnoy found startling parallels between the handling of character, place, time, and memory in film and in the novels of Marcel Proust. These included the discontinuous “psychological evolution of characters,” the recalling of forgotten memories through “some sensorial shock, some sort of triggering release in the unconscious,” and the use of superimpositions to describe subjective impressions.65 By the end of the decade, the Impressionist theory of cinema was still prominent enough, at least in practice, for Desnos to single out its “exaggerated respect for art” and its “mystique of expression” for mocking condemnation.66
The Realist theory of a narrative cinema, which Delluc and Moussinac had articulated in partial opposition to Impressionism in the early 1920s, at first seemed to fade in importance as well. But then it rebounded in response to the stunning impact of the banned Soviet films, the emergence of manifestos for and inquiries into a populist and proletarian fiction, and perhaps the repeated revival of Delluc’s as well as other early French realist films in the ciné-clubs and specialized cinemas.67 With his connections in the French Communist Party, Moussinac, of course, was the crucial figure here. His participation in the RAPP conference in Moscow, his firsthand experience of the Soviet film industry, his discussions with Soviet filmmakers, and his tireless efforts to exhibit Soviet films widely in France all seemed not only to restore his faith in a realist aesthetic but also to redefine it more sharply and narrowly in socioeconomic terms. In contrast to the travestied caricatures in the American and European cinemas, for instance—see the scathing review of Metropolis (1927) by Prévost68—the Soviet cinema was seeking “to portray the life of workers and peasants in particular, to translate revolutionary realities, without forgetting that this ought neither to be limited to sentimental and psychological serial episodes nor simply dissolve into a study of certain milieus and a number of personalities.”69 There the spectator “discovered in a simple, authentic story, not the sterile romantic excitement of fated events, but the omnipresent realism of his sacrifice, his labor, his desire, and his goals.”70 In contrast to the French, Moussinac also pointedly noted, the Soviet cineastes were interested in “pure cinema” experiments only to the extent that they might be useful in satisfying “the moral and intellectual needs of the masses.”71 One of the things that impressed Moussinac about Eisenstein, for instance, was the way he devoted himself, especially in Potemkin (1925–1926), “to approximating the ‘newsreel’ image as much as possible, to images caught on the run and interpreted solely by the lens and the drive mechanism of the camera.”72 As conscious as he was then of the different techniques that Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov used and experimented with, Moussinac still stressed the social vision that seemed to unite them.
Soviet filmmaking practice and a Marxist aesthetic (whether Soviet or French) were not alone, however, in stimulating the resurgence of a Realist theory of narrative cinema. Encouragement also came from the relatively apolitical defenses of a populist literature, initially articulated in the late 1920s by André Thérive and Leon Lemonnier.73 And it came most significantly from Henri Poulaille, whose influential advocacy of a proletarian literature intersected momentarily with the notions of Moussinac and his colleagues.74 Because it arose as a “spontaneous expression of the working class,” Poulaille believed that a proletarian literature was indigenous to France as well as elsewhere.75 And generally, he also argued, it was not overtly political; instead, it merely had to be “not only humanist in tone but authentic in its depiction” of the proletarian milieu.76 In “L’Age ingrat du cinema” (1928), Poulaille uses this notion to call attention to an eclectic list of “true films whose scenarios are drawn from life and which are authentically human.”77 But he also pays homage to Moussinac, especially his Le Cinema soviétique (1928), in roundly attacking the commercial nature of the French film industry and approaching the conclusion that the cinema could serve as a collective means of combat in some kind of social revolution.78 It may well have been Poulaille’s defense of a broadly proletarian art, then, as well as the example of Soviet films, that encouraged Moussinac to appreciate, for instance, the uncompromising realism, “the profoundly human meaning of the trial of death of Jeanne d’Arc,” in his admirable review of Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).79 And both Poulaille and Moussinac led others, such as Andre Sauvage, to celebrate such films as King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) for its evocation of “the soul of the American city” and “the heartfelt drama of the proletariat there.”80
Among these various theories, Epstein charted a singular, rather idiosyncratic course that involved several shifts in direction and some tacking back and forth. These shifts may have been exacerbated by a personal crisis, sometime between 1924 and 1925, which seems to have coincided with his disappointing commercial filmmaking practice at Films Albatros. Evidence of this appears in several essays that turn his concept of “lyrosophical” knowing back on the filmmaker as well as the spectator, by suggesting how—as if in anticipation of Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage”—the camera/ screen can function as a psychoanalytical instrument of self-revelation. At one point, Epstein recommends such a psychoanalysis of cinema as a pleasantly instructive, therapeutic experience.81 At another point, however, he describes an analogous confrontation—the stunning vision in the multi-mirrored stairwell of a Sicilian hotel—as absolutely horrifying. “I appeared at the top of seven flights of stairs within a huge retina which had neither conciousness nor morality. There I saw myself stripped of well-kept illusions, surprised, laid bare, erased, pared down to net weight. I wanted to run far away to escape the screw-like grooves down which I seemed about to plunge toward the ghastly gravitational center of myself.”82 Here Del-luc’s earlier disquieting experience of self-knowledge before the cinema screen seemed perversely magnified. For what Epstein’s mirror/screen permitted, as Paul Willemen puts it, was a recognition of a photogénie of the unspeakable, “the activities of a phantasy” by means of “the scopic relation underpinning cinematic signification”—a formulation that looks forward to Christian Metz’s “Imaginary Signifier.”83 Yet despite this wavering and self-doubt over the psychoanalytical implications of the cinema, Epstein generally held firm to the lyrosophical position he had developed in the early 1920s. Only now he postulated first one and then another film form to put this lyrosophical knowing into practice.
In “Art d’événement” (1927), for instance, which served as a preamble to La Glace à trois faces (1927), Epstein presented an original film narrative construction analogous (in his characteristic overlapping of languages) to a chemical crystallization, to “an egg [appearing suddenly] at the fingertips of a naked magician,” or to a syntactically difficult Latin sentence.84 In one sense, this narrative construction was grounded in a quasi-semiotic conception of film language. Here film images “really signify only in association with one another, just as words that are simple but rich in meaning must do.”85 Hence the image, Epstein would later add, “is a sign, complex and exact, like those of the Chinese alphabet.”86 The shot is both precise and arbitrary, single and polysemous, its signification dependent on its contextual position in relation to other shots within a constructed textual system as well as on the spectator’s ability to synthesize perception and memory in a process of “reading.” In another related sense, however, the particular narrative structure of La Glace à trois faces was shaped by and exploited the peculiar spatiotemporal nature of the cinema. Specifically, four stories are narrated, not in succession, but in parallel: “each character is introduced alone” and kept apart, but “they live together, in association with one another.”87 Moreover, their association depends on a complex interpénétration of temporal relations: “Fragments from several pasts take root in the present; the future erupts through the memories.”88 Here the narrative process of coming to knowledge within the film text is omniscient, Epstein insists, rather than subjective, as with the “Impressionists.” Yet it nonetheless turns deceptive: at the end, the hero as subject “proves to be untrue” in a literal mirror image that reflects disquietingly on the spectator’s own positioning as subject. What goes unsaid, interestingly enough, is the fact that, since the narrative of La Glace à trois faces deploys three sets of broken-off romances, all narrated by the women, this deception is strongly marked by sexual difference.
Within a year—whether influenced by the Soviet films and Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc or else by the rise of a populist and proletarian literature remains unclear—Epstein seemed to forsake such a sophisticated, highly self-conscious practice for another, far more simple and allegedly authentic. In effect, he, too, returned to some of the realist premises that he initially had shared with Delluc and Moussinac. “Les Approches de la vérité” (1928) served to introduce and justify Finis Terrae (1929) as a “psychological documentary,” a drama of “events which really happened, of actual men and things,” on several remote islands off the coast of Brittany.89 There was no makeup or costumes to mask the human figure, no artificial decors to conceal the islands and sea, no technical effects (beyond the consistent use of a slightly slow motion camera), and no complicated narrative structure to deflect from what Epstein called “the mystery of men dedicated to a land that is nothing but rock, to a sea which is nothing but foam, to a hard and perilous trade [gathering sea algae], as if in obedience to some high command.”90 The narrative process of knowing for Epstein finally seemed to settle on the existential condition of a simple people not only marginal to but apparently outside modern industrial society and whose only problems were defined as diseases, which a good, compassionate doctor could cure. And a similar settling now marked spectator positioning. This shift in locations and terms—from studio artifice to natural reality, from the relations of sentimental romance to those of isolated community, from the modern industrial to the pre-industrial, from the psychoanalytic to the physical or concrete, from critical analysis to the mystical or mythopoetic, from the uncannily destabilizing to the more or less stable—did this represent an advance or a retreat for Epstein, a stripping away of illusions or, what is more likely, merely another form of inescapable repression?
In contrast to Epstein, the Surrealists pursued a relatively straightforward course, gathering momentum as the decade wore on. Their writings neatly, if unfairly, summarized the other competing theories in circulation during the period as they lambasted, in turn, the French mainstream narrative cinema, L’Herbier as a practictioner of an outdated Impressionism, the “pure cinema” advocates in particular, and even Epstein, perhaps because he was closest of all to the Surrealists’ own position. Their principal concern remain unchanged: the exploration of the idea that the cinema operated as an analogous discourse to that of the dream state, thereby giving access to the unconscious, making visible “the automatic writing of the world,”91 and constituting a new order of intellectual pleasure. Here Dr. Allendy’s study, “The Psychological Value of the Image” (1926), provides an instructive contrast to the Surrealists, particularly since he was then Antonin Artaud’s physician. Allendy assumes a rather conventional hierarchical model of “psychological life” with consciousness and rational thinking at the top and the “swarming subterranean realms” of the unconscious at the bottom—the latter threatening “to overflow and drown our reason at the least sign of weakness.”92 Yet within the film image—which is a unique blend of the objective and subjective—the unconscious plays a special role in the form of “symbolism . . . an unconscious, primitive, rudimentary process” that can bypass the understanding and “arouse intense feelings in us without our having the least intellectual notion of its meaning.”93 For examples, Allendy points to specific French films, notably the carnival sequence in Epstein’s Coeurfidele (1923), where, among a plethora of details, three tiny mechanical figures on a barrel organ replicate the heroine’s situation: a woman torn between two men. Such a correspondence, Allendy argues, “impinges naturally on the unconscious of the heroine” and, through her, on that of the spectator.94 This “domestication” of the unconscious within a rational process of representation and perception was carried even further in Paul Ramain’s “theory” of an oneiric cinema that repressed the revolutionary potential of the unconscious within a muddled, almost Impressionist, aesthetic idealism.95 The Surrealists instead followed Des-nos’s lead in seeking to wrench the cinema free of such conventional aesthetics.
As Linda Williams has demonstrated, two different lines of thinking actually governed Surrealist writing on the cinema during the late 1920s.96 The more simple or naive was represented by Desnos, who continued to write as if film could literally reproduce the content of dreams.97 Here film functioned as a wish-fulfillment of unconscious desire, especially in its ability to overturn the real world “through the disruptive anti-social tumult of amour fou [mad passion].”98 And Desnos provided a myth of origin for such a Surrealism in the cinema that rivaled Soupault’s. Theirs was a generation raised in an ideologically bankrupt prewar period, a generation tortured by a “desire for love, revolt, and the sublime;” and they found that desire fulfilled in the mysterious spaces and actions of the early crime serials : Fantômas (1913–1914), Les Vampires (1915–1916), and Les Mystères de New York (1915–1916).99 Yet the scenarios Desnos wrote during this period were marked by a different conceptualization of the cinema, one that privileged formal patterns and used them whimsically to transgress established narrative conventions. In “Minuit à quatorze heures” (1925), for instance, according to Williams, various round forms are repeated to the point where they become “an ominous and inexplicable presence . . . swallowing up everything else in the scenario, including (literally) the incipient psychology of the characters.”100 Through this process of narrative interruption and diversion, similar to the way the unconscious desires interrupt ordinary thoughts and memories, Desnos’s scenario offered “an analogue of the tensions between the manifest and the latent contents in a dream.”101
This more sophisticated line of thinking, however, developed especially through the writings of Jean Goudal and Antonin Artaud. Although not a Surrealist and critical of the assumptions and methods advanced by André Breton in The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), especially with regard to literature, Goudal found that they suited the cinema almost perfectly. Here the film image, rather than reproducing the dream, “corresponds exactly to a conscious hallucination.”102 What interested Goudal, writes Williams, was “more the resemblance between the film and the dream in language than in content.”103 Specifically, this meant that film was capable of producing “the Marvelous,” by combining rational and irrational elements peculiar to the cinema: the “geometry of lines” and the “illogicality of detail” (the displacing, fragmenting, and reordering of ordinary objects and movements).104 About the same time, Clair found himself similarly fascinated by “the marvelous barbarism” of film’s illogic, in the form of a “musical liberty,” which pointed toward his actual film practice in the early 1930s, and in the form of an erotic pleasure that shifted Desnos’s earlier repressed latent content onto film construction and the cinematic apparatus itself.105 In both cases, the cinema functioned not as a representation but as a construction, an approximation of the form of unconscious desire. While director of the Bureau de Recherche Surréalistes, Artaud pushed this Surrealist concept of the cinema toward the realm of impossibility, especially in his introduction to the published scenario of Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman (1928).106 Such a film was not the recreation of a dream, Artaud insisted, but a “pure play of appearances,” a “collision of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions,” out of which “is born an inorganic language that moves the mind by osmosis and without any kind of transposition in words.”107 It presents, in short, “the very essence of language,” a non-discursive, non-translatable language that, as Williams puts it, would “be the very flesh and blood of his thought.”108 Artaud’s extraordinary sense of alienation, of a perpetually absent self, and his extravagant hopes for an ontological “cure” by means of the cinema almost inevitably had to end in disappointment—as they did several years later.
Besides the production of a number of publishable, filmable, and un-filmable scenarios,109 this project of advancing a marvelous, truly revolutionary cinema led the Surrealists to champion a diverse corpus of films.110 Desnos, for one, consistently singled out documentary films as a source of “mysterious movement”—from short studies of modern machine movement to full-length features by André Sauvage and Alberto Cavalcanti.111 And just as consistently, he excoriated Epstein for failing to discover in his film practice that same sense of mystery that he, too, seemed to appreciate. Most writers ranged widely across the narrative cinema, finding radical or subversive elements almost everywhere, regardless of a film’s national origin. Goudal, for instance, compared several magical moments in Fair-banks’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with the laboratory resurrection sequence that climaxed L’Herbier’s Llnhumaine (1924).112 For revolutionary candor, Desnos equated Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925–1926), Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1925), and Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929).113
The most specific analysis of Surrealist cinema, however, came in Robert Aron’s fascinating comparison of Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, and Buster Keaton, in La Revue du cinema (November 1929).114 With unusual acumen, Aron traces the two French filmmakers’ “delight in dislocation and desire for freedom” in the very structure of film. Both exhibit a playful use of narrative disruptions, intertitle juxtapositions, and unexpectedly satirical transformations of faces, fragments of bodies, and clothing. Yet the freedom they achieve is easy, Aron argues, because it is merely witty fantasizing, “with neither joy nor passion.”115 In The Navigator (1926) and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1927), by contrast, while seeming to accept all natural laws and social conventions, Keaton produces a comic “disorder of nightmarish or hallucinatory proportions.”116 The normal working out of the plot, in this best regulated of worlds, is lured into traps where those very laws and conventions are mocked mercilessly. In one sense, what is “revolutionary” for Aron is a film practice like Keaton’s (an American practice), one that apparently follows the rules only to violate or defy them from within rather than one that irreverently dispenses with the rules altogether. In another sense, however, as if following Desnos, he simply endorses a strategy that conventionally places the spectator so that he can better identify with “the revenge of [the hero] in the very space of [his] sufferings.”117 Yet in so doing, he ignores the more radical strategy articulated by Goudal and Artaud as well as Epstein—and by the films themselves—a strategy that continually dislocates the spectator and questions the very space of desire as well as suffering. Here, as Williams argues, the Surrealists—along with Epstein, whom she does not mention—initiated “a very sophisticated attempt to expose the viewer’s own misrecognition of the image” and, in cultivating “what Lacan calls the Imaginary,” ultimately reveal “the ways in which the image, too, is structured by processes similar to those at work in language.”118
By the late 1920s, French writing on the cinema clearly was functioning as an autonomous discourse. The broad spectrum of some half-dozen “theories” that had emerged during and just after the Great War now constituted a set of polarized factions, each relatively systematic in its thinking, although not necessarily consistent internally, and each having its own heritage or history on which to draw. Whereas arguments in defense of the cinema previously had been addressed to those hostile to the new medium or had comprised just one perspective in a loosely shared vision of a new art form, now they were addressed to one another, and often in the form of polemical harangues. The very concept of an “avant-garde” in the cinema came into question in a crisis of confidence compounded by a continuing crisis within the French film industry as well as another socioeconomic one developing within French society. The crisis, however, induced Fescourt and Bouquet to write the most comprehensive defense of a mainstream narrative cinema since Diamant-Berger. It provoked a series of attempts to produce a kind of aesthetic revolution in cinematic representation and visual pleasure—for instance, in Porte’s “pure cinema” or Dulac’s “visual symphony”; in Moussinac, Poulaille, and others’ proselytizing of an authentic proletarian or populist film art; in Epstein’s disquieting experiments in narrative construction and spectator positioning; and in the Surrealists’ disruptive transformations of the very process of representation and “reading.” Finally, it encouraged Moussinac and his colleagues to use the Soviet cinema as a model in establishing a new cultural institution—the Amis de Spartacus—and a realist aesthetic to facilitate (unsuccessfully, it turned out) the coming of a new socioeconomic order in France. French film theory and criticism, then, seemed perhaps most vital just at the moment when it was poised on the brink of another crisis, the coming of sound film, a crisis that would drastically alter the parameters of its discourse and the very ground of its debates.
1. The next six paragraphs constitute a condensed and revised version of one section from “The Alternate Cinema Network” in my French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 260–63.
2. This information is drawn from a partial examination of these newspapers and magazines, plus “Société des Ecrivains du Cinéma,” Tout-Cinéma, ed. E. L. Fouquet and Clément Guilhamou (Paris: Filma, 1926), 84–86; “Autres Journaux publiant régulièrement une rubrique cinématographique,” Tout-Cinéma (Paris: Filma, 1928), 903–5; René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le Cinéma et la presse, 1895–1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 63–69; 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. François Coty wielded some financial power in the French press of the late 1920s. In 1925, he helped launch Georges Valois’s Nouveau siècle, the official organ of Le Faisceau, the first openly fascist political party in France—see J. Plumyène and R. Lasierra, Les Facismes français, 1923–1939 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 34–44. In 1927, after breaking with Valois, Coty annexed Le Gaulois to Le Figaro. The stunning success of L’Ami du peuple, whose political line was difficult to describe (perhaps “simplistic and demagogic” or even “Bou-langist” sums it up best), contributed to the breakup of the consortium of four or five major dailies that had dominated the French press financially for almost forty years. One factor contributing to that success was the sudden decline in Action française s influence, partly as a result of the Vatican’s decision to censure the organization that published the paper, in December 1926—see Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 219–39.
4. Georges Altman first wrote for the literary pages of Monde and L’Humanité, where he also contributed a number of film reviews—see Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, Le Parti communiste français et la question littéraire, 1921–1939 (Paris: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1977), 307–8, 312.
5. Antonin Artaud, “La Coquille et le clergyman,” Nouvelle Revue française, 170 (November 1927), trans. Victor Corti, m Tu lane Drama Review, 11 (Fall 1966), 173–78.
6. Another film journal deserving mention here is Kenneth MacPherson’s international Close Up (published in Switzerland, beginning in July 1927), which included a regular column on the French cinema by Jean Lenauer as well as articles by Robert Aron and Marc Allégret.
7. The publication offilms racontés, unfilmed scenarios, and shooting script excerpts proliferated in the late 1920s. See such magazines as Ciné-Miroir, Mon-Ciné, Le Film complet, and the deluxe La Petite Illustration; book series from Jules Tallandier’s Cinéma-Bibliothèque to Gallimard’s Cinéma-romanesque; individual ciné-romans such as Henri Bar-busse’s Force (1927), Henry Poulaille’s Le Train fou (1928), Pierre Chenal’s Drames sur celluloid (1929); and Abel Gance’s full-length découpage texts, Napoléon vu par Abel Game (1927) and La Roue, scénario arrangé par Jean Arroy (1930).
8. Lucien Wahl, “La Critique des films,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 187–94.
9. At least two publishers for these books were associated with the French Communist Party: Povolovsky, which published Moussinac’s Naissance du cinéma (1925), and Les Ecrivains réunis, which published Epstein’s Le Cinématographe vu d’Etna (1926) and Cendrars’s final version of L’A.B.C. du cinema (1926)—David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1915–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 47.
10. Léon Moussinac, “Avenir et technique,” Panoramique du cinema (Paris: Le Sans Pareil, 1929), reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1967), 320–21. For a more extensive survey of the French ciné-clubs and specialized cinemas, see Abel, French Cinema, 256–60, 263–70.
11. See, for instance, Léon Moussinac, “Un Répertoire de films,” Panoramique du cinéma (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1929), 107–9.
12. André Levinson, “Pour une poétique du film,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 4 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1927), 51–88. A section of this essay was translated as “The Nature of the Cinema,” in Theatre Arts Monthly (September 1929) and reprinted in Lewis Jacobs, ed., Introduction to the Art of the Movies (New York: Noonday, 1960), 145–53. Levinson, a Russian émigré, was the most distinguished French dance critic of the period and wrote regularly for Les Nouvelles littéraires.
13. Jean Sapéne, “La Politique du cinéma français,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 34 (1 April 1925), 7. There is a telling racial slur in Sapène’s remarks when he complains that directors too often turn “the bouncing blond baby” of a script (which the producer has given him) into “a little nigger boy.” See, also, Jean Tedesco, “Pour un cinématographe international,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 28 (1 January 1925), 4–5.
14. For an analysis of the international production strategies in France in the 1920s, see Abel, French Cinema, 27–32, 35–36.
15. See, especially, Marcel L’Herbier, “Cinématographe et démocratie,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 48 (1 November 1925), 7–8; Blaise Cendrars, L’A.B.C. du cinéma (Paris: Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926), 20–22; Marcel L’Herbier, “Le Cinématographe et l’espace,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 4, 1–22; Marcel L’Herbier, “Détresse du cinéma français,” Comoedia (18 July 1927), reprinted in Marcel Lapierre, ed., Anthologie du cinéma (Paris: La Nouvelle Edition, 1946), 169–75; and Abel Gance, “Autour du moi et du monde: Le Cinéma de demain,” Conférencia, 18 (5 September 1929), translated by Norman King in Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 62–79.
16. For an analysis of the 1926 Paris International Film Congress, see Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 114–16. A copy of the program and list of invited filmmakers can be found at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris.
17. See Roger Icart, Abel Gance ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983), 203–6; and King, Abel Gance, 164.
18. Fernand Léger, “Le Spectacle,” Bulletin de L’Effort Moderne, 7 (July 1924), translated by Alexandra Anderson as “The Spectacle” in Léger, Functions of Painting (New York: Viking, 1973), 35–47
19. René Clair, “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 8990. See, also, René Clair, “Le Cinématographe contre l’esprit,” lecture, Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales, 19 February 1927, reprinted in Lapierre, Anthologie du cinéma, 175–82; and Clair, “Millions,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 46–47.
20. Bernard, LeParti communiste français, 57–58. See also Hubert Révol, “La Corporation du cinéma,” Cinégraphie, 4 (15 December 1927), 64, and Spartacus, “Le Décret des ‘32’,” Spartacus, 1 (15 April 1928), 1.
21. Léon Moussinac, “Cinéma: Expression sociale,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 4, 3536. See, also, Léon Moussinac, “Cinéma vivant,” Cinégraphie, 5 (15 January 1928), 75.
22. Léger, “The Spectacle,” 46–47. Nothing quite like Siegfried Kracauer’s socio-psychological studies of the cinema as the central component of popular culture in Germany seems to have appeared in France—see Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” [1926], translated by Thomas Y. Levin in New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), 91–96; Thomas Elsaesser, “Lulu and the Meter Man,” Screen, 24 (July-October 1983), 6–8; Heide Schlüpmann, “Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920s,” translated by Thomas Y. Levin in New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), 97–114; and Sabine Hake, “Girls and Crisis: The Other Side of Diversion,” New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), 147–164.
23. Léon Moussinac, Le Cinéma soviétique (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue française, 1928), reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 200–217. See, also, Moussinac’s reviews of Gance’s Napoléon (1927), Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1928), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), and Feyder’s Thérèse Raquin (1928), collected in Moussinac, Panoramique du cinéma, and reprinted in L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 267--77, 284–95. Cf. Alberto Cavalcanti, “Le Metteur-en-scène,” La Revue fédéraliste, 103 (November 1927), 11–16.
24. King, Abel Gance, 140–46. The concept of “elite populism,” it should be noted, is not all that different from the Boulangism of Maurice Barrés in the late 1880s and early 1890s, which recognized “the people as at once a mass to be dominated and a source of instinctual energy”—see Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York: Viking, 1986), 278–79. Ann Yaeger Kaplan also sees “this bizarre combination of populism and elitism” as characteristic of fascism— Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 6.
25. King, Abel Gance, 142.
26. Abel Gance, “Le Temps de l’image est venu!” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 2, translated as “The Era of the Image Has Arrived,” in Rediscovering French Film, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), 53.
27. Gance, “The Era of the Image Has Arrived,” 54.
28. Abel Gance, “Mon Napoléon,” Théâtre de l’Opéra programme (April 1927), trans. Kevin Brownlow in “Napoleon directed by Abel Gance,” Empire Theatre program (London: Thames Television, 1980), v; Emile Vuillermoz, “Napoléon,” Le Temps (9 April 1927), 3; Emile Vuillermoz, “Abel Gance et Napoléon,” Cinémagazine, 7 (25 November 1927), 33540; Léon Moussinac, “Napoléon,” L’Humanité (24 April and 1 May 1927), revised and reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 267–77, and trans. Norman King, in Abel Gance, 34–41. For further reviews of Napoléon, see Jean Mitry, “Napoléon à l’écran,” Photo-Ciné, 4 (April 1927), 55–57; Jean Tedesco, “Napoléon vu par Abel Gance,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 83 (15 April 1927), 9–10; Juan Arroy, “La Technique d’Abel Gance,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 86 (1 June 1927), 9–12; Jean Prévost, “Le Napoléon d’Abel Gance,” Le Crapouillot (June 1927), 50–51; and Albert Gain, “Napoléon,” La Petite Tribune (10 June 1927). For recent books and essays on Napoléon, see Bernard Eischenschitz, “From Napoléon to New Babylon,” Afterimage, 10 (Autumn 1981), 49–55; Kevin Brownlow, “Napoleon”: Abel Gance’s Classic Film (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 14–176; Abel, French Cinema, 428–45; and King, Abel Gance, 31–33, 87–105, 145–63, 191–96, 205–11.
29. Jean Goudal, “Surréalisme et cinéma,” La Revue hebdomadaire (February 1925), 343— 57. Jean Cocteau had expressed a similar attitude two years earlier, in an interview in Les Nouvelles littéraires (24 March 1923).
30. Moussinac, “Napoléon,” L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 267–77. Gance himself had no such problem with technological innovation, as evidenced in “Nos Moyens d’expression,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 133 (15 May 1929), 7–9.
31. Moussinac, “Avenir et technique,” 327–28.
32. Jean Epstein, “Pour une avant-garde nouvelle,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 29 (15 January 1925), 8. Cf. André Obey, “Musique et cinéma,” Le Crapouillot (March 1927), 9–12.
33. Jean Epstein, “Les Grands Docteurs,” Photo-Ciné, 3(15 March 1927), 34.
34. Jean Epstein, “Les Images de ciel,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 107 (15 April 1928), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinema, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 189–90.
35. Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vols. 1–3 (Paris: Haberschill et Sergent, 1925–1926).
36. Jacques Feyder, “Transposition visuelle,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 67–71.
37. Fescourt and Bouquet, L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vol. 3, 9–10.
38. Fescourt and Bouquet,, L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vol. 1, 26.
39. Epstein, “Pour une avant-garde nouvelle,” 8–10; Clair, “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” 89–90.
40. Pierre Porte, “Faisons le point,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 49 (15 November 1925), 9.
41. See, for instance, Jean Tedesco, “Pur Cinéma,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 80 (1 March 1927), 9.
42. D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice, 1746–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 167–93.
43. Germaine Dulac, “L’Essence du cinéma: L’Idée visuelle,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 64–65, translated by Robert Lamberton as “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 36–42.
44. Henri Chomette, “Seconde Etape,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 86–88.
45. René Clair, “Rythme,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17(1925), 13–16.
46. Clair, “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” 90; Chomette, “Seconde Etape,” 87–88.
47. Fernand Léger, “Peinture et cinéma,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 107–8.
48. Georges Charensol, “Le Film abstrait,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 83–84. Léger, “Peinture et cinéma,” 108. Cf. Marcel Gromaire, “Le Cinéma et ses deux tendances,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 205–7.
49. See, for instance, Pierre Porte, “Eclecticisme,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 58 (1 April 1926), 10; Porte, “Cinéma intellectuel ou affectif?” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 61 (15 May 1926), 9–10; Porte, “Une Sensation nouvelle,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 64 (1 July 1926), 2728; Porte, “Musique plastique,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 68 (1 September 1926), 22–23. For Fescourt and Bouquet’s response, see “Sensations ou sentiments,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 66 (31 July 1926), 13–14, and 69 (15 September 1926), 15–16.
50. Porte, “Faisons le point,” 9. Mossop, Pure Poetry, 167–68, 187.
51. Pierre Porte, “Le Cinéma pur,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 52 (1 January 1926), 12.
52. Porte, “Le Cinéma pur,” 13.
53. See, for instance, Bernard Brunius, “Musique ou cinéma?” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 68 (1 September 1926), 15–16; Henri Chomette, “Cinéma pur, art naissant,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 71 (15 October 1926), 13–14; and Tedesco, “Pur Cinéma,” 9–11.
54. Obey, “Musique et cinéma,” 9. The bateau ivre or “drunken boat” refers to the famous 1871 poem written by Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891).
55. Louis Chavance, “Symphonie visuelle et cinéma pur,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 89 (15 July 1927), 13.
56. Hans Richter, “Mouvement,” Schémas, 1 (February 1927), 21–23. Eugène Deslaw, “Comment travaille Eugène Deslaw,” Pour Vous, 16 (7 March 1929), 4. See, also, Miklos N. Bandi, “La Symphonie diagonale de Vicking Eggeling,” Schémas, 1 (February 1927), 9—
57. Vuillermoz, “Abel Gance et Napoléon” 340.
58. Obey, “Musique et cinéma,” 11–12.
59. Germaine Dulac, “Les Esthéthiques, les entraves, la cinégraphie integrale,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 2, 46.
60. See Germaine Dulac, “Du Sentiment au ligne,” Schémas, 1 (February 1927), 26–31; Dulac, “La Musique du silence,” Cinégraphie, 5 (15 January 1928), 77–78; Dulac, “Films visuels et anti-visuels,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 31–41. Dulac’s own short non-narrative films from this period included Disque 927 (1928), Thèmes et variations (1928), and Etude cinégraphique sur un arabesque (1929).
61. Antonin Artaud, “Cinéma et réalité,” La Nouvelle Revue française, 170 (1 November 1927), reprinted in Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 22–25; Léon Moussinac, “La Question du film dit d’ ‘avant-garde’,” Le Cinéma soviétique, 218–20; Epstein, “Les Images de ciel,” 190; Robert Desnos, “Cinéma d’avant-garde,” Documents, 7 (December 1929), 385–87.
62. Dulac, “Les Esthétiques, les entraves, la cinégraphie intégrale,” 41–47.
63. Emile Vuillermoz, “La Musique des images,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 3 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1927), 41–66. For an earlier, but no more original essay, see Vuillermoz, “Réalisme et expressionnisme,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 72–80. Louis Chavance, “L’Impressionnisme cinématographique,” Cinégraphie, 2 (15 October 1927), 21–22. See, for instance, Paul Ramain, “L’Influence du rêve sur le cinéma,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 40 (1 July 1925), 8; Ramain, “Les Chants et danses de la mort,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 46 (1 October 1925), 23–25; Ramain, “Sensibilité intelligente d’abord, objectif ensuite,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 55 (15 February 1926), 7–8; Ramain, “Pour une esthétique intellectuelle du film,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 58 (1 April 1926), 13–14; and Ramain, “De l’incohérence onirique à la cohérence cinématographique,” Schémas, 1 (February 1927), 60–66.
64. Levinson, “Pour une poétique du film,” 69–74.
65. Pierre-F. Quesnoy, “Littérature et cinéma,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 91–93.
66. Desnos, “Cinéma d’avant-garde,” 385–87.
67. For a survey of the revivals of French films within the circuit of ciné-clubs and specialized cinemas, see Abel, Trench Cinema, 283–84.
68. Jean Prévost, “Metropolis,” Le Crapouillot (November 1927), 55.
69. Léon Moussinac, “Les Principes,” Le Cinéma soviétique (Paris: Nouvelle Revue française, 1928), reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 177–78. See, also, Michel Goreloff, “Le Nouveau Cinéma russe,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 76 (1 January 1927), 10–11; Jean Tedesco, “La Jeune Ecole russe,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 90 (1 August 1927), 12–15; René Marchand and Pierre Weinstein, Le Cinéma (Paris: Rieder, 1927); and Michel Goreloff, “Cinéma russe,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 100 (1 January 1928), 15–16.
70. Moussinac, “Les Principes,” 182.
71. Moussinac, “La Question du film dit d’ ‘avant-garde’,” 218. Cf. André Delons, “Cinéma pur et cinéma russe,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 105 (15 March 1928), 11–12. André Levinson evidenced some interest in Eisenstein’s Potemkin as a “film of attractions” and briefly cited an essay on montage (“Iskousstvo Kino,” Leningrad, 1926) by the Russian filmmaker, Timoshenko—“Pour une poétique du film,” 87–88. Translations of Russian writings on the cinema, however, did not appear in France until 1929—for example, Vsevold Poudov-kine, “Construction d’un scénario,” La Revue du cinéma, 3 (May 1929), 2; S. M. Eisenstein, “Les Principes du noveau cinéma russe,” La Revue du cinéma, 9 (1 April 1930), 16–27.
72. Léon Moussinac, “Eisenstein,” Le Cinéma soviétique, 204.
73. André Thérive, “Plaidoyer pour le Naturalisme,” Comoedia (3 May 1927); Léon Le-monnier, “Une Manifeste littéraire: Le roman populaire,” L’Oeuvre (27 August 1929); Léon Lemonnier, Manifeste du roman populiste (Paris: Jacques Bernard, 1929). See Bernard, Le Parti communiste français, 19–21 ; and J. E. Flowers, Literature and the Left in Trance (London: Methuen, 1985), 80–83.
74. See, for instance, the inquiry on the question of a proletarian literature, launched by Barbusse’s Monde (4 August-3 November 1928) and to which Poulaille was one of six principal respondents. This inquiry sparked four others as well over the next two years—La Revue mondiale (November 1929), Savoir et Beauté (March—May 1930), Les Nouvelles littéraires (July-September 1930), and La Grande Revue (October 1930)—see Bernard, Le Parti communiste français, 29–33. see also» Moussinac’s laudatory review, “Charlie Chaplin, par Henry Poulaille,” Panoramique du cinéma, 142–44.
75. Flowers, Literature and the Left in Prance, 79. See Henri Poulaille, “Le Littérature et le peuple,” Le Progrès (17 December 1925); Poulaille, “Réponse,” Ai onde (13 October 1928); and Poulaille, “Charles-Louis Philippe et le littérature prolétarienne,” Cahiers bleus, 55 (29 March 1930). Poulaille and his “school” were published primarily by Georges Valois, who had returned to his earlier anarchist beliefs after his break with François Coty in 1927. For an analysis of Poulaille’s theory of a proletarian literature, see Bernard, Le Parti communiste français, 23–28; Pierre Bardel, “Henry Poulaille et la littérature prolétarienne,” Europe, 373–76 (March—April 1977), 168–78; and Flower, Literature and the Left in France, 77–80.
76. Flower, Literature and the Left in France, 78.
77. Henri Poulaille, “L’Age ingrat du cinéma,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 68. Cf. his earlier defense of a Realist cinema in “L’Emotion et le cinéma,” La Revue fédéraliste, 103 (November 1927), 78, 81–82.
78. Poulaille, “L’Age ingrat du cinéma,” 69–71.
79. Léon Moussinac, “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” Panoramique du cinéma, reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma, 284–88. After its preview, in April 1928, the Catholic archbishop of Paris threatened to initiate a boycott of Dreyer’s film, a position that convinced the producers to cut the film severely for its premiere in October. It should be remembered that Action française and other rightist groups adopted Jeanne d’Arc as the true mythic figure of French nationalism quite early in the century, and that the date of Jeanne d’Arc’s birth was proclaimed a national holiday, as a symbolic event marking the Nationalist Revival, in 1911—see Plumyène and Lasierra, Les Facismes français 25–26; and Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 11, 69–71. Thus Dreyer’s Protestant interpretation of the Jeanne d” Arc story overtly countered this rightist mythology.
80. André Sauvage, “Panoramiques,” La Revue du cinéma, 2 (February 1929), 1.
81. Jean Epstein, “L’Objectif lui-même,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 53 (15 January 1926), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 128. See, also, Epstein, “Le Regard du verre,” Les Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 9–12.
82. Jean Epstein, “Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 59 (15 April 1926), 9–10, reprinted in Epstein, Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (Paris: Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926), 16, 18.
83. Paul Willemen, “On Reading Epstein on Photogénie” Afterimage, 10 (Autumn 1981) , 44–45. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Ben Brewster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) , 3–87.
84. Jean Epstein, “Art d’événement,” Comoedia (18 November 1927), 4. See, also, Jean Epstein, “Temps et personnage du drame,” Cinégraphie, 3 (15 November 1927), 43–45; and Epstein, “Opinion sur le cinématographe,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 28–30. The doubled narrative and peculiar climax of Epstein’s 61/2x11 (1927)—with its development of a photograph whose image is simultaneously present and absent—act as a prelude to La Glace à trois faces. For an analysis of these two films, see Abel, French Cinema, 448–62.
85. Epstein, “Art d’événement,” 4.
86. Epstein, “Les Images de ciel,” 90.
87. Epstein, “Art d’événement,” 4.
88. Epstein, “Art d’événement,” 4.
89. Jean Epstein, “Les Approches de la vérité,” Photo-Ciné (15 November–15 December 1928), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1, 191–93. For an analysis of Finis Terrae, see Abel, French Cinema, 500–507.
90. Epstein, “Les Approches de la vérité,” 193.
91. Rosalind Kraus, “The Photographie Conditions of Surrealism,” October, 19 (Winter 1981), 31.
92. Dr. Allendy, “La Valeur psychologique de l’image,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 1 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1926), reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Corréa, 1946), 305–8. Cf. Michel Goreloff, “Suggérer,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 91 (15 August 1927), 23–24; and Paul Ramain, “La Construction thématique des films de F. Lang: Metropolis,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 91 (15 August 1927), 21–22.
93. Allendy, “La Valeur psychologique de l’image,” 304–5, 310.
94. Allendy, “La Valeur psychologique de l’image,’ 310–11.
95. Ramain, “L’Influence du rêve sur le cinéma,” 8. See, also, Paul Ramain, “Le Film peut traduire et créer le Rêve,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous, 67 (15 August 1926), 11–14.
96. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 14–17, 26.
97. See, for instance, Robert Desnos, “René Clair et le nouveau cinéma.,” Journal littéraire (21 March 1925), and “Les Rêves de la nuit transportés sur l’écran,” Le Soir (3 February 1927), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 131–32, 150–52.
98. Williams, Figures of Desire, 24. See, for instance, Robert Desnos, “Amour et cinéma,” Le Soir (19 March 1927), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 159–60.
99. Robert Desnos, “Fantômas, Les Vampires, Les Mystères de New York,” Le Soir (26 February 1927), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 153–55.
100. Williams, Figures of Desire, 27. Robert Desnos, “Minuit à quatorze heures,” Cahiers du mois, 12 (1925), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 21–28. For further analyses of Desnos’s scenarios, see Marie-Claire Dumas, “Un Scénario exemplaire de Robert Desnos,” Etudes cinématographique, 38–39 (Spring 1965), 135–39; J. H. Matthews, Surrealism andFilm (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 56–58; Alain and Odette Virmaux, Les Surréalistes et le cinéma (Paris: Seghers, 1976), 69–71; and Steven Kovâcs, From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1980), 59–61. For an analysis of Desnos’s previously unacknowledged contribution to Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer (1928), see Inez Hedges, “Constellated Visions: Robert Desnos’s and Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer,” Dada/Surrealism, 15 (1986), 99–109. The manuscript scenario of L’Etoile de mer is reprinted by Rudolf Kuenzli, and translated by Inez Hedges, in Dadal Surrealism, 207–19.
101. Williams, Figures of Desire, 28.
102. Goudal, “Surréalisme et cinéma,” 346.
103. Williams, Figures of Desire, 18. Cf. Kovâcs, F rom Enchantment to Rage, 251–53.
104. Goudal, “Surréalisme et cinéma,” 355.
105. Clair, “Rythme,” 15.
106. See, also, Antonin Artaud, “Le Cinéma et l’abstraction,” Le Monde illustré, 3645 (October 1927), trans. Helen Weaver as “Cinema and Abstraction,” in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), 149–50; and Artaud, “Sorcery and the Cinema” [1927 or 1930], trans. P. Adams Sitney, in The Avant-Garde Film, 59–60. For an analysis of Artaud’s scenario and Dulac’s film version of La Coquille et le clergyman, see Matthews, Surrealism and Film, 64–66; Kovâcs, From Enchantment to Rage, 174–76; Inez Hedges, Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983), 27–33; Abel, French Cinema, 475–80; Naomi Greene, “Artaud and Film: A Reconsideration,” Cinema Journal 23.4 (Summer 1984), 28–40; and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “The Image and the Spark: Dulac and Artaud Reviewed,” Dadal’Surrealism, 15(1986), 110–27.
107 Artaud, “Cinema et réalité,” 24–25.
108 Williams, Figures of Desire, 20.
109 See, for instance, Benjamin Fondane’s “paupières mûres,” “barre fixe,” and “mta-sipoj” in his Trois Scénarii (Paris: Robert Baze, 1928), and Francis Picabia, La Loi d’accommodation chez borgnes (Paris: Th. Briant, 1928). For an analysis of Fondane’s scenarios, see Peter Christensen, “Benjamin Fondane’s ‘Scénarii intournables’,” Dadal Surrealism, 15 (1986), 72–85.
110 It should be remembered that André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, and Pierre Unik all joined the French Communist Party in early 1927, after which the rest of the Surrealist circle followed; as a body, the Surrealists remained aligned with the French Communist Party until 1932—see Robert Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920–1936, “Journal of Contemporary History, 1.2 (1966), 10–17; and Bernard, Le Parti communiste français, 90–112.
111. Desnos, “Cinémad’avant-garde,” 386. See, also, Robert Desnos, “Mouvements accélérés,” Journal littéraire (18 April 1925); [untitled], Journal littéraire (9 May 1925), and “Moana,” Le Soir (19 May 1927), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 137–38, 143–44, 177–79.
112. Goudal, “Surréalisme et cinéma,” 356.
113. Desnos, “Cinéma d’avant-garde,” 387.
114. Robert Aron, “Films de révolte,” La Revue du cinéma, 5(15 November 1929), 41— 45. The Surrealist films that Aron discusses include Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1927), L’Etoile de mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Chateau du Dé (1929), and Bunuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929). See, also, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s scenario for Un Chien andalou, in La Revue du cinéma, 5 (November 1929), 3–16. For analyses of Un Chien andalou, see Raymond Dur-gnat, Luis Bunuel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 22–37; Matthews, Surrealism and Film, 84–90; Phillip Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou” Screen, 18 (1977), 55–119; Paul Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog” 1978 Film Studies Annual (1979), 57–63; Kovâcs, From Enchantment to Rage, 196–210; Williams, Figures of Desire, 53–105; Hedges, Languages of Revolt, 44–52, 69–73; Abel, French Cinema, 480–86; and Stuart Liebman, “Un Chien andalou: The Talking Cure,” Dadal Surrealism, 15 (1986), 143–58.
115. Aron, “Films de révolte,” 41–43, 45.
116. The Surrealists were much taken with the films of Buster Keaton—see, for instance, Robert Desnos, “Paris qui dort, Sherlock Jr., Le Rail,” Journal littéraire (14 February 1925), and “René Clair et le nouveau cinéma,” reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma, 127–28, and 131— 32; and Luis Bunuel, “Buster Keaton’s College” Cahiers d’art, 10 (1927), reprinted in Francisco Aranda, Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography, trans. David Robinson (New York: De Capo, 1976), 272–73.
117. Aron, “Films de révolte,”45.
118. Williams, Figures of Desire, 41. As Williams suggests, “many of Lacan’s most important contributions to psychoanalytic tradition . . . are all drawn from the poetic well-spring of Surrealism”—Figures of Desire, 44.