Translated by Stuart Liebman from “Pour une avant-garde nouvelle,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 29 (15 January 1925), 8–10. This essay was first delivered as a lecture at the Vieux-Colombier cinema on 14 December 1924. An earlier version of this translation appeared in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 26–30.
I JUST WANT to say this: you have to love it and hate it at the same time—and love it as much as you hate it. This fact alone proves that the cinema is an art with a very well-defined personality of its own. The difficulty lies above all in the choice of what is right to hate about it. And if this choice is difficult, it is because it must be revised at extremely short intervals.
Indeed, the best friends of an art always end up becoming infatuated with their ideas. And because art as it transforms itself goes beyond its rules at every moment, these best friends of yesterday become the worst enemies of tomorrow, fanatics devoted to shopworn methods. This continual overturning of friendships is characteristic of the slow evolution of all the arts.
Thus it is that today at last—at last but a little too late—some methods of cinematic expression, still considered as strange and suspect a year ago, have become a la mode. Being fashionable has always signaled the end of a style.
Among these methods we can chiefly include the suppression of intertitles, rapid editing, the importance accorded to sets and to their expression-istic style.
The first films without intertitles were made almost simultaneously in America and in Germany. In America it was a film by Charles Ray, La Rente Baignade [The Old Swimmin’ Hole, 1921], distributed and titled here, though only after considerable delay. Retreating from its novelty, the distributors were careful to add about fifteen intertitles to the film. In Germany, it was Le Rail [Scherben or Shattered, 1921] by Lupu Pick. I haven’t come here to justify the so-called “American” title—incorrectly named for it is, alas, often French too—that beforehand explains a first time to the spectator what he is about to see in the next image, and then after it tells him a second time in case he either wouldn’t see or understand. Certainly the suppression of the title has had its value as a new method, not entirely in and of itself but as a useful one among others. And Lupu Pick, who must be considered the master of the film without titles, last season presented us with a kind of cinematic perfection, that is, The Night of St. Sylvester [1923], perhaps the most filmic film ever seen, whose shadows conveyed an extreme of human passion on film for the first time. And the theory that is the basis for the film without titles is obviously logical: the cinema is made to narrate with images and not with words. Except that one should never go to the limits of theories; their furthermost point is always their weak point where they give way. For you can’t deny that watching a film absolutely free of intertitles is, for psychological reasons, depressing; the intertitle is above all a place for the eye to rest, a punctuation point for the mind. A title often avoids a long visual explanation, one that is necessary but also annoying or trite. And if you had to limit yourself to films without titles, how many otherwise beautiful scenarios would become unrealizable. Finally, there are various kinds of information that I still believe it is more discreet to provide in a text than through an image; if you must indicate that an action takes place in the evening, maybe it would be better simply to write it than to show a clock face with the hands stopped at nine o’clock.
Obviously, in a good film an intertitle is only a kind of accident. But on the other hand, advertising a film by stating that it has no intertitles, isn’t that like praising the poems of Mallarmé because they don’t have punctuation marks?
Rapid editing exists in an embryonic state in the gigantic work of Griffith. To Gance goes the honor of having so perfected this method that he deserves to be considered its inspired inventor. La Roue is still the formidable cinematic monument in whose shadow all French cinematic art lives and breathes. Here and there, attempts are being made to escape from its hold and its style; it is still difficult. And if I insist on this point, it is so that what I am going to say in a moment cannot in any way be construed as a criticism of La Roue. It contains, moreover, elements far more noble, more pure, and more moral than the discovery of the rapid editing technique, which seems to me nothing more than an accident in the film. But if in La Roue this is a very fortunate accident, how disagreeable it becomes in so many other films. Today, rapid editing is abused even in documentaries; each drama has a scene, if not two or three, made up of little fragments. Nineteen twenty-five, I predict to you, will inundate us with films that will precisely correspond to this most superficial aspect of our cinematic ideal in 1923. Nineteen twenty-four has already begun, and in a month four films using breakneck editing have already been shown. It’s too late; it’s no longer interesting; it’s a little ridiculous. Wouldn’t our contemporary novelist be ridiculous if he wrote his works in the Symbolist style of Francis Poietevin where, invariably, he uses the word “remembrance” [resouvenance] for “memory” [souvenir] and “disheartenment” [désespérance] for “despair” [déséspoir]?1
If you must say about a film that it has beautiful sets, I think it would be better not to speak about it at all; the film is bad. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the best example of the misuse of sets in cinema. Caligari represents a serious cinematic malady: the hypertrophy of a subordinate feature, the great importance still accorded to what is an “accident” at the expense of the essential. I do not want to talk primarily about Caligari s shoddy expressionism “ready-made for thirty francs,” but about the principle of a film that is hardly anything more than photographs of a group of sets. Everything in Caligari is a set: first, the decor itself, next, the character who is as painted and tricked up as the set, finally, the light which is also painted—an unpardonable sacrilege in cinema—with shadows and halflights illusionistically laid out in advance. Thus the film is nothing more than a still life, all its living elements having been killed by strokes of the brush. Along with a thousand other things, cinema has borrowed sets from the theater. Little by little, if it is independently viable, the cinema will pay back its debts and this debt as well. No more than it revived the theater, the work of painters will not succeed in reviving the cinema. On the contrary, the work of painters cannot but succeed at impeding the normal development, sincere and pure, dramatic and poetic, of the cinema. Painting is one thing, the cinema something else entirely. If the “Théâtre d’Art” declared at its birth: “The word creates the decor as well as everything else . . . ,”2 the “Cinéma d’Art” now being born declares: “The gesture creates the decor as well as everything else.” In cinema, stylized sets ought not and cannot be. In the fragments of those few films that are almost true cinema, the sets are anatomical, and the drama played in this intimate physical arena is superlatively ideal. In close-up, the eyelid with the lashes that you count, is a set remodeled by emotion at every instant. Beneath the lid appears the gaze which is the character of the drama and which is even more than a character: it is a person. With imperceptible movements whose religious secret no emotional microscopy has yet been able to reveal, the circle of the iris transcribes a soul. Between the tuft of the chin and the arc of the eyebrows an entire tragedy is won, then lost, is won anew and lost once more. Lips still pressed together, a smile trembles toward off-screen, within those wings which is the heart. When the mouth finally opens, joy itself takes wing.
If I criticize three techniques especially misused by modern cinema, methods which now enjoy a belated vogue, it is because these methods are purely material, purely mechanical. The mechanical period of cinema is over. The cinema must henceforth be called: the photography of delusions of the heart.
I remember my first meeting with Blaise Cendrars. It was in Nice, where Cendrars was then assisting Gance in the production of La Roue. We were speaking about cinema and Cendrars told me: Photogénie is a word . . . very pretentious, a bit silly; but it’s a great mystery.” Gradually, much later, I understood what a great mystery photogénie is.
Each of us, I assume, may possess some object which he holds onto for personal reasons: for some it’s a book; for some, perhaps a very banal and somewhat ugly trinket; for someone else, perhaps, a piece of furniture with no value. We do not look at them as they really are. To tell the truth, we are incapable of seeing them as objects. What we see in them, through them, are the memories and emotions, the plans or regrets that we have attached to these things for a more or less lengthy period of time, sometimes forever. Now, this is the cinematographic mystery: an object such as this, with its personal character, that is to say, an object situated in a dramatic action that is equally photographic in character, reveals anew its moral character, its human and living expression when reproduced cine-matographically.
I imagine a banker receiving bad news at home from the stock exchange. He is about to telephone. The call is delayed. Close-up of the telephone. If the shot of the telephone is shown clearly, if it is well-written, you no longer see a mere telephone. You read: ruin, failure, misery, prison, suicide. And in other circumstances, this same telephone will say: sickness, doctor, help, death, solitude, grief. And at yet another time this same telephone will cry gaily: joy, love, liberty. All this may seem extremely simple; they may be regarded as childish symbols. I confess that it seems very mysterious to me that one can in this way charge the simple reflection of inert objects with an intensified sense of life, that one can animate it with its own vital import. Moreover, I confess that it seems much more important to me to concern ourselves with this phenomenon of cinematic telepathy than to cultivate two or three almost purely mechanical methods too exclusively.
M. Jean Choux, the film critic of the newspaper La Suisse,3 has written apropos of Coeur fidèle the lines that I reproduce below and that do not apply solely to this film.
“How close-ups deify. Oh, these faces of men and women displayed so harshly on screen, solid as enamel and more powerfully sculptural than the Michelangelesque creatures on the ceiling of the Sistine! To see a thousand immobile heads whose gazes are aimed at and monopolized and haunted by a single enormous face on the screen toward which they all converge. What an excruciating conversation. An idol and the crowd. Just like the cults in India. But here the idol is alive and this idol is a man. An extraordinary import is emitted from these close-ups. In them, the soul is separated in the same way one separates radium. The horror of living, its horror and mystery, is proclaimed. This pitiable Marie, this Jean, and this Petit-Paul, have they no other purpose than to be this Marie, this Jean, and this Petit-Paul? It’s not possible! There must be something more.”
Certainly there is something more.
The cinema is its herald.
1 Francis Poietevin (1854–1904) was a minor Symbolist poet.
2 A reference to Jacques Copeau’s famous Théâtre de Vieux-Colombier, which he founded in 1913 with the help of the writers associated with the Nouvelle Revue française.
3 Jean Choux (1887–1946) was a Swiss journalist and film critic who directed a half-dozen films in Switzerland and France between 1925 and 1929, and then hit the jackpot with Jean de la Lune (1931).
Translated by Paul Hammond in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 49–56. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Surréalisme et cinéma” in La Revue hebdomadaire (February 1925), 343–57.
ANEW TECHNIQUE is born: immediately the philosophers come running, armed with false problems. Is it an art?—Is it not an art?—Is it even worthy of interest?
“In short,” some of them say, “the cinema is only a perfected form of photography.” And they refuse to credit the new invention.
The indispensable extremists assume the other position. They tell us, “Not only is the cinema an art, it will, moreover, gradually absorb all the other arts” (Monsieur Marcel L’Herbier, in a lecture at the Collège de France, repeated in Geneva during October 1924 at the showing in that town of L’Inhumaine [1924], previously published in La Revue hebdomadaire in 1923). The proof: the cinema takes the place of architecture (30 meters devoted to the palaces in The Thief of Bagdad [1924]), music (a Negro jazz band goes through the motions for 20 meters), dance (25 meters on a tango by Valentino). Were they to draw the obvious conclusions from their ludicrous logic they would have us believe that in future our meals will be replaced by the image of Charlie Chaplin and the Kid tucking into a plate of pancakes.
“Given its basic technical strictures, how do we see the future of the cinema?” Now that’s a more realistic question. To establish the correctness of it, to begin to answer it, we need briefly to consider the evolution of the other arts.
We see each of them in their turn follow the same general pattern.
First, they escape literary contamination (the renunciation of figurative painting, of thematic music); next they renounce the constraint of logic, considered an intellectual element restricting sensory freedom, in favor of inquiring after their guiding principles in terms of their technique (Cubism, musical impressionism).
(You can already foresee the third stage: thirsting for total liberty, artists will thrust aside the last support of technique and claim the right to bring into play, without any modification, the very material forming the basis of their art.)
We do not want to conceal the excessive simplification of these views or the dangers inherent in them; but nobody can contest this conclusion: in the evolution of every art there comes a moment, which may or may not be deplored, when the artist ignores every command of intellectual or logical origin in order to question the technical possibilities of his art. To us this moment appears to have arrived for the cinema.
Let us open a short parenthesis here on a literary movement whose origins are not recent, but which manifests itself at present in a very noisy way.
We know the essential character of the Surrealist theses (we find an authentic expression of them in André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism [1924]): that the unconscious activity of the mind, on which general attention has been focused through the work of thinkers like Freud and Babinski1 or the novels of authors like Marcel Proust, has become the keystone of mental life. The artist’s principal target is henceforth to search for a reality in the dream superior to that which the logical, therefore arbitrary, exercise of thought suggests to us. On the one hand Surrealism presents itself as a critique of existing forms of literature, on the other as a complete renewal of the field and of artistic method and even, perhaps, as the renovation of the most general rules of human activity: in short, the absolute overthrow of all values.
You might think that objections to Surrealism (about which, however, you cannot deny the relative fruitfulness) are not lacking. Monsieur André Breton, even, shows himself to be ecstatic about the obstacles which already present themselves: “To its conquest [surreality] I go, certain of not getting there, but too heedless of my death not to calculate a little the joys of such possession.”
The potential difficulties seem to us capable of being subsumed under two principal headings.
First, an objection as to method. It is not easy to determine if the Surrealists situate a superior reality in the dream itself, or in a sort of union or adjustment, difficult to imagine, of the two states, dream and reality. In both cases the same objection arises. If you admit that dream constitutes a superior reality, there will be insurmountable practical problems in attaining and fixing this dream. As soon as consciousness succeeds in rummaging through the unconscious you can no longer speak of the unconscious. On the other hand if you accord a superior reality to a mystical fusion of the real and the dream, one cannot see by what means one can make two areas, by definition incommunicable, communicate with each other. (Our intention of progressing quickly here may lend too schematic an allure to our arguments. Furthermore, our real objective is not a critique of Surrealism.)
The second order of objection touches more profoundly on the anti-logical ambitions of Surrealism. Men have had the habit for so long now of using a language to communicate with each other that one asks if they can ever renounce this kind of usage. In short, what we call reason is the part of our mind common to all men: if it is to disappear will we not lapse into an individual, incommunicable mode of expression? “I believe more and more,” writes Monsieur A. Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism), “in the infallibility of my thought in relation to myself.” Monsieur A. Breton is right; but why then have this “spiritual and mental mechanism” of Monsieur A. Breton’s, once fixed in its absolute ingenuity valid only for Monsieur A. Breton himself, printed and published? Is it not so that we can make a comparison between his mind and our mind, and is this comparison even possible without some essential reference that only reason and logic can supply?
One fact seems remarkable to us. The objections we have just sketched out lose their value as soon as one applies the Surrealist theories to the domain of cinema. (That the theorists of Surrealism have wanted to apply their ideas to literature, that is to say just where they are most contestable, should not be too surprising since the same pen suits the theorist and the poet.) Applied to the technique of cinema the correctness and fecundity of the Surrealist thesis is all the more striking.
The objection to method (the difficulty of uniting the conscious and the unconscious on the same plane) does not hold for cinema, in which the thing seen corresponds exactly to a conscious hallucination.
Let’s go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the darkness. On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen where for two hours it will remain fixed. Life in the street outside no longer exists. Our problems evaporate, our neighbors disappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of temporary depersonalization which takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square meters of white sheet.
But we must beware of vague analogies. It is better here to go into details.
Monsieur A. Breton, wanting to establish the superiority of the dream, writes: “The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility arises no more.” And, he asks, “what reason, what reason better than another confers this natural allure on the dream, makes me welcome unreservedly a host of episodes the strangeness of which strikes me as I write”?
The answer to this question lies in what Taine2 used to call the “reductive mechanism of images.” When we are awake the images surging into our imagination have an anemic, pale color which by contrast makes the vigor and relief of real images stand out, the ones, that is to say, we get through our senses: and this difference of value is enough to make us distinguish the real from the imagined. When we sleep our senses are idle, or rather their solicitations do not cross the threshold of consciousness and, the reducing contrast no longer existing, the imaginary succession of images monopolizes the foreground; as nothing contradicts them we believe in their actual existence.
Awake, we imagine the real and the possible all at once, while in the dream we only imagine the possible. The Surrealists see an advantage in what, they say, one is used to seeing as inferior. Without going into the legitimacy of this paradox, let us return to the cinema. There we see a whole host of material conditions conspire to destroy this “reductive mechanism of images.” The darkness of the auditorium destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict the ones on the screen. It is equally important to ward off the impressions that can come to us through our other senses: who has never noticed the special nature of music in the cinema? Above all else it serves to abolish a silence that would let us perceive or imagine auditory phenomena of a realistic order, which would damage the necessary uniqueness of vision. And what spectator has not been embarrassed at times during the showing of a film at the attention he was giving, despite himself, to the music? In reality the only music that would suit the cinema would be a sort of continuous, harmonious, monotonous noise (like the humming of an electric fan), the effect of which would be to obdurate the sense of hearing in some way for the duration of the show.
Someone might object that these are conditions common to all forms of spectacle and that even in the theater the darkness is there to facilitate the audience’s concentration on the stage. But let us observe that the individuals performing on a theater stage have a physical presence that strengthens the trompe I’oeil of their setting; they have three-dimensionality, they live amidst the noises of normal life; we accept them as our brothers, as our peers, while the camera aspires to give the illusion of reality by means of a simulacrum of a uniquely visual kind. An actual hallucination is needed here which the other conditions of cinema tend to reinforce, just as, in the dream, moving images lacking three-dimensionality follow each other on a single plane artificially delimited by a rectangle which is like a geometrical opening giving on to the psychic kingdom. The absence of color, too, the black and white, represents an arbitrary simplification analogous to those one meets in dreams. Once again let us note that the actual succession of images in the cinema has something artificial about it that distances us from reality. The persistence of images on the retina, which is the physiological basis of cinema, claims to present movement to us with the actual continuity of the real; but in fact we know very well that it’s an illusion, a sensory device which does not completely fool us. Ultimately, the rhythm of the individuals we see moving on the silent screen possesses something jerky about it that makes them the relatives of the people who haunt our dreams.
We must add one last analogy. In the cinema, as in the dream, the fact is complete master. Abstraction has no rights. No explanation is needed to justify the heroes’ actions. One event follows another, seeking justification in itself alone. They follow each other with such rapidity that we barely have time to call to mind the logical commentary that would explain them, or at least connect them.
(Summary considerations, no doubt, but ones that allow us to make short work of certain illusions about the advisability of adding “improvements” like color, relief or some kind of sound synchronization. The cinema has found its true technique in black and white film—forget three-dimensionality and sound. To try to “perfect” it, in the sense of bringing it closer to reality, would only run counter to and slow down its genuine development.)
The cinema, then, constitutes a conscious hallucination, and utilizes this fusion of dream and consciousness which Surrealism would like to see realised in the literary domain. These moving images delude us, by leaving us with a confused awareness of our own personality and by allowing us to evoke, if necessary, the resources of our memory. (In general, however, the cinema only demands from us memory enough to link the images.)
The cinema avoids the second order of difficulty raised by Surrealism just as happily.
Though the complete repudiation of logic is forbidden language, which is born of this logic, the cinema can indulge itself in such repudiation without contravening any ineluctable internal necessity.
“The strongest image is the one that has the greatest degree of arbitrariness,” declares Monsieur A. Breton, who cites, among other examples, this image from Philippe Soupault: “A church stood dazzling as a bell.”
The word church, encompassed, by virtue of language, within a system of logical relations, just as the word bell is, makes the very fact of pronouncing these two words, of comparing them, evoke these two systems, makes us make them coincide. And, as they are not juxtaposable, the reader bridles at accepting the comparison.
On the other hand when the cinema shows us a dazzling church then, without transition, a dazzling bell, our eye can accept this sequence; it is witnessing two facts here, two facts which justify themselves. And if the two images succeed each other with the necessary rapidity, the logical mechanism which tries to link the two objects in some way or other will not have time to be set in motion. All one will experience is the almost simultaneous sight of two objects, exactly the cerebral process, that is to say, that suggested this comparison to the author.
In language the foremost factor is always the logical thread. The image is born according to this thread, and contributes to its embellishment, its illumination. In cinema the foremost factor is the image which, on occasion, though not necessarily so, drags the tatters of reason behind it. The two processes, you see, are exactly inversed.
The above tends to demonstrate that not only does the application of Surrealist ideas to the cinema avoid the objection with which you can charge literary Surrealism, but that surreality represents a domain actually indicated to cinema by its very technique.
Just leaf through the dreamed poems Monsieur A. Breton has collected together at the end of his Manifesto, under the title of Soluble Fish, and you will see, perhaps, that the surest way of making the public accept them would be to treat them like film scenarios.
The adventures of the crate penetrated by human arms, sliding down hillsides, bashing against “trees that cast bright blue sunlight on it,” then running aground on the first floor of a run-down hotel, and which is found to contain only starch, and the mysterious voyage of the barque which is the poet’s tomb following the closing of the cemetery, and the tribulations of the lamppost, and the chase after the woman who has left her veil with her lover, a source of miracles and inexplicable bliss, so many marvelous tales with enough anacoluthon inevitably to shock the reader, but which, brought to the screen, would perhaps be accepted with delight by the spectator. The latter would see in its teeming lapses of logic no more than thousands of details, comic and strange, all ingenious.
It is time cinéastes saw clearly what profits they may gain in opening up their art to the unexplored regions of the dream. Up till now this has only been done intermittently, as if by default. They should lose no time in imbuing their productions with the three essential characteristics of the dream, the visual, the illogical, the pervasive.
THE VISUAL
The cinema is already so by force of circumstance.
It will remain so exclusively.
(There is nothing for it to fear, we repeat, from the paltry attempts at phonographic synchronization.)
Everything that is foolish about cinema is the fault of an old-fashioned respect for logic.
Sentimentality is the respect for logic within the framework of feeling. (All elegance, all unselfconsciousness results from the severing of one or more links in the traditional chain of feelings.)
The feuilleton is the respect for logic within the framework of episodes. (I term feuilleton any sequence of events whose unfolding, using basic characters and situations, can be understood by the average concierge.)
Slowness is the respect for logic within the framework of situations and gestures.
Etc.
THE PERVASIVE
But if you are to bring to the screen only various illogical series of images, assembled according to the most capricious associations of ideas, don’t you risk alienating the public?
First, we reply that we are suggesting only one possible direction for the cinema here. Other ways remain open besides this one. Bit by bit the education of the public will occur.
Next, we feel we must not lose our footing through complete incoherence. Man is only interested in what is close to him. I am interested in my dreams, despite their coherence, because they come from within me, because I find a particular quality in them belonging no doubt to what I can recognize in them of elements of my past life, though arbitrarily assembled. These memories are my own; but I have difficulty in identifying them. For want of a better word this is what I mean by the expression: the dream is pervasive.
This property of the dream is strictly personal, one can see that. How can a film, which must address itself to thousands of spectators, manage to be pervasive?
This is the place to reintroduce the human dimension.
One of Surrealism’s points of departure is the observation that everything that emerges from the mind, even without logical form, inevitably reveals the singularity of that mind. Man retains his personality (all the more so perhaps) in his most spontaneous productions.
A film, then, will have a sufficiently pervasive and human character because it will have come from the brain of one of my peers.
We now come up against a serious problem. In the actual process of cinema, a film does not have one creator, it has two, three, ten, fifty. One man supplies the scenario, which usually consists of an extremely brief outline. This scenario is taken up by the director, who develops it, fills it out with detail, in short brings it to the level of practical realization. It remains to note the contribution of each artist, the suggestions of the costume and prop departments, the requirements of the lighting technicians. During the course of such a many-sided collaboration doesn’t the work risk losing the singular quality it owed to the individuality of the author, the singularity of its first conception?
This difficulty is, we believe, only temporary and soon tends to disappear. It is due to the exceptional conditions created by the too-rapid growth of the cinema. The cinema has met with such success since its beginnings (it is barely thirty years old, remember) that it has had to cope with demands disproportionate to its means. The public expects new films every week. To create them is the work of many. You employ whomever you can. Let us give the division of labor and the necessary specialization the time to find their way. Then, beginning with the original cell, the source idea born in his mind, the cinéaste will be able to supervise it, thanks to a technique he must be master of, until it is seen on the screen without the idea being bungled by a commercial organization concerned only to exploit it. On that day the cinema will have its artists, and the question whether or not “the cinema is an art” will thereby get an affirmative response difficult to contest.
The cinéastes are beginning to see the light.
It isn’t too hard to see indications in their most recent productions that would confirm our previsions, yet with what awkwardness is this Marvelous in which the cinema finds its real voice still spoken of. Will results come from the comedy film side? We have memories of certain American films, almost without subtitles [intertitles], in which girls, irresponsible individuals, and animals let their whims, of the most diverting fantasy, take control of them. Do not the recent Chaplins betray the desire to construct a simplified setting which no over-precise detail can localize (Charlie Chaplin being universal, the locations he performs in could be anywhere)—and also the preoccupation with creating a dream atmosphere which is believable and makes possible the extraordinary gestures of this unfortunate with the little mustache and big feet. Remember the strange chapel with its strange congregation in The Pilgrim [1923], where Charlie, the bogus pastor, delivers that strange sermon; and in Payday [1922], Charlie, the mason in his cups, returning to a far-off lodging house that proves impossible to get to, and that nightmarish rain, and those futile, unreal attempts by the drunk to get on a tram which has no destination and will always escape, full of eternal commuters, back into the anonymous night.
Besides this burlesque Marvelous, Charlie’s unique atmosphere, there is a place for that faery [féerie] Marvelous certain films have already brought us, the essential elements of which would be the geometry of line and the illogicality of detail.
The Marvelous in the cinema, unable to utilize the infinite resources of color, must count above all on the resources of lighting and line. Just as in the world we inhabit no line is absolutely geometrical, so a resolutely geometrical stylization creates a surprising atmosphere.
In The Thief of Bagdad, for instance, two details strike the spectator forcibly: the gate of the town that opens and closes through the connecting and disconnecting of identically formed panels, and Douglas Fairbanks soaring above the unreal clouds on his scleroid horse. These two images have the admirable manifest artifice of the dream.
In the same film, on the other hand, the heavy-handed Americans, wanting to show us a monster, have laboriously sought verisimilitude and concocted a sort of enormous lizard, instead of painting in, in broad strokes, a clearly fantastic creature of geometrical cardboard. The Germans made the same blunder when they sought to represent Cerberus guarding Brunhild’s castle (in The Nibelungen [1924]). They constructed a complicated, naively realistic mechanism needing sixteen men to make the huge thing move. What effort and money expended, not necessarily in vain, but they missed the whole point!
At least we have a success in the laboratory set F. Léger designed for Monsieur L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine. The effect of the machines used to bring the loved woman back to life is striking, the Cubist decor coming alive and moving in a clever frenzy.
Let us quote Monsieur A. Breton again: “No matter how charming they may be, a grown man would think he were reverting to childhood by nourishing himself on fairy tales, and I am the first to admit that all such tales are not suitable for him. The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the stage of waiting for this kind of spider.” It is the fineness of this fabric we think of when calling for the illogicality of the detail. It is not without unparalleled sorrow that man, crushed by a thousand years of logic, will renounce the principle of identity. The American faery that we find in this same Thief of Bagdad (flying carpets, flames, monsters) is not much more courageous than Perrault’s, whose fairies didn’t go quite so far as to change a pumpkin into a horse or a rat into a coach, but prudently changed an animal into an animal, an object into an object. “There are,” adds Monsieur A. Breton, “fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.” Who will write these tales if not the cinema?
The preceding pages, we repeat, aim only at suggesting one possible direction for the cinema.
As for the concessions needed to suit public taste, we do not think it useful to insist on them. There will always be enough industrialists to keep up the old traditions, to go on adapting novels to be acted out by boxing champions and France’s most beautiful midinettes.
What the cinema has produced over a quarter of a century justifies all our hopes. One does not fight the forces of the spirit.
JEAN GOUDAL (1895—?), as far as is known, composed just this one essay on the cinema.
1 Joseph François Félix Babinski (1857–1932) was best known for his studies on hysteria—for example, Démembrement de Ihystérie traditionnelle, pithiatisme (Paris: Semaine médicale, 1909).
2 Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) was an influential literary historian and critic whose positivist theory of literature attempted to explain literary works in the context of race, place, and time period.
From “L’Influence du rêve sur le cinéma,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous 40 (1 July 1925), 8.
IF ONE TAKES inspiration from the ideas of Sigmund Freud on dream— which is “untranslatable in words, [and] can only be expressed by means of images”—it is quite obvious that one is correct in believing that the current cinema is based on dream under all its guises: both the dream that is an unconscious creation of moving images during sleep and the daydream that is a subconscious creation of the waking state—two forms which have the same cause according to certain psychologists. Moreover, inspiration is associated with dream: like dream, it is a spontaneous manifestation of the unconscious or subconscious which is translated into images.
Now, this—quasi-conscious, if one can say that—use of dream appears constantly in the majority of artistic films or real “cinema,” whether it occurs as content, as means, or merely as a sporadic element.
To cite the films which are dreamlike or use dream images would be time-consuming, there are so many: from Sjostrom’s Charette fantôme [The Phantom Carriage, 1921] to René Clair’s Fantôme du Moulin Rouge [1925] and Midsummer Night’s Dream (in preparation),1 by way of the same author’s Entr’acte [1924], a film which has to be regarded as a type of dream but an incoherent one, which makes it all the more interesting. L’Inhumaine [1924] also is of an oneiric order. As for the German productions, from Caligari [1919], which is a distorted vision, the oneiric delirium of a madman, to Waxworks [Paul Leni, 1924], The Hands of Or lac [Robert Wiene, 1924], and Warning Shadows [Arthur Robinson, 1923], dream turns to nightmare and nightmare to hallucination.
If the cinema is dreamlike, the reciprocal is also true: dream is like the cinema. Without entering here into what I could call the physiology of the cinema, I will show briefly how dreams and cinema are merely different, yet parallel expressions of the same impulse. The images that I see unroll before my eyes in the slumber of the darkened hall are directly comparable to oneiric images, with the orchestra playing an essentially hypnogenic role.2 In dreams, people are silent, food doesn’t exude any odor, liquids are tasteless: it’s the same on the screen.
In certain films—for example, the German Vanina [Arthur von Gerlach, 1922]—I have personally experienced the intolerable feeling that one has in certain dreams: running without getting anywhere in trying to escape imminent danger.
This example, chosen from among many, reveals that a cinema based on dream reaches the point of producing oneiric feelings in us. Moreover, by virtue of very complicated laws of dissociation between the representative and affective elements of a psychological state—according to P. Brunet— the representative terms of a fear can occur in a dream without being accompanied by the affective terms; so that the dreamer can see his fears materialize without experiencing any distressing emotions. What produces a certain oneiric materialization of fears here is not a nightmare and cannot be distinguished from the materialization of desires.
Now, all this can be fully realized in the images on the screen. Certain scenes, although agonizing in and of themselves, are not so for many spectators who, instinctively, unconsciously, recognize that they are seeing a fiction.
The incoherence of dream is more apparent than actual and, interposed against the logic of film, is easily repressed: the technique of film being the same as that of dream. All the expressive and visual processes of the cinema are found in dream, and have existed there since man first came to exist and to think. The simultaneity of actions, soft-focus images, dissolves, superimpositions, distortions, the doubling of images, slow motion, movement in silence—are these not the soul of dream and daydream?
Furthermore, dream is progressive, never static. So is the cinema.
Now, this affinity between the dynamic movement of the cinema and the dynamic movement of dream engenders a third connection: that of cinema and music. Music, the supreme art of dream, of audible dream, is itself dynamism and movement. This simultaneity, this soft focus, these super-impositions, these distortions, all this movement proper to cinema and dream can be found again completely, acoustically, in music: fugue, counterpoint, harmony . . . And doesn’t music create, for many people, more or less rapid, clear visual images, and in constant motion? See, for example, Bach’s Caprice sur le départ d’un frère bien-aimé, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, most of Debussy’s works, Ravel’s Valse, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Déodat de Séverac’s Baigneuses au soleil, Vincent d’Indy’s Poème des montagnes, Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231, and so on . . .
Therefore, dream and the fantastic are nicely externalized by music (Moussorgsky) and even better so by cinema (Charette fantôme). Cinema, dream, and music form, then, a kind of Trinity: three states in one. And I have to admit, inspired by all this, that the cinema, as the translator of dream, may one day become a true optical music that transcends the scenario and causes the subtlest emotion to blossom in the self, through the rhythm and visual song of images alone—without any wordplay.
That is a form of cinema, if not cinema at its best.
PAUL RAMAIN was a cinema enthusiast who founded one of the earliest ciné-clubs outside Paris, in Montpellier. He also passed himself off as a doctor of psychology, although he apparently had no formal training.
From “Transpositions visuelles,” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 67–71.
THE CINEMA has scarcely gotten beyond infancy. It is still in its period of formation, that of “essays,” various experiments, tentative trials and errors, and also the most exciting efforts—those in which it sees opening ahead all the paths of virtual conquest and mystery, rich in possibilities. In the meantime, it can be pardoned for not always being entirely itself. Yet just as we demand that painting be above all pictorial, literature literary, and theater theatrical, so we are right to insist that the cinema above all be cinematic. The character or individuality of an art is comprised of an ensemble of means, techniques, and possibilities which constitute its own unique property.
In the current state of the art and of visual technique, film still cannot escape completely from the influence, suggestions—and snares—that the other arts in general and literature in particular impose upon it each step of the way.
Until the new order of things arrives, then, we have two kinds of scenarios: those composed directly for the screen and those drawn from theatrical dramas or novels. The future will see more and more cinéastes worthy of the name adopting the former to the detriment of the latter.
For two reasons, however, this first source of visual interpretation is temporarily impossible. In our age of literary overproduction, where bad books are almost as numerous as bad films, a well-launched book can easily sell its 150,000–200,000 copies. It’s a publicity campaign, in effect, for a film of the same title. Producers are fond of saying that a film drawn from a celebrated book attracts many more people than does one drawn from an original scenario, whose author may die unknown—unrecognized—however inspired he may be. That’s an error of judgment from which the public will recover long before the producers do.
The visual education of the spectator is proceeding slowly but surely. His revolt will be all the more sudden the less he believes in production company publicity. When that day comes, the cinema will take an enormous step forward and perhaps witness the collapse of the exhibition circuits of our cinema shopkeepers.
The second important reason why we don’t create original scenarios in France is that, ever since the death of Louis Delluc [March 1924], we have not had any genuine scenario writers. Who could we compare with C. Gardner Sullivan and Jack Hawks, the authors of The Aryan [1916], Civilization [1916], Those Who Pay [1917], and Blue Blazes Rawden [1918], with Jeannie MacPherson and Francis Marion, all claimed by America, or with Hans Janowitz, Hans Kraely, Thea Von Harbou, and Carl Mayer who do Germany proud?1
The dramatists and novelists who could give us some powerful and original work have no sense of the cinema; they have neither seriously investigated its limitless possibilities nor studied the technical resources for those possibilities. They all ought to submit to a reeducation and serve an apprenticeship in visual composition; but, because of their age and intellectual rigidity, none would even consider that.
Now, certain modern writers—Pierre Mac Orlan, Alexandre Arnoux, Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, Joseph Delteil, André Obey, Marc Elder—have come strongly under the influence of this new art form; but that influence has not gone beyond the point of the literary development of this or that page.3 It still has not provoked a revolution in the conception of the novel like that which the following generations will make, the generation born along with the cinema.
Given the total French production of the last few years, how many original scenarios are worthy of sustaining our attention? Le Penseur by Edmond Fleg; Le Silence, La Fête espagnole, and La Femme de nulle part by Louis Delluc; L’Atre by Robert Boudrioz4—and then?
Abel Gance, the greatest director that the cinema has granted us up until now, to whom we owe certain fragments in La Roue, which, stripped of their context, are among the most perfect in the cinema? Has Gance himself ever achieved balance and harmony in the composition of his scenarios?
DESPITE a sometimes technically deft decoupage, the film projects proposed to us currently, most of the time, possess such a banality and poverty of ideas that it is disconcerting!
Where should we turn? . . . What films should we shoot? . . . We turn to adaptations. They are but a last resort in the present state of affairs.5
Certain good novels, not necessarily the famous ones, provide a richness of substance, vigor, and thought, a multitude of psychological details. They penetrate more deeply into the characters, explore their dimensions, expose all of their impulses and the play of their reflexes, dismantle all of their mental machinery.
Temporarily, then, it seems preferable to film these adaptations, provided that they be perfectly visual.
Understand the importance of these words: to make visual. In them lies the whole art of cinegraphic transposition.
Writing is a means of expression; the film is another, essentially different. And it is agreed that the former, in light of its age, has the enormous advantage of universality.
Just as any literary translation inevitably alters the sense of the original language more or less, visual transposition more or less distorts the original work.
This distortion is matched inversely to the skill, ingenuity, and virtuosity of the cinéaste, who must have the desire to rethink the work on a different plane, to recreate it completely if necessary. Often then there is a displacement of the original qualities. Some passage given over to a learned vocabulary or to verbosity has to be condensed and expressed on the screen by several suggestive images. By contrast, several pages, lines, or words can become the pretext for extended visual development.
The screen, which calls for images and not words, can require a total recasting of the subject; it can demand that the scriptwriter create images which may seem quite distant from those found in the novel or play in a literary form and yet which may be closer in spirit to the author’s thinking or to those he himself would have imagined.
The description of a decor, a character, the psychology of an individual, the stock phrases of an exchange, the responses of a pathetic scene—all have to become visual and be expressed by the image, that is, in light and silence. The extraordinary dynamism of the cinema, its extreme mobility in time and space, can even authorize the cinéaste to modify the order of development of the action.
Everything is allowed so long as the visual perfection of the work is foremost.
The cinéaste who visually translates a literary work has only one purpose: to make cinema, to make a film. He has to put aside all other considerations. To do otherwise is a confession of impotence on his part.
In France, we are wrong to think only of the source work, especially since the Americans always think about the work to be done. We reproach the latter for having distorted Notre Dame de Paris; actually they have transformed it, they have made it visual. If Victor Hugo were alive in our century and wrote directly for the screen, he would be obliged to submit to certain contingencies of visual expression.
Scriptwriters have imposed rules on Victor Hugo’s work which he would accept cheerfully if he were alive.
There’s no point, then, in crying out about sacrilege; instead, let’s be astonished at the scriptwriters’ ingenuity.
We often express the opinion that some works are visual and others are not. It’s an easy argument which masks our helplessness. All literary, theatrical, and musical works have been or could be rendered visual. It’s only the cinegraphic conception of certain directors which is not always so visual. Anything can be translated onto the screen; anything can be expressed in images.
It’s possible to derive a fascinating fiction film from the tenth chapter of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois as well as from a page of [Balzac’s] Physiologie du mariage, or a paragraph from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as well as any novel of Paul de Kock.6
But, to do so, it’s indispensable that one possess the spirit of cinema.
JACQUES FEYDER (1885–1948) was an actor at Gaumont before the war and then directed numerous short films for Gaumont between 1915 and 1919. His first feature film, L’At tan-tide (1921), based on Pierre Benoit’s best-selling novel, was a smash hit, and he went on to direct Crainquebille (1923) and Visages d’enfants (1925).
1 C. Gardner Sullivan (1885–1965) was head of the scenario department for Thomas Ince’s productions (at Triangle, Paramount-Artcraft, and Associated Producers), and Jack G. Hawks (1875–1940) was one of his chief writers. Actually William S. Hart shared credit with Sullivan for the scripts and dialogue titles of many of his films.
Jeannie MacPherson (1887–1946) wrote scripts for Cecil B. DeMille—for example, Forbidden Fruit (1921), Manslaughter (1922), The Ten Commandments (1923). Francis Marion (1887–1973) was one of the best American scriptwriters from the late 1910s to the 1930s; she was particularly favored by Mary Pickford—for example, Daddy Long Legs (1919), Polly anna (1919), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921).
Hans Janowitz (1889–1954) was the scriptwriter, along with Carl Mayer, for Caligari (1919). Hans Kraely (1885–1950) wrote the scripts for many of Ernest Lubitsch’s early films—for example, Madame Dubarry (1919), Sumurun (1920), Anna Boleyn (1920).
Thea Von Harbou (1888–1954) was Fritz Lang’s principal scriptwriter—for example, Destiny (1921), Dr. Mabuse (1922), Niebelungenlied (1924)—and also his wife. She also scripted Murnau’s Phantom (1922) and Von Gerlach’s Chronicle of Grieshaus (1925).
Carl Mayer (1894–1944) wrote the scripts for Backstairs (1921), Shattered(1921), Vanina (1922), Warning Shadows (1923), Sylvester (1923), and The Last Laugh (1924).
2 Pierre Mac Orlan (see note 4 to the Jean Epstein selection, “The Senses 1 (b),” in Part Three). Alexandre Arnoux (1884–1973) was a novelist and playwright who turned to writing film criticism and edited the film journal, Pour Vous (1928–1939). Jules Romains had just written an original scenario for Feyder at this time—L’Image (1926). (See, also, the biographical note following the Romains selection, “The Crowd at the Cinematograph,” in Part One and note 127 to the introductory essay, “Photogenie and Company,” in Part Two.)
Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a novelist and essayist—for example, Vie des martyrs (1917), Les Plaisirs et les jeux (1922), Confessions de minuit (1924). Joseph Delteil (1894— 1978) was best known then for his lyrical study of Jeanne d’Arc (1925). Andre Obey (1892— 1975) was a playwright best known for his collaboration with Denys Amiel on La Souriante Madame Beudet (1921), the source of Germaine Dulac’s 1923 film. Marc Elder was the pseudonym of Marcel Tendron (1884–1933).
3 Pierre-F. Quesnoy argues that the influence of the cinema on literature was actually stronger than Feyder suggests, in “Littérature et cinéma,” Le Rouge et le noir (July 1928), 85–104.
4 Le Penseur (1920) was directed by Leon Poirier for Gaumont; this was the only work done for the cinema by the Swiss writer, Edmond Fleg (1874–1963). L’Atre (1920–1923) was adapted from Alexandre Arnoux’s play, La Chavauch’ee nocturne, and directed by Robert Boudrioz for Films Abel Gance.
5 Feyder could very well be talking about his own experience as a filmmaker here. After making two very successful adaptations, L’Atlantide (1921) and Crainquebille (1923), he directed two original scenarios, the first of them his own—Visages d’enfants (1925) and L’lmage (1926)—both of which ran into distribution difficulties. At the time he wrote this essay, he (along with others such as Clair and L’Herbier) was forced by the economic problems of the Cartel des Gauches govenment, which tended to dry up French film production money, to sign a contract with Films Albatros to make two more adaptations, Gribiche (1926) and Carmen (1926).
6 Feyder is contrasting the classic political and philosophical texts of two writers almost no one would consider adapting for the cinema with the novels of Balzac, which were much in vogue at the time for film adaptations—for example, Poirier’s Narayana (1920), Baron-celli’s Pére Goriot (1921), Ravel’s Ferragus (1923), Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge (1923), Robert’s Cousin Pons (1924), and de Rieux’s Cousine Bette (1924)—and with the sentimental romance novels of Paul de Kock (1793–1871), which offered a prototype for the typical French melodramatic films of the 1920s.
From “Rythme,” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 13–16.
THE EARTH glides by under the hood of an automobile. Two outstretched fists. A mouth that cries out. Some trees snapped up, one after the other, by the muzzle of the screen.
Thought emulates speed in the flow of images. But it slows and, vanquished, gives way to surprise. It surrenders. The new gaze of the screen forces itself on our passive gaze. At that moment rhythm comes into its own.
WE SAY “rhythm” and feel satisfied with that. We find a rhythmic value in every film, with a little kindness. Yet it seems that the filmed world is notably lacking in such rhythm. Nothing is more incoherent than the “exterior movement” of most films. The formlessness of this mass of images would be disconcerting if we didn’t know that it came from an era in chaos itself. Occasionally there’s hope. Three quick drum beats. The spectator’s body rouses. Delight fades away. The torrent of images continues to run slackly through the well-regulated gearing mechanism.
A GENERAL definition of rhythm. The latest, it seems, is that of Professor Sonnenshein.1 Rhythm is “ a series of events in time, producing in the mind that experiences it a sense of proportion among the durations of the events or groups of events which constitute the series.” So be it. But on the screen the series of events is produced in time and space. One has to take space into account as well. The emotional quality of each event gives to its measurable duration a rhythmic value that’s completely relative. Let’s not be too hasty to define the nature of cinematic rhythm. Instead, let’s open our eyes.
Before becoming interested in the luminous editing table where images are assembled, I used to think that it would be easy to give orderly rhythms to a film. I distinguished three factors in the rhythm of a film, thanks to which one could achieve a cadence not too different from that of Latin verses:
1. the duration of each shot
2. the alternation of scenes or “motifs” of action (interior movement)
3. the movement of objects recorded by the lens (exterior movement: the performance of the actor, the mobility of the decor, etc.)2
But the relations among these three are not easily definable. The duration and alternation of shots have a rhythmic value which is affected by the “exterior movement” of the film, whose emotional quality is unappreciated. And what metric laws can resist this balancing of spectator and landscape, each equally mobile, on the axis formed by the screen? This ceaseless shifting from objective to subjective, thanks to which we experience such miracles? Thus the spectator who sees some faraway automobile race on the screen is suddenly thrown under the huge wheels of one of the cars, scans the speedometer, takes the steering wheel in hand. He becomes an actor and sees, in the turns of the road, rushing trees swallowed up before his eyes.
AGNOSTICISM. Does our generation know what to think about such a question posed within each film and by film itself? I doubt it. Such an attitude has to be judged incompatible with the knowledge we pretend to require that an artist have of his art. Let’s insist in the cinema on the right of being judged only according to its promises.
Today I myself have learned how to resign myself to readily admitting neither rule nor logic in the domain of images. The marvelous barbarism of this art fascinates me. Here at last are virgin lands. It doesn’t distress me to not know the laws of this newborn world which is free of any slavery to gravity. I feel a pleasure at the sight of these images which is, too infrequently, what I seek to awaken in myself—a sensation of musical liberty.
Gallop, canter. How the ascending horizons are inverted and the abyss finally opens its petals to welcome you into its soothing heart. Become statue, house, little dog, sack of gold, rolling river of oaks. I no longer know how to separate you from the midst of your kingdom, O huntress [Diana].
Sentences cannot long carry illogic in their arms without working themselves to death. But this series of images which is not bound up with the old tricks of thought and to which no absolute meaning is attached, why should it be burdened with a logic?
Blond, you lift your head and your curving hair reveals your face. This look, this gesture toward the imagined door—I can give them a meaning of my own. If words had given you life, it would be impossible to preserve you from their constrictive power; you would be their slave. Images, be my mistress.
You are mine, dear illusions of the lens. Mine, this refreshing universe in which I take a bearing on flattering features, according to my taste.
1 A reference probably to Professor Edward Adolf Sonnenshein (1851–1929), a classical scholar, whose What is Rhythm? (1925) had just been published by Blackwell’s in England.
2 Here Clair reverses the meaning of the terms, interior and exterior movement, that Moussinac and Delluc had established several years before.
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum in René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. R. C. Dale (New York: Dover, 1972), 99–100. Reprinted by permission. The original French version first appeared as “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” in Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 89— 90.
THE CINEMA is primarily an industry. The existence of “pure cinema” comparable to “pure” music seems today too much subject to chance to merit serious examination.
The question of pure cinema is directly connected with that of “cinema: art or industry?” To answer this last question, it would first be necessary to have a precise definition of the concept of art. Now, our era is not favorable to such precise formulations. Next, it would be necessary for the cinema’s conditions of material existence to be drastically altered. A film does not exist on paper. The most detailed screenplay will never be able to foresee every detail of the execution of the work (exact camera angle, lighting, exposure, acting, etc.). A film exists only on the screen. Now, between the brain that conceives it and the screen that reflects it, there is the entire industrial organization and its need for money.
Therefore, it seems pointless to predict the existence of a “pure cinema” so long as the cinema’s conditions of material existence remain unchanged or the mind of the public has not developed.
Nevertheless, there are already signs of the pure cinema. It can be found in fragmentary fashion in a number of films; it seems in fact that a film fragment becomes pure cinema as soon as a sensation is aroused in the viewer by purely visual means. A broad definition, of course, but adequate for our era. That is why the primary duty of the present-day filmmaker is to introduce the greatest number of purely visual themes by a sort of ruse, into a screenplay made to satisfy everybody. Therefore, the literary value of a screenplay is completely unimportant. . . .
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum in René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. R. C. Dale (New York: Dover, 1972), 97–98. Reprinted by permission. The original French version first appeared as “Seconde étape,” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925). 86–88.
NO SOONER had the cinema freed the image from its original immobility than it began to express itself in disappointing formulas. False humor, Italian melodrama, the serial, and “natural” color came along to doom our new hopes. Later, the spectator—anxious for information about the theater but depending on chance for the choice of films to see—discovered The Cheat, Chaplin, Mack Sennett, and Nanook. And his understandable discouragement gave way to a temporary reconciliation.
At present—except in the eyes of the French legislator, who still classes it along with “traveling shows”—the cinema has been able to win its least favorable judges back to its side. Yet, although it is a newborn force with numerous possibilities, it is still showing signs of only one of its potentials: the representation of known things.
In short, the only role it plays in regard to the eye is partially comparable to that of the phonograph in regard to the ear: recording and reproducing.
Of course, stop-action filming reveals to us events which our eyes did not perceive or did not perceive clearly (the opening of a rose)—but at least we had an idea about the sum of these events. Of course, trick shots give us unprecedented illusions (elimination of gravity, or of the opacity of a body through double exposure)—but only by sticking to objects familiar to our reason, concrete and well-known objects. Do you wish to escape from the real and conjure up something imagined—a soul, for example? You will have to make use of a body, which has become transparent—but is still a recognizable human body. A conventional representation, but representation.
Thus, all the present uses of cinema can be reduced to films of a single world, the representative, which can be divided into two groups: documentary—mere reproduction in motion—and dramatic (comedies, dramas, fairy-pantomimes, etc.), the origin and essence of which can be found in older types of performing arts (drama, pantomime, vaudeville, etc.).
But the cinema is not limited to the representative world. It can create. It has already created a sort of rhythm (which I did not mention when speaking about current films because its value in them is extremely diluted by the meaning of the image).
Thanks to this rhythm, the cinema can draw from itself a new potentiality, which, leaving behind the logic of events and the reality of objects, engenders a series of visions that are unknown—inconceivable outside the union of the lens and the moving reel of film. Intrinsic cinema—or, if you will, pure cinema—since it is separate from all other elements, whether dramatic or documentary—that is what certain works by our most personal directors permit us to foresee. That is what offers the purely cinematic imagination its true field and will give rise to what has been called—by Mme Germaine Dulac, I believe—the “visual symphony.”
Virtuosity, perhaps, but just like a harmonious concert of instruments, it will move our sensibilities as well as our intelligence. For why should the screen be denied that faculty for enchantment which is granted to the orchestra?
Universal kaleidoscope, generator of all moving visions from the least strange to the most immaterial, why should the cinema not create the kingdom of light, rhythms, and forms alongside that of sound?
HENRI CHOMETTE (1896–1941) was the older brother of René Clair. He worked as an assistant to Robert Boudrioz, Jacques Feyder, and Jacques de Baroncelli; made two short abstract films, Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) and Cinq Minutes de cinéma pur (1925); and then directed Dolly Davis and Albert Préjean in Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle (1928).
From “Peinture et cinema,” Cahiers du mois, 16–17 (1925), 107–108.
THE PL’ASTIC ARTS all exist in a state of relativity. If you wish to consider the cinema as such, it then comes under the same law.
In my own case, I know that I have used the magnification of the frame or the individualization of a detail in certain compositions. Thanks to the screen, the prejudice against “things larger than nature” no longer exists.
The future of cinema as painting lies in the attention it will draw to objects, to fragments of those objects, or to purely fantastic or imaginative inventions.
—The error of painting is the subject.
The error of cinema is the scenario.
Freed of this negative weight, the cinema can become the gigantic microscope of things never before seen or experienced.
There’s an enormous realm which by no means is restricted to documentary but which has its own dramatic and comic possibilities.
—(Similarly in painting, in the plastic composition of the easel).
I maintain that a stage door that moves slowly in close-up (object) is more emotional than the projection of a person who causes it to move in actual scale (subject).
Following this line of thinking leads to a complete renovation in cinema and painting.
—Subject, literature, and sentimentality are all negative qualities which weigh down the current cinema—in sum, qualities which bring it into competition with the theater.
True cinema involves the image of the object which is totally unfamiliar to our eyes and which is in itself moving, if you know how to present it.
Naturally, you have to know how to do this. It’s rather difficult. It demands a plastic understanding which, apart from Marcel L’Herbier and René Clair, very few possess.
From L’Idée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vol. i (Paris: Haberschill and Sergent, 1925).
IN SUM, this famous avant-garde movement can only lead to a massive miscarriage.
—You jest!
—We do not jest. On the contrary, we think the jest has gone on far too long.
On the boulevard, at the end of a preview screening. Three characters are arguing, and from the responses below you can judge for yourself who has won the argument. Sour grapes? Lack of fairness? What do you know about those? An idea . . . We are going to make you decide. To orient you now, let’s take up the conversation again from its beginning.
ENTHUSIAST: The film we just saw is worse than useless.
WE: As bad as that?
ENTHUSIAST: You saw it too: it follows the formula of a play, that is, a series of scenes presented according to the arbitrary rules of all dramatic works. There’s no attempt at novelty, no technical discovery, no concern for composing the image. It’s not cinematic.
WE: What do you mean by “cinematic”?
ENTHUSIAST: By “cinematic” I mean everything that fills the screen with an aura free of literary conventions. If the cinema devoted itself exclusively to drama, I would no longer consider it had a reason to exist, since drama existed before it. As something new, the cinema must provide me with new feelings.
WE: When you open the Petit Larousse, you find the following definition of the cinematograph: an apparatus intended to project animated images on a screen.
ENTHUSIAST: Doubtless!
WE: This definition is better than others. It at least has this advantage— whether presented to our elders of 1900 or those of 1910 or even our successors, it could not fail to pick up all the votes. Would it be same with yours?
ENTHUSIAST: I obviously cannot prejudge our descendants. As for our predecessors, I’m not really concerned because, before 1915, the cinema existed only in a larval stage. It did not exist intellectually.
WE: We protest! Whatever opinion you have of that period, you have no right to erase it with your memories. Imagine a philosopher who, in studying the evolution of a science, an art, or a social movement, neglected to examine its origins.
ENTHUSIAST: I repeat that from an intellectual point of view, I date the origins of the cinema around 1915–1916, with the appearance of the first good American films.
WE: However, in 1914, the cinema had a form. To make a film meant to choose an action or plot, and to present the sudden changes in that action by means of a series of concise tableaux. The acting did not differ greatly from that of the theater, but already photographic necessities had created a knowledge of lighting and decor. Leonce Perret, Louis Feuillade, Jasset, and several others used both natural and artificial lighting with virtuosity.1 In sum, it was a question of narrating actions as clearly as possible, with the benefit of frequent and instantaneous changes of decor—something impossible in the theater.
ENTHUSIAST: All that is true, but I see nothing of interest in it.
WE: During the war, the American films you spoke about just now came into view. The most striking was The Cheat. Others such as The Aryan, the first films of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford equally caused a sensation. They created an absolute upheaval in technique through the use of “close-ups.” Let’s get this straight: the Americans didn’t invent the “close up”; they found them in the oldest films. But no one had figured out how to use them rationally. The Americans established the “close-up” as the mark of a system, and this was an enormous step forward because the photographic lens, moving from one object to another, showed us only what was important to see instead of letting the spectator’s eye wander among vast ensembles.2
ENTHUSIAST: That’s a technique that I consider “cinegraphic.”
WE: Don’t cry victory! With a new technique, the Americans pursued a previously agreed-on aim: they told stories. Their films had no other purpose. Certainly, from time to time, a light touch helped construct the milieu or created an atmosphere, but only in proportion to what was required to strengthen the scenario. If they showed us some drinkers in a bar, it was because those drinkers watched the gestures and actions of the principal character. Some disreputable dancer, seated in a corner of the decor, served to describe the sad milieu which shocked the poor ingenue. There was nothing in all this except narrative.
ENTHUSIAST: Good Lord, yes! They stick to that one set of routinely marked out paths.
WE: In France, despite the war, several directors worked with ample means: Abel Gance, Louis Nalpas,3 Jacques de Baroncelli, [Louis] Mercan-ton, [Rene] Hervil, and others. They differed from the Americans in their choice of subjects, but they adopted the same techniques. They sought to correct the performance of French actors, which had been excellent in the old days but was inappropriate for the system of “close-ups.” The play of light especially held their attention. It would be unfair to say that our directors copied the Americans; they followed the same path, that’s all. It was then that Louis Delluc came along.
ENTHUSIAST: I’m curious to hear what you are going to say about someone who was a pioneer of the current cinema.
WE: Delluc created a movement. Let’s try to examine it.
From his first contact with American films, Delluc was dazzled, enthusiastic. Was it by the intrigue? No, it was by the “atmosphere,” by the detail that cropped up, by the picturesqueness of the decor. What struck him was the drunken face of a cowboy, a pool of muddy water, a gray wall in front of which something happened. Did he concern himself with defining what entranced him? In his books and articles, you will notice penetrating comments and acerbic remarks, but the man is too subtle to trouble himself with formulas. Did he invent the word photogénie? In any case, he launched it. Well, search his writings for a precise, formulated definition of photogénie.
In the same period, people began to say: “That’s cinematic. That’s not cinematic.” At first a charming witticism, this way of passing judgment soon became doctrine.
ENTHUSIAST: Talk about Delluc’s films.
WE: Let’s talk rather about his scenarios, okay? We said that Delluc admired the picturesque side of American films. But if you put the purely picturesque images of The Aryan end to end, would you have a hundred meters of film? Delluc took the time to write scenarios, and beginning with La Fête espagnole, the major part of a film for him was devoted to impressionistic images. It was a revolution, which had nothing in common with American films. We see a sustained action in one, and a scenario-as-pretext in the other. The drama moves into the background: it’s a question of displaying Spain, and the principal characters shift for themselves as best they can, in order to be seen. Take Fièvre, the tendency there is even more emphasized. Delete its intrigue, and the film remains with nearly all its characteristics intact.
ENTHUSIAST: Come on, you are less refractory than I feared. I see now that you understand the cinema.
WE: Delluc wrote in praise of Swedish films: “A subtle and profound atmosphere renders the scenario nearly useless. To live with the people and know them, what an impression! And just like that, they’re suddenly stylized because we directly experience their thoughts (otherwise glimpsed only through their actions).”4
Delluc made several films of psychological action: Le Silence and La Femme de nulle part. There, the impressionism is “interior,” but it’s just the same impressionism. The thoughts and memories of characters interested Delluc; their actions not at all. He lavished attention on daydreams and subjective visions and confined the action to several meters of film.
ENTHUSIAST: Exactly!
WE: Another filmmaker was working similarly, but he lived in isolation for a long time. No one knew at first where he wanted to go. Rose-France, Le Bercail, Le Carnaval des vérités are slightly hermetic and hesitant sketches.
ENTHUSIAST: It’s obviously with L’Homme du large and El Dorado that Marcel L’Herbier asserted his own propensities.
WE: With L’Herbier, picturesque impressions gave way to a concern for the decorative. Then again, for a long time, when speaking of “rhythm,” one referred to the battle montage in Intolerance, certain passages in J’Accuse, and various other films. L’Herbier sought to combine “rhythm” and “tableaux.” See the brothel scene in L’Home du large and the death of Sybilla in El Dorado.
ENTHUSIAST: It’s really during this period that the cinema seemed to me to break out of its chrysalis. The soft-focus images of Broken Blossoms and the “distortions” of L’Herbier let me glimpse an absolutely dazzling future.
WE: With L’Herbier as with Delluc, the action moved into the background. L’Herbier called El Dorado a melodrama, which showed his disdain for the subject. It was an obstruction. For a number of filmmakers, technique alone counted. Before the despised public, they tossed out a scenario as if turning it out to pasture, but the initiated knew that they could do that only for certain passages.
However, there was a reaction, inspired by the Swedish films (for, in opposition to Delluc, we think the Swedish films were for the most part conceived dramatically and objectively). The Outlaw and His Wife and Arne’s Treasure were much admired, but their influence remained almost nil. Technique was a la mode, and the technique of the Swedish was camouflaged, nearly invisible. Only the superimpositions of The Phantom Carriage held the attention of the image masticators.
ENTHUSIAST: Don’t be unfair. The Swedish films were much talked about. . .
WE: . . . talked about, and that’s all. The wind blew in another direction. Jean Epstein wrote: “Generally, the cinema tells a story badly and ‘dramatic action’ is wrong for it,” and then again: “Why tell stories, stories which always assume orderly events, a chronology, a gradual process of actions and feelings. Perspectives are no more than illusions of the lens. Life isn’t deduced like those China tea tables out of which come twelve more, one after another, in succession. There are no stories. There never were any stories. There are only situations, with neither head nor tail, without beginning, middle, or end.”5
ENTHUSIAST: You aren’t speaking of the Germans.
WE: We are. The Germans provided us with Caligari and Destiny, the one derived from Cubism, the other from the conceptions of Max Reinhardt. Although Caligari was a scenario-as-pretext, the action was tightly reined in. That of Destiny was even more so. But, in France, we focused only on the stylization of the film’s decor.
So, the anarchy is complete: soft focus, distortions, superimpositions, Cubist decors, close-ups, rhythm, all mixed up together. Gance contributed his ingenious discovery of split-second montage. But, while he used it soberly, and to narrate something, his imitators used it without rhyme or reason. A group formed which baptized itself “avant-garde.” For this avant-garde the only good film had to have some originality in its mechanical effects. They decreed that the camera was a brain, that it was the camera which interpreted man and nature.
ENTHUSIAST: Let me interrupt you here. Where you see anarchy, I see well-founded inclinations. Would you let me summarize them in a better way?
WE: We’ll listen attentively. One should never decline an occasion to be educated.
ENTHUSIAST: If the camera is not a brain, at least it possesses an eye, and an eye quite different from ours. It has its own way of seeing, in space as in time; and it overturns our conceptions of the image and movement. “Luminous values” and “rhythm,” these are the elements of the new aesthetic which it offers us. Filmmakers make cinematic works according to how well their films allow this harmony of value and rhythm to develop unobstructed, beyond any outside influences.
WE: Undoubtedly, it’s in light of such experiments that a young director, René Clair, recently uttered the following: “Perhaps we have to reach the point of divesting the cinema of all that is cerebral and devoting ourselves to seeking the direct expression of movement.”6
ENTHUSIAST: Exactly.
WE: Another person, Mme Germaine Deluc, for whom we have special respect, has gone even further.7 In the course of a chat—would she hold this indiscretion against us?—she laid out an audacious theory. She longed to see only luminous forms without any material significance on the screen: lines, surfaces, tonal values shifting and combining—a visual symphony, made poignant through its own unique plastic resources.
ENTHUSIAST: An audacious conception, which distresses me not at all.
WE: Indeed, could you cite some films that you consider “cinematic”?
ENTHUSIAST: No one complete work, but interesting experiments.
WE: Many?
ENTHUSIAST: Alas, no!
WE: Ten? Twenty? Thirty?
ENTHUSIAST: A few more.
WE: A hundred?
ENTHUSIAST: That’s all!
WE: A hundred films . . . and you reject the thousand others that have been produced. Because they do not square with the theory fixed in your head, you say: “That doesn’t exist!”
ENTHUSIAST: Once again, the cinema has no other reason to exist except not to resemble any other form of expression.
WE: YOU make us think of those apostles who, in proclaiming a new faith, have only one idea: to free it of any dependence on the already existing cults, to turn it into a revealed doctrine. People are enthusiastic, then centuries pass; the enthusiasm passes as well. Then come the mythologies that demonstrate, through the evidence at hand, that the so-called religion had been inspired by all the preceding ones.
ENTHUSIAST: That’s a pleasant digression that says my conceptions aren’t original.
WE: Aren’t we speaking of lines and luminous surfaces?
We think a painter would give useful advice on the arrangement of tonal values and the composition of tableaux.
ENTHUSIAST: The painter works on a fixed, clamped-down image. The cinema is composed of successive moving images.
WE: Rhythm would interest a musician. Besides, twenty articles appearing in the avant-garde journals have emphasized the resemblance that exists between cinematic rhythm and musical rhythm.
ENTHUSIAST: One addresses the ear, the other the eye. A rather big difference, it seems to me!
WE: You are quick to assert the independence of the cinema, when your theories demand it. You showed much less perspicacity several moments ago when we tried to ascertain whether certain differences existed equally between a cinematic drama and a theatrical drama.
ENTHUSIAST: It’s up to you to point them out to me!
WE: We don’t mean to insinuate that your conception of cinema mimics paintings and music. We note only that it has several points of contact with those two arts.
ENTHUSIAST: They are more than coincidences.
WE: So the cinema remains pure. But why wouldn’t it be just as pure when it presents analogies with the theater and the novel? And, to extend the debate, what reason is there for the arts to be separated one from another by airtight partitions? What benefit do they draw from this so-called independence? Aren’t sculpture and painting distinct arts, in spite of their obvious family relationship?
ENTHUSIAST: The cinema has nothing to gain from the theater, whose ways it cannot assimilate.
WE: You constantly confuse “theater” and “narrative.” Is narrative the prerogative of literature alone? Take an essentially dramatic subject: the story of Prometheus. If a musician or a painter took inspiration from Prometheus to compose a work of art, would he cease making music or painting?
ENTHUSIAST: The subject would then be a pretext, the painter would study the forms of the man bound to the rock, and the musician would assemble sounds allowing only feelings of a general nature.
WE: But one driving idea, a kind of anecdote, would animate the two works. The subject is not a pretext, it is the very foundation of the work. If you want to banish narrative from the plastic arts and music, you would have to suppress the celebrated series of tableaux on the Life of Marie de Medici by Rubens, the Life of Sainte Genevieve by Puis de Chevanne and Jean-Paul Laurens, the Gate of Hell and the Burgers of Calais by Rodin, and the third movement of the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven. We mention these by chance: a host of names comes to mind.
ENTHUSIAST: You don’t invalidate my theory. Those artists were only working at the limits of their art’s independence.
WE: Yes, but one can still recount an anecdote without being a feudal vassal of literature and theater. Drama indeed is a source of emotion from which all artists have drawn. It’s wrong to confuse the spirit of “drama” itself with the dramatic methods in use in the theater.
ENTHUSIAST: We are in agreement here. But it’s because the filmed dramas employ these theatrical methods that I condemn them.
WE: The misunderstanding originates here. A film devoted to a narrative, performed and directed without any other aim but this narrative, handled through the objective exposition of a series of actions, has nothing to do with the theater.
ENTHUSIAST: That’s right.
WE: You have remarked, quite rightly, that the cinema depends on two aesthetic elements: luminous values and rhythm. But you have forgotten a third: logic, that is, the peculiar quality that shots have of being coordinated.
ENTHUSIAST: Who could deny that shots form an ensemble? My theory does not contradict that at all.
WE: But you claim to draw only impressions, there where one could come to conclusions. You want to feel emotion, and seek out a rhythm; we want to think, and seek out meaning. You know the film of Dr. Coman-don, The Movement of Leucocytes, recorded with the aid of the microscopic camera? What does the eye of the layman see on the screen? Forms which for him have no objective value, but which are nevertheless harmonious, decorative, and whose elements change position like the crystals of a kaleidoscope. That has to be sufficient for your happiness. However, does this film mean anything? Don’t the learned see a drama there? Don’t the images of the film, in succession, develop a logical action?
ENTHUSIAST: An action quite different, you would admit, from those of the films I call theatrical.
WE: Good! Let’s take another example. Aren’t you amazed by the following fact: we show you a man shooting a gun, then, in a second shot, a bottle breaking, and you deduce that the gunman broke the bottle.
ENTHUSIAST: That doesn’t take much thought.
WE: It’s minimal because it’s only a question of two shots. But is it when it’s a question of a hundred or a thousand shots? If in this way we succeeded in telling you the most involved, the most complicated story possible, why would we not have made cinema? Even if our story is stuffed with theatrical tricks, it will not be theater. Even if it’s full of fictional situations, it will not be a novel.
ENTHUSIAST: You are playing on words.8
WE: Haven’t you done that in saying: “That’s not cinematic”? Such a state of mind leads you to repudiate narrative as a cinematic genre. For, not only does narrative merit the freedom to go where it will, one could also consider it one of the most dangerous genres to deal with. You can reach the sublime by not letting yourself be understood; it is difficult to make yourself interesting through an effort at clarity.
ENTHUSIAST: “TO narrate,” that’s your aim?
WE: A character can be studied through an analysis of his actions just as well as through the transposition of his mental states. Judiciously arranged events produce meaning, create emotion. That’s why a dramatic film, no less than a film full of plastic and rhythmic designs, can be harmonious. Its harmony is even of a higher quality because it affects not the eye but the mind directly.
ENTHUSIAST: All dramatic action is arbitrary.
WE: Yes, we understand that: “There are no stories; there never were any stories. There are only situations, with neither head nor tail, without beginning, middle, or end.”
An impoverished assertion, with consequences even more impoverished! Don’t kid yourself, life worldwide is prodigiously logical; “Chinese tables do engender twelve more, one after another, in succession.” Ever since the world’s creation, not a grain of sand has changed position spontaneously. The largest as well as the smallest events, whether accomplished by men or the elements, have causes and consequences. Only the appearances of life are incoherent. But is it a question of reproducing life in its appearances or of interpreting and analyzing it? The task of the artist rightly consists in arranging, inferring, and implying. Evolution, that’s action—drama.
ENTHUSIAST: Apropos of logical and coordinated action, tell me about Charlie Chaplin.
WE: YOU are handing us the cane with which to whip you. According to his formulas, Chariot seems to you quite outside our conceptions. But that’s merely an illusion. Notice, in the first place, that Chariot is objective. He narrates his life; he reveals his character by means of actions, he never confides his thought by way of evocations—with the exception of the dream in The Kid, which was still a narrative.
Therefore, if Chariot neglects to construct solid scenarios, it’s because he makes films on the model of the old “episode play” or skit. Examine the “skits” of Chariot, and you will notice that all those actions of a minute’s length call for as much logic and coordination as do more tightly constructed dramas. If the ensemble holds together, it’s thanks to the virtuosity of the actor-author. Molière equally could neglect the construction of his comedies because he was Molière. Shakespeare botched the denouements of his dramas, as is well known! We don’t believe that it’s good for a dramatist to draw lessons from that.
ENTHUSIAST: Drama, drama . . . You can’t talk about anything else.
WE: Then reread a recent essay by Jean Tedesco entitled, “Has the Art of Marcel L’Herbier Evolved?”9 The author notices an evolution in L’Herbier: “less stylization and more humanity.” Then he adds: “A solid scenario, pleasing and poignant at certain moments, will always be a necessary framework.” Certainly, in writing those lines, Jean Tedesco must have been on guard not to betray L’Herbier’s effort. Here’s a respected man, and rightfully respected, as one of the most remarkable seekers of the French cinema, who feels obliged not to sacrifice the foundation or framework to the form.
But we have something even better to impart to you. Jean Epstein, not long ago, pronounced some memorable words. Didn’t he say:
“What is an avant-garde film? And how does an intelligent public which readily accepts the cinema today recognize such a film? It stubbornly insists on several scenes of rapid montage, several distorted images, several super-impositions in the German style, and a more or less genuine absence of in-tertitles. These techniques, once admirable at the time of their inception, are today almost completely prohibited through the desperate relentless-ness with which certain filmmakers have taken them over and abused them.”10
“At the time of their inception” means: two years ago! If such propositions came from the lips of a philistine, you would scorn them. But Epstein certainly knows what he is talking about: and notice how, in just a few sentences, he summarizes many years of research and experimentation.
ENTHUSIAST: The artist is allowed to renew himself. That’s necessary.
WE: We don’t contest the principle of artistic evolution; we record certain results: “Technique once admirable at the time,” says Epstein. What seems admirable to us is to see these techniques relegated to the closets of yesteryear because they are no longer “avant-garde” enough.
Is the “avant-garde” an end in itself or rather a movement destined to produce a mature aesthetic? If it is an end in itself, let’s talk no more about it: it’s redoing the story of Saturn devouring his own children. If it constitutes a movement whose aim is an aesthetic, admit that the results are disappointing. We have come full circle and can sum up with a brief catalogue of technical terms. Since the methods of filming are fallacious, because of their facility, your famous avant-garde movement can only lead to a massive miscarriage.
ENTHUSIAST: YOU jest!
WE: We do not jest! On the contrary, we think the jest has gone on far too long.
ENTHUSIAST: Our seekers are not as opinionated as you think. They are evolving and certain ones actually are finding the “avant-garde” label a little narrow.
WE: In that case, nothing distinguishes them from most other mortals. But is it the label alone that seems obsolete? Isn’t the goal of their research even more so? Someone spoke, two months ago, of “divesting the cinema of all that’s cerebral.” At that, we cry “murder,” for that is equivalent to killing intellectualism, to put it bluntly.
ENTHUSIAST: You demolish things with a good deal of passion, but without talking of reconstruction. You defend the cinematic drama but admit that at present it flounders in chaos. Do you have some formulas, some of your own methods to clarify that? Do you have a technique of narration?
WE: Let’s guard against pontificating and creating inevitably arbitrary frameworks. The art of narrating is not single; each individual possesses his own way of doing so. But there exists, here as elsewhere, a set of biases that we have to combat.
HENRI FESCOURT (1880–1966) was a journalist and minor government official who turned to filmmaking and directed several short films for Gaumont before the war. During the 1920s, he was one of the most successful filmmakers working for Cinéromans—for example, Rouletabille chez les bohémiens (1922), Mandrin (1924), Les Grands (1924), Les Misérables (1925–1926), La Glu (1927).
JEAN-LOUIS BOUQUET (1900–1978) came to the cinema as an assistant to Louis Nalpas, then turned to writing scenarios—for example, Luitz-Morat’s La Cité foudroyée (1924), Du-lac’s Le Diable dans la ville (1925)—and became Fescourt’s editor on Rouletabille chez les bohémiens (1922), Mandrin (1924), and Les Misérables (1925–1926).
1 Fescourt and Bouquet are perhaps the first to single out Léonce Perret (1880–1935) as a Gaumont filmmaker—for example, L’Enfant de Paris (1913), Roman d’un Mousse (1914)— who was as important as Feuillade before the war. Perret went to the United States in 1916, where he made a number of competent but undistinguished films for Brady World and Pathé-Exhange. In 1921, he returned to France to direct L’Ecuyère (1922) and the highly successful Koenigsmark (1923).
2 Fescourt and Bouquet’s brief analysis of the American systematization of the close-up during the 1910s as well as their subsequent remarks on the American subordination of atmosphere and milieu to narrative agree, in general outline, with the authoritative history of the development of the American continuity system in Kristin Thompson’s “The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–1929,” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 155–240. See, also, Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Wordstar, 1983), 162–70.
3 Louis Nalpas (1884–1948) was an independent producer who almost singlehandedly tried to create a major studio outside Nice between 1918 and 1921. Some of his films were hits—for example, Le Somptier’s La Sultane de l’amour (1919) and Fescourt’s Mathias Sandorf (1921)—but the venture overall was not successful enough. In 1922, Nalpas became executive producer for Jean Sapène’s newly reconstituted Société des Cinéromans.
4 Quoted from a Delluc essay on the Swedish cinema in Cinéa 2(13 May 1921), reprinted in Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc (Paris: Seghers, 1965), 98.
5 Quoted from Jean Epstein, “Le Sens 1 bis,” Cinéa 9 (10 June 1921).
6 Quoted from a René Clair interview in L’Intransigeant (22 August 1925).
7 The special respect accorded Germaine Deluc may stem from the fact that she was on contract to Sapène’s Cinéromans, just as Fescourt and Bouquet were.
8 The French words referred to are romanesque (fictional) and roman (novel).
9 Jean Tedesco, “L’Art de Marcel L’Herbier, avait-il évolué?,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous 44 (1 September 1925).
10 Quoted from ajean Epstein interview in Comoedia (25 September 1925).
From L’ldée et l’écran: Opinions sur le cinéma, vol. 3 (Paris: Haberschill and Sergent, 1926), 9–11, 32–33.
WE: The cinema records and reproduces external phenomena in motion. How does this reproduction operate? By means of the presentation of an image which is transformed. Let’s hold onto the concept: the transformation of an image. It involves movement, and it embraces the cinema at its root as well as in all its applications. Its terms are independent of any artistic conception, which is of a necessarily secondary order.
This transformation doesn’t operate solely on lines and forms. Indeed, let’s not forget that it’s an image. Look at its etymology! The image is the representation of a subject; and, with photography, the actual existence of this subject is indisputable, since there’s nothing except recording.
Some would arbitrarily twist and contract the principle of photography by saying that its purest expression is to reproduce subjects—lines or forms—without any meaning. They would alter the general principle of the image even further, since the ultimate value of the image is precisely to espouse the meaning as well as the aspect of its subject.
A cinematic image is thus able to signify. Movement exerts a transformation of meaning as well as a plastic transformation. There is an evolution on the intellectual plane, on which we will later have occasion to speak.
Let’s return to our definition: the cinema is not at all by nature an art. It becomes art only through the application of aesthetic ideas, which everyone knows are not exclusive. It expresses through the transformation of the image, which is both a movement of forms and a meaningful movement. . . .
ENTHUSIAST: Apropos of personality, let me share some reflections with you. The technical means of the cinema assume such expert knowledge that they demand collaborative efforts. In the current state of the cinema, who exactly is the author of a film? The scenario writer? The director? Can one work without the other, and both without a number of third parties? What would the set designer of Caligari say about that?
It would be a great advance for the artist to discover a medium in which he could exercise his talent in complete independence, without the meddling of other “personalities.”
WE: In several arts, individualism is a necessity. In others, collective efforts are time-tested. Aside from the architect, who works with decorators, and Michelangelo, who is capable of creating Saint Peter’s in Rome all by himself (in conception, of course, not in the construction), how many collaborations have there been with grandiose results?
A gothic cathedral wasn’t even conceived by a single man, at least not in all its features. A number of artists of diverse talents, conforming to a conception of the ensemble, personally created a part of the work. There was agreement and harmony, above all! There was also that precious quality of the Middle Ages: humanity. The artist lived in the shadows; he worked so as to render a work immortal rather than to immortalize his own name.
Is the cinema an individualistic art? Perhaps . . . But let this individualism be dictated solely by a disinterested aesthetic! Plenty of doctrines would cause the uninitiated to think quite differently if they knew how keenly certain cinéastes were gnawed by the desire not to share the delights of fame with anyone.
An individual art? A collective art? Both concepts can work as long as one tries. When one creates, it’s the work alone that matters; it’s not a question of knowing how one can compose something that’s more personal, but how one can compose something that’s best. When the two qualities are combined, so much the better! But when an outside contribution can produce an improvement, the artist who refuses it is being criminal toward his work. . . .
From “Le Cinema pur,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous 52 (1 January 1926), 12–13.
AMONG FOREIGN “intellectuals,” most stubbornly persist in considering the cinema merely as an instrument to convey actions, a machine to recite stories. For, seeing it confined within the genre of adventure stories alone, they want to believe it’s inept at any other function, incapable of anything resembling speculation.
Certain cinéastes—all of them called “avant-garde”—have protested often against such an opinion, widespread even in cinegraphic circles, an opinion that seeks to reduce the cinema to being no more than the craftsman of a single genre. They have claimed that this new art is capable of conveying something else besides adventures, of expressing as well as conveying, of revealing the expression of intellectual feats, and of bearing witness to the revelation of a transcendent poetry. Thus, in the face of the ciné-phobes who persist in speaking badly of it, they attest to the power and richness of their art.
THESE cinéastes—and not the least of them—profess that, far from having to limit itself to the role of narrator, the cinema can have another ideal, the same ideal as the other arts, the ideal of elevating the spirit above and beyond the material.
They would like to create a genre in which the cinema, once it was uniquely and completely itself, would evoke in us the same transcendent feelings which poetry or music evokes, but through the harmonic and melodic play of that plastic movement of which it alone is master. And I say, “They would like to create this particular genre,” and not “They want to involve the whole cinema in such practices.”
They want to create a cinegraphic genre whose aim will be not only to arouse interest, amuse, or distract but whose end will be to fling us into that aesthetic emotion, so different from distraction and amusement, which—as everyone knows—is purely intellectual and completely disinterested.
They would like to form a genre in which the cinema seeks, not its pretext in a purely material adventure story, but rather its base, above and beyond the material, in the very inspiration of the artist.
They would like to realize a genre in which the cinema would use not just some of its means but each and all of them and in which, once completely autonomous, it would only have recourse to its very own forces.
They share the ideal of creating a cinegraphic genre that will be to the cinema which exists today something like what poetry is to prose in literature.
And they don’t want actually to create this cinegraphic poetry so much as to reveal its possibility to the enemies of the cinema. To those who dispute this art or speak badly of it because they consider it purely material, because they imagine it slavishly copies the material, because, seeing it dependent on science, they want to believe it impassive, mechanical—to those, the devoted cinéastes bear witness to the existence of a cinema on which all of these petty arguments have no effect.
BUT BETWEEN the current cinegraphic genre which depends on action alone and this genre out of which certain filmmakers tomorrow will realize a number of poems, what is the precise difference of opinion? If, on the one side, action is everything, is there nothing on the other? A delicate and controversial question.
For myself, the cinema exists above and beyond the plot and even the action—but not everyone agrees with this. So let’s engage in discussion.
The cinema exists above and beyond the action—that doesn’t mean that it must always, or even sometimes, be deprived of all action. That simply means that its principle source is not in action, that its aesthetic foundation is independent of any plot.
It’s this which certain of our “avant-garde” wish to establish when they say that narrative is not the aim of cinema. Their actual concern is to demonstrate that this narrative role is far from the most interesting of those which could fulfill their art. Thus, when Epstein declares: “Generally, the cinema tells stories badly” and “Dramatic action is a mistake,” or when he asks, “Why tell stories, tales?” he doesn’t mean to claim that the cinema has to abandon narrative entirely, but only to show that there exists for him another field of action, above and beyond any chronicle or fable, in which he can flourish uninhibitedly and offer the boldest and most personal works. Thus, when René Clair says, “Perhaps we have to reach the point of divesting the cinema of all that is cerebral and seek out the direct expression of movement,” one must not—as certain people have—misunderstand that the cinéaste wants to eliminate all connections with action, but rather that the cinema, by rejecting the anecdote, might form a genre where it would elucidate its genius more freely and marvelously.
Similarly, if literature was confined purely to adventure tales alone, wouldn’t you applaud those who revealed that it might have an ideal other than the one which compelled it always to narrate?
Action is no more than a form of veneer to the art of the cinema. It isn’t necessary to its very existence. That’s why we say that, when they are mixed together, the one combines with the other in an amalgam, an amalgam so coherent that it’s difficult to separate the elements, an amalgam so homogeneous that to certain people it can seem a single and quite simple substance.
Such a cinema, once isolated from the matrix in which we always see it incorporated, we call pure cinema, not wishing to claim that action can tarnish it but rather noting that, above and beyond the action, we can better contemplate its unique specificity.
The specificity thus manifested has nothing in common with any other among the arts. Its fundamental principle—completely original in aesthetics—is to express itself through the harmony and melody of plastic movements.
A general formula that welcomes the narrative cinema—on the condition obviously that the story be “visual.” A formula that welcomes all experiments called avant-garde. A formula that welcomes a cinegraphic genre where there would be no action and even a genre where emotion would result from the play of masses and colors in movement alone.
On the question of a cinema perfectly separated from all contingencies other than the harmony and melody of plastic movement, and thus perfectly pure, it seems that Poiret has just mounted an experiment on his barge Orgues, an experiment that seems to me to realize the famous “keyboard of colors.”2 Rachilde described this effort enthusiastically in Comoe-dia\
A visual symphony stimulated not by sound but by daubs of color and lines on the screen. What nourishment for the imagination there! Clouds, blood-red curves, incisive verticals, subtle mauves, spirals, fugitive suns, madonna blues—all this rhythm of combined colors and coupled light and shadow evoked in our minds fleeting visions: oriental skies, superhuman conflagrations, fabulous moonlight, aurora borealis, morbid twilight. No sooner did a daub take the shape of a woman’s body than it disappeared. All that tortured our hearts, gnawed at our brains, and hollowed us out inside. There’s no story capable of transporting us like that.3
Such films or rather films in which, as Epstein says, “nothing happens but so what,” or rather films that would constitute pure visual poems— these are obviously only films of a certain “genre.” No one ever said or could say—unless he was mad—that all cinema must commit itself to such a path. Certain people have said, and we say it too, that on this path the cinema has an immense future ahead of it, that here it can explore its intense specificity completely, that here it can produce works which alone can express its genius and which, free of a dependency on plotting, can achieve that same ideal which the cinephobes deny it.
Is that why, in a recent booklet, H. Fescourt and J. L. Bouquet endeavor to prove that the cinema always has to depend on the anecdote and can only exist by means of action alone?
PIERRE PORTE contributed dozens of theoretical essays to Cinea-Cine-pour-tous from 1924 to 1927.
1 By movement, I mean not only the movement of the human body—without which the basis of the cinema closely merges with that of dance and music—but all forms of movement, in an absolutely general sense, from the slow evolution of a shot to the brusque leap from one shot to another.—Au.
2 Paul Poiret (1879–1944) was the most influential French fashion designer of the early decades of this century. L’Herbier invited him to design the costumes for L’lnhumaine (1924). The “keyboard of colors” reference probably comes from Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) and his Symbolist novel, Au Rebours (1884).
3 Rachilde was the pseudonym of novelist Marguerite Valette (1862–1953) who published a biography of her close friend, Alfred Jarry, AlfredJarry ou le surmâle de lettres, in 1928, and whose husband was one of the founding editors of Mercure de France.
Translated by Stuart Liebman in Framework 19 (1982), 6–9. Reprinted by permission. The original French version first appeared as “Les Esthétique, les entraves, la cinégraphie intégrale,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 2 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926), 29–50.
To Y von Delbosf friend of cinema
IS CINEMA an art?
Its burgeoning power that breaks through the still well-established barrier of incomprehension, of prejudice, and of laziness in order to reveal itself in the beauty of a new form, nobly substantiates its claims (to be an art).
Every art bears within itself a personality, an individuality of expression that confers upon it its value and independence. Until now, the cinema was confined to the task, simultaneously servile and splendid, of drawing its life’s breath from the other arts, those ancient masters of the human sensibility and spirit. Regarded in this way, it had to abandon its creative possibilities in order to be cast, as demands required, according to traditionalist comprehensions of the past and to lose its character as the seventh art. Now (the cinema) is proceeding resolutely and gradually through adverse elements, occasionally stopping to do battle, and moving to surmount the obstacles in order to appear in the light of its own truth before the eyes of an astonished generation.
If, as we envisage it today, the cinema is merely a surrogate for, or an animated reflection, but only a reflection, of the expressive forms of literature, or of music, sculpture, painting, architecture, and the dance, it is not an art. Now, in its very essence, it is a very great art. Hence the constant and hurried transformations of its aesthetic that attempts, unceasingly and arduously, to free it from the succession of erroneous interpretations of which it is the object, in order finally to reveal its own appropriate inclinations.
The cinema is a young art. While the other arts have had long centuries to evolve and to perfect themselves, the cinema has had only thirty years in which to be born, to grow, and to move beyond its first stammerings to acquire a conscious form of speech capable of making itself understood. Through the forms that we have imposed on it, let us see what form it has, in its turn, little by little attempted to impose on us.
When it appeared, the cinema, a mechanical invention created to capture life’s true continuous movement, and also the creator of synthetic movements, surprised the intellects, the imaginations, and the sensibilities of artists whom no course prepared for this new form of expression, and who believed that literature, the art of written thoughts and feelings, that sculpture, the art of plastic expression, that painting, the art of color, that music, the art of sound, that dance, the art of gestural harmonies, and that architecture, the art of proportion, were adequate forms with which to create and to unbosom themselves. If many minds appreciated the singular significance of the cinematograph, very few grasped its aesthetic truth. The intellectual elite, like the masses, obviously lacked some psychological capacity indispensable for any correct assessment that would have enabled them to consider movement from another angle: namely, that a shifting of lines can arouse one’s feelings. This required a new sense, parallel to the literary, musical, sculptural, or pictorial senses in order to be understood.
A mechanical device, an originator of expressive forms and new sensations hidden in its gears, existed; but even in those of supple mind, no spontaneous release of feelings was summoned by the rhythm of a moving image and the cadence of their juxtaposition, as if by the vibrations of a long-desired and long-sought keyboard. It was the slow disclosure by the cinema of a new emotive faculty present in our unconscious that led us to the perceptual comprehension of visual rhythms and not our rational longings that made us greet it (cinema) as an art we had been waiting for.
While enfeoffed with our ancient conceptions of the aesthetic we held it back at our level of understanding, it tried, in vain, to raise us toward a hitherto unknown conception of art.
It is rather disturbing to recount the simplistic way in which we greeted its manifestations. At first, the cinema was for us nothing but a photographic means to reproduce the mechanical movement of life; the word “movement” evoked in our minds only the banal vision of animated people and things, going, coming, or shaking with no other concern than to let them develop within the borders of the screen, when it was instead necessary to consider movement in its mathematical and philosophical essence.
The sight of the indescribable Vincennes train arriving in the station was enough to satisfy us, and no one at that time dreamed that in it a new means for the sensibility and the intellect to express themselves lay hidden. No one ventured to discover these means on the other side of the realistic images of a commonly photographed scene.
No one sought to know if within the apparatus of the Lumière brothers there lay, like an unknown and precious metal, an original aesthetic; content to domesticate it by making it a tributary of past aesthetics, we disdained any careful examination of its own possibilities.
Sympathetic study of mechanical movement was scorned, but in the hope of attracting an audience, the spiritual movement of human feelings through the mediation of characters was added. The cinema thus became an outlet for bad literature. One set about arranging animated photographs around a performance. And, after having been based solely on actual experience, the cinema entered the fictional domain of narrative.
A theatrical work is (a form of) movement since it presents a development of moods and events. The novel is (a form of) movement because it recounts ideas and situations that follow each other, that collide and clash. Human existence is movement because it changes position, lives, acts, and reflects successive impressions. Rather than studying the concept of movement in its plain and mechanical visual continuity as an end in itself, unaware that the truth might lay therein, we moved from deduction to deduction, from confusion to confusion to assimilate the cinema with the theater. It was regarded as a simple means to multiply the episodes and the sets of a drama, or, thanks to alternating shots of fabricated sets and natural scenes, as a means to reinforce dramatic or novelistic situations by perpetual changes of viewpoint.
Taking the place of capturing movement from life itself was a curious preoccupation with dramatic reconstructions composed of pantomimes, exaggerated expressions, and ridiculous subjects, in which characters became the principal objects of concern when, perhaps, the evolution and transformations of a form, or of a volume, or of a line would have provided more delight.
The meaning of the word “movement” was entirely lost sight of, and in the cinema it (movement) was made subservient to succinctly recounted stories whose series of images, too obviously animated, were used to illustrate the subject.
Just recently, someone2 had the happy idea to compare a film of long ago with contemporary films, thereby showing how this caricature of narrative cinema is still honored today in a more modern form: a photographed action far removed from the theory that, after years of mistakes, aims at pure movement as the creator of emotion.
Compared to these racy and completely puerile images, how much closer the simple sight of a suburban train entering the Vincennes station seems to the true meaning of cinégraphie. On one hand, an overbearing plot filmed without any visual care; on the other hand, the capturing of a raw movement, that of a machine with its connecting rods, its wheels, its speed. The first cinéastes who thought it was clever to confine cinegraphic action within a narrative format embellished with droll stories and those who encouraged them were the cause of an unpardonable mistake.
A train arriving in a station provides a physical and visual sensation. In composed films, nothing to equal it (was offered). A plot, an intrigue, without emotion. The first obstacle that cinema encountered in its evolution was, therefore, this preoccupation with a story to be told, this conception of a dramatic action performed by actors that was considered indispensable, this presumption of human beings as the inevitable center of attention, this total misunderstanding of the art of movement considered in and for itself. If the human spirit must embody itself in works of art, can it not do so except by means of other souls shaped by some motive?
Painting, meanwhile, can create emotion solely through the power of color, sculpture through ordinary volume, architecture through the play of proportions and lines, music through the combination of sounds. No need at all for a face. Cannot movement be considered exclusively from this perspective?
Years passed. The production methods and the skills of directors were perfected, and narrative cinema, laboring under a misapprehension, attained the fullness of its literary and dramatic form in realism.
The logic of an event, the precision of a shot, the truth of a pose constituted the armature of visual technique. The study of composition, moreover, when applied to the arrangement of images, created astonishing expressive rhythms that were likened to movement.
Pictures no longer followed independently of each other, simply linked by a subtitle [intertitle]; rather, an emotive and rhythmic psychological logic made them interdependent.
At that time the Americans were kings. Little by little, after a detour, a sense of life, if not of movement, was recovered. One still worried about a plot, but the images were decanted so that they were no longer burdened with useless gestures and superfluous details. They were balanced in harmonious juxtaposition. The more perfect cinema became by moving in this direction, the more, I think, it moved away from its own truth. Its attractive and rational form was all the more dangerous because it created an illusion (of truth).
Skillfully constructed scenarios, splendid performances and ostentatious sets propelled the cinema headlong into literary, dramatic, and decorative conceptions.
The idea of “action” was increasingly merged with the idea of “situation,” and the idea of “movement” was volatized into the arbitrary linking of briefly described events.
One demanded truth. Perhaps it was forgotten that presented with the famous Vincennes train, our minds, surprised by a new spectacle, were not bound by any tradition, and the attractions we found in it were not so much the precise observation of people and their gestures but the sensation of speed (at the time small) of a train charging straight at us. Sensation, action, observation—the struggle commenced. Cinegraphic realism, the enemy of useless annotations and a friend of precision, won so many votes that with it the art of the screen seemed to have attained its zenith.
Nevertheless, after an odd detour, cinegraphic technique began to ascend toward the visual idea by dividing up the gestures that presided over the realization of acted scenes.
In order to create dramatic movement, one must successively contrast varied mimetic gestures and intensify them by using different shots corresponding to a motivating feeling . . .
By the use of interposed shots and the necessary divisions, a cadence was imposed. From the juxtaposition, rhythm was born.
Carmen of the Klondyke was one of the masterpieces in this genre.
Fièvre by Louis Delluc, which will remain one of the most perfect examples of realist film, marked it apogee. But over Fièvres realism hovered a bit of a dream that went beyond the dramatic line and rejoined “the inexpressible” above its unambiguous images. The cinema of suggestion came into view.
The human spirit began to sing. Transcending the events, an intangible movement of feelings took shape as a melody that controlled the people and things heaped up pell-mell as they are in life. Realism evolved. This film by Louis Delluc did not receive the welcome it deserved. The public, always the prisoner of habit, of tradition, and the eternal obstacle with which innovators collide, did not understand that an incident counts for nothing without the play of actions and reactions, either slow or rapid, that brings it about.
The cinema was already trying to break loose from clearly formulated events and it sought an emotional agency in suggestion. At first, Fièvre met with the incomprehension of the crowd. And yet Delluc hardly deviated from traditional modes. He respected the rising curve of literary action and as a result he developed a standard (narrative) line.
Fièvre is now a classic work in the repertoire of the screen. Those who hissed the film when it appeared admire it today thanks to the improvement of their cinegraphic education. Now they must seriously reflect on their conduct in order to understand that it is better to seek self-renewal in an original work than to criticize it. Yesterday’s truth is always dazzling, and it impedes the blossoming of tomorrow’s truth.
After the failure to appreciate the term movement, routine was the greatest obstacle that the cinema had to overcome.
Another era arrived, that of the psychological and impressionist film. It seemed childish to place a character in a given situation without penetrating the secret domain of his inner life, and the actor’s performance was annotated with the play of his thoughts and his visualized feelings. By combining the description of manifold and opposing experienced impressions with the unambiguous facts of a drama—actions are but the consequence of a mental condition, and vice versa—a duality of lines gradually emerged that had to be adjusted to the measure of a clearly denned rhythm in order to remain in harmony.
I remember that in 1920, in La Mort du soleil, before portraying the despair of a scientist who regains consciousness after having been felled by a stroke, I used, in addition to the actor’s countenance, his paralyzed arm, and the objects, lights, and shadows surrounding him, and I gave these elements a visual value by calculating their intensity and rhythm to match my character’s physical and mental state.
Of course this passage was cut; the spectators were not willing to endure an action slowed down by a sensitive elaboration. Nevertheless, the impressionist era began. Suggestions began to prolong the action, thereby creating an enlarged emotional domain since it was no longer confined within the limits of unambiguous facts.
Impressionism regarded nature and objects as elements equal in importance to the action. A light, a shadow, or a flower at first were meaningful as reflections of a (character’s) feeling or of a situation; then, little by little, their own intrinsic value made them become necessary complements (to the action). We strained out ingenuity to make things move, and by using our knowledge of optics, we tried to change their outlines to correspond to the logic of a state of mind. Later, rhythm, mechanical movement, long suppressed by the literary and dramatic framework, disclosed its will to exist . . . But it ran up against ignorance and habit.
La Roue by Abel Gance stands out as a great step forward.
Both the psychology and the performance became clearly dependent upon a rhythm controlling the work. The characters no longer were the only important factors; rather, alongside them (the characters), the duration of the images, their contrasts and harmonies assumed a role of prime importance. Rails, a locomotive, a boiler, wheels, a manometer, smoke and tunnels: a new drama composed from a series of raw movements, and undulating lines appeared, and the idea of an art of movement, finally understood in a rational manner, recovered its rights, leading us magnificently toward a symphonic poem of images, toward a visual symphony outside all known formulas. (The word “symphony” is used here only by way of analogy.) A symphonic poem in which the image is equivalent to a sound, and as in music, feelings bursts forth not in facts and in actions, but in sensations.
A visual symphony, a rhythm of arranged movements in which the shifting of a line, or of a volume in a changing cadence creates emotion without any crystallization of ideas.
The public did not respond to Abel Gance’s La Roue in the way it de served and, when filmmakers used the play of varied rhythms in which the speed of a single image having the effect of a cadence sometimes flashed by like a lightning bolt—I was going to say as quickly as a triple crotchet— or when they used abstract rhythms in the synthesis of movement, protests exploded from among the spectators: useless protests that were later transformed into applause. The time it takes to become accustomed: an obstacle, time lost.
Cinegraphic movement, in which visual rhythms corresponding to musical rhythms give the overall movement its meaning and power, and which is composed of values analogous to note values, had to be completed, if I may put it thus, by the sonorities constituted by the feeling contained in the image itself. Here the architectural proportions of the set, the flickering of artificial light, the density of shadows, the balance or imbalance of lines, and the resources of perspective could play a role. Each image of Caligari really seemed to be a chord thrown into the moving flow of a fantastic burlesque symphony. A responsive chord, a baroque chord, a dissonant chord within the larger movement of the succession of images.
In this way, despite our ignorance, the cinema, by freeing itself from its initial mistakes and transforming its aesthetics, drew nearer in techique to music, leading to the claim that a rhythmic visual movement could provoke a feeling analogous to that aroused by sounds.
By slow degrees, narrative structure and the actor’s performance assumed less importance than the study of the images and of their juxtaposition. Just as a musician works on the rhythm and the sonorities of a musical phrase, the filmmaker sets himself to work on the rhythm and the sonorities of images. Their emotional effect became so great and their interrelationships so logical that their expressiveness could be appreciated in its own right without the assistance of a text.
This was the ideal that guided me recently when, composing La Folie des vaillants [1925], I avoided acted scenes in order to stick to the song of the images alone, exclusively to the song of emotions within a diminished, almost nonexistent, but always dynamic action.
We are entitled to question whether cinegraphic art is a narrative art form. In my opinion, cinema seems to progress much farther by means of tangible suggestions than by means of its unquestionable accuracy. Will it not be, as I have already said, music for the eyes, and shouldn’t we envision the subject serving as its pretext as comparable to the sensitive theme that inspires the musician?
The study of these different aesthetics whose developments tend toward a unique concern with expressive movement as the generator of emotion logically leads to (the idea of) a pure cinema, able to endure without the tutelage of other art forms, without any subject, without any explanations.
The cinema finds its principal obstacle in the slowness with which our visual sense develops and sets about seeking its fulfillment in the integral truth of movement. Can lines unwinding in profusion according to a rhythm dependent on a sensation or an abstract idea affect one’s emotions by themselves, without sets, solely through the activity of their development?
In the film about the birth of sea urchins, a schematic form, generated by greater or lesser speeds of time-lapse cinematography, describes a graphic curve of varying degree that elicits a feeling at odds with the thought that it illustrates. The rhythm and the magnitude of movement in the screen space become the only affective factors. In its embryonic state, a purely visual emotion, physical and not cerebral, is the equal of the emotion stimulated by an isolated sound. If we imagine many forms in movement unified within an artful structure composed of diverse rhythms in single images that are juxtaposed in a series, then we will successfully imagine an “integral cinegraphie.”
Consider an example in which a bit of learning is involved, but which is composed of quite simple elements: a grain of wheat sprouting. This joyful hymn of a germinating grain stretching toward the light in a slow and then a more rapid rhythm, isn’t it a synthetic and total drama, exclusively cin-egraphic in its conception and expression? Of the rest, the lightly touched upon idea gives way to the shades of movement harmonized by a visual proportion. Straining lines do battle or become united, expand and disappear: the cinegraphie of forms.
Another expression of brute force, lava and fire, a tempest expiring in a whirlwind of elements whose speeds destroy each other and which become but a series of stripes. The contest of blacks and whites, each wishing to dominate the other: the cinegraphie of light.
And consider the crystallization process. (In it we witness) the birth and development of forms harmonizing in the movement of the whole by means of abstract rhythms.
Until now, only documentaries made without any philosophical ideal or aesthetic concern, with the sole aim of capturing the movements of the infinitesimal and of nature allow us to conjure up the technical and emotional particulars of integral cinegraphie. They nevertheless carry us toward an understanding of a pure cinema, one liberated from every property alien to it, a cinema (that is) the art of movement and of the visual rhythms of life and the imagination.
If the sensibility of an artist inspired by these modes of expression will use them to create and will coordinate them by means of a clearly defined act of will, we will draw nearer to an understanding of a new art revealed at last.
To divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and of visual rhythms, that is the new aesthetic appearing in the light of the coming dawn.
Just as I wrote in Les Cahiers du Mois:3 “the cinema that assumes so many varied forms can also remain what it is today. Music does not disdain to accompany dramas or poems, but music would never have been music if it had been restricted to uniting notes with words or actions. The symphony, pure music exists. Why doesn’t the cinema have its own symphonic school? (The word ‘symphonic’ is used here only by way of analogy.) Narrative and realist films can make use of cinegraphic plasticity and continue along their chosen paths. The public, however, should not be misled: this is a mode of cinema but not the true cinema that must try to find its emotion through the artistic movement of lines and forms.
“The question for a pure cinema will be long and arduous. We have misunderstood the true import of the seventh art; we have travestied and trivialized it, and now, the public accustomed to its current forms, so charming and pleasurable, has fashioned for itself a conception of and a tradition for the art.”
It would be easy for me to say: “Only the power of money impedes the evolution of cinégraphie” But this is only a function of that (the public’s conception of the cinema), and that comprises the public’s taste and its familiarity with an artistic mode that it likes the way it is. Cinegraphic truth will be, I believe, stronger than we are, and for better or worse, it will thrust itself upon us through its revelation of visual sense. Till now, music, comparable to cinema in technique, has not been a comparable inspiration. Two arts that arouse emotion through the agency of suggestion.
Cinema, the seventh art, is not the photographing of real or imagined life as it has been believed to be up till now. Regarded in this way, it will merely be the mirror of successive epochs and will remain incapable of engendering the immortal works that every art form must create.
To prolong (the life) of what will die is good. But the very essence of cinema is different and it brings Eternity with it since it springs from the very essence of the universe: movement.
1 Yvon Delbos (1885–1956), newspaper editor and Radical Socialist politician, was the Minister of Public Education in the second and third Painlevé cabinets (11 October-28 November 1925). He was also Foreign Affairs Secretary in several of the Blum and Chautemps cabinets during the Popular Front period.—TRANS.
2 A reference to M. Tallier and Mile Myrga, directors of the Studio des Ursulines.— TRANS.
3 Dulac, “L’Essence du cinema: L’idée visuelle,” Cahiers du mois 16–17 (October 1925), translated by Robert Lamberton as “The Essence of Cinema: The Visual Idea,” in P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 36–42.—TRANS.
From “Fantômas, Les Vampires, Les Mystères de New York,” Le Soir (26 February 1927), reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 153–55. © Editions Gallimard 1966.
GENERATIONS are born under a sign: love, liberty, life, poetry, and even the parabolic curve of an era are subject to it. Some were born under the cockades of ‘89, to the clamor of ‘93 (in the bitterness of Thermidor, Brumaire, or December), or in the enthusiasm of ‘48.1
We were born under the sign of the [1900] International Exposition. The Eiffel Tower had dominated Paris for eleven years, opening an era which some called a renaissance and which was merely an eccentric spiritual endeavor and a condemnation of the triumph of matter over the spirit.
They were carefully upholding the spirit of revenge in the schools; Dé-roulède spoke annually in front of a bronze statue of Jeanne d’Arc, Mac-Mahon was no more than an image d’Epinal;, Panama was a far off reef disemboweling shameful ships; our fathers were still gasping for breath after having battled over Dreyfus; on certain nights, our childhood sleep was troubled by cries of “Down with the clergy!” and resounding blows breaking down the church doors; the Federate wall was already welcoming the people of Paris; the empty terrain of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges was getting ready to soak up blood; they invented the automobile for tragic bandits; they raced from Paris to Peking; Europe had no more than fourteen years to forge its arms.2
We came to be born. We learned to read with Les Misérables and Le Juif errant. A tremendous desire for love, revolt, and the sublime tortured us. We weren’t vicious; we were precocious. We hid copies of Claudine in our desks. We dreamed, in turn, of shipwreck in the Vengeur, of the Moulin Rouge, of Cléo de Mérode. For us and us alone, the Lumière brothers invented the cinema. There we were at home. Its darkness was like that of our bedrooms before going to sleep. The screen perhaps might be the equal of our dreams.3
Three films lived up to this mission: Fantômas, for revolt and liberty; Les Vampires, for love and sensuality; Les Mystères de New York, for love and poetry.
Fantomasl Such a long time ago! . . . It was before the war. But the vicissitudes of this modern epic were already fixed in our memories. At every corner of Paris, we rediscovered an episode of this terrific work; and, in the depths of our dreams, we reenvisioned the bend in the Seine where, under a red sky, a barge exploded, right next to a newspaper with headlines telling of the latest exploits of the Bonnot gang.
Musidora, how beautiful you were in Les Vampires! Do you know that we dreamed of you and that when evening came you entered our bedrooms without knocking, dressed in your black tights, and on awakening the next morning we searched for a trace of the disconcerting “hotel mouse” that had visited us.
Meanwhile, across the deserted streets of Paris, then in the grip of a bellicose madness, under a sky lacerated by searchlights and artillery shell explosions, as we sought the privilege of shadowy adventures of love, did you know that, in our desire for escape and evasion, we rediscovered that privilege in the wake of Pearl White, in the touring cars of Les Mystères de New York, and the mock battles between bogus policemen and stupendous bandits?
We have not read Faublas,4 yet, despite failures and disillusionments, we will not let the image of love that we once nurtured fade away, not the cinema either, where for the first time woman appeared to us with all her wiles, her charms, and her splendor, to become, under the yoke of multiple censures, the expression of a common, lawful morality.
There are only vices for the powerless; sensuality, on the contrary, is a justification of all forms of life and expression. To the first belong literature, art, and all the manifestations of reaction: tradition, classicism, the obstacles to love, the hatred of liberty. To the sensual, instead, belong the deepest revolutionary pleasures, the legitimate perversions of love and poetry.
That’s why we refuse to consider the spectacle of the screen other than as the representation of the life we desire, with the same status as our dreams; why we refuse to believe that any rule, any constraint, any realism could relegate it to the low level to which writing has fallen ever since the novelists, as good businessmen, threw public discredit on the poets; why we demand that the cinema exalt what is dear to us and only what is dear to us; why we wish that the cinema would be revolutionary.
1 These are references to the revolutions of 1789, 1793, and 1848 in France.
2 Paul Déroulède (1846–1914) was a polemical political writer, poet, and leader of the right-wing Ligue des patriotes. In 1899, Déroulède attempted to lead a coup against the Republic, for which he was banished for six years.
General MacMahon (1808–1893) was President of the French Republic from 1873 to 1879. His support of the Royalist forces in their struggle with the Republicans led by Léon Gambetta (1838–1882) was not enough to counteract the victory of the latter in the 1877 elections.
The Fédérate wall was where the leaders who briefly established the Paris Commune of 1871 were executed.
Villeneuve-Saint-Georges was the Paris site where, in 1908, the Confédération Générale du Travail and the Fédération du Bâtiment held a rally protesting police action against a quarrymen’s strike at Draveil; an unprovoked police cavalry charge into the rally participants left four dead and sixty-nine wounded.
Most of these references provide clear evidence of the strong leftist position of the Surrealists in 1927.
3 The references are to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Eugène Sue’s Le Juif errant (1830), Colette’s Claudine à l’école (1900), and Cléo de Mérode, a famous ballet dancer from before the war.
4 The reference is to Louvet de Couvray’s series of novels, Les Aventures du Chevalier Fau-blas (1787–1793).
Translated by Kevin Brownlow in Napoleon, Directed by Abel Gance (London: Thames Television, 1980), v. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Mon Napoléon” in a Théâtre de l’Opéra programme (April 1927).
NAPOLEON is Prometheus.
I’m not thinking here of morality or of politics, but of art. What greater tragedy could there be than the story of a man who wrote: “All my life I have sacrificed everything, peace, profit, happiness to my destiny.”
So it wasn’t in order to make a mundane “historical film” that I tried to bring alive on the screen this epic figure who described himself as a fragment of rock thrown into space; but because Napoleon represents a microcosm of the world.
My first quest was for a cinematographic style capable of fulfilling my vision. Since La Roue I had realized that it was possible at all times to separate the emotional from the narrative element of the pictures appearing on screen. From this arose the necessity of finding new techniques of filming to bring the required flexibility.
One of these was the use of the triple screen. In part of my film I used the triple screen as a way of portraying simultaneously three elements: the physical, the mental, and the emotional. It requires considerable effort to understand and to fuse these three elements in the space of a single second; or should I say a sixteenth of a second. And I noticed that if I missed one image, the other two immediately became meaningless. Let’s hope that viewers’ hearts, minds, and eyes will at least bear with my self-indulgence.
In general, my approach in Napoléon was: (1) to make the spectator become an actor; (2) to involve him at every level in the unfolding of the action; (3) to sweep him away on the flow of pictures.
I conceived Napoleon as a man who is being dragged towards war by a strong web of circumstances and who is trying all the time and in vain to escape. From Marengo onwards, war had become his inescapable destiny. He tried his best to avoid it but was forced at every turn to succumb. Therein lies the drama.
Napoleon can be seen as the everlasting and recurrent conflict between the great revolutionary who wanted to bring about a Revolution in peace, and who went to war in order to establish that peace.
He confessed this in a letter to Fievee: “I am pitting my strength against Europe. You are putting your strength against the spirit of the Revolution. Your ambition is greater than mine, and I have greater chances of success than you.”
And, later, that terrible accusation: “War is an anachronism. One day victories will be won without cannon and without bayonets.”
He was a man whose arms were not long enough to encompass something that was greater than himself: the Revolution.
Napoleon was a climax in his generation, which in turn was a climax in Time.
And the cinema, for me, is the climax of life.
Translated by Norman King in his Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 42–43. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Napoleon” in Le Temps (9 April 1927), 3.
IT is CHARACTERISTIC of the epic, whether it is poetic, pictorial, musical, theatrical, or cinematographic, to sweep along on its stormy waves all kinds of contradictory elements and to throw together in its violent rhythm the good, the mediocre, and the worst. In making his Napoléon, Abel Gance has not escaped from the law of the genre. His film has splendid qualities and strident defects; it is by turns dazzling and intensely irritating. If one examines this work in strictly critical terms, one cannot possibly approve of it. But it is self-evident that where the critical faculties dominate, there can be no more epics . . .
The fundamental limitation of this gigantic composition is that it is not essentially cinematic. Without being aware of it, Abel Gance has gradually distanced himself from the seventh art and made an unexpected return to literature, to the ode, to historical drama, official painting, state sculpture, and lyrical theater. I am not speaking simply of the perfectly legitimate interventions of the chorus, of the drums, of Koubitsky present on the stage, singing the “Marseillaise” while he was miming it on the screen, or even of the actor who lent his voice to Bonaparte to harangue the Army of Italy; it is rather in the whole conception of the work that I see a tendency which represents a very unfortunate step backwards in the history of the silent art. A reproach that is all the more serious in that Abel Gance is a filmmaker who has a real cinematic genius. And it is towards the cinematic, and only towards it, that he should have directed his exceptional gifts. By seeking to imitate verbally and scenically Edmond Rostand and Georges d’Esparbes,1 this Ingres of the screen has, alas, merely played the violin.2
This film is in fact made in an extremely disparate style. Sometimes, as in the first and the third parts, it nobly fulfills its technical mission; sometimes, as in the second, it is merely reduced to the rank of schoolbook illustration. Everywhere there is an abuse of visual and verbal repetitions, of effects that are overextended. Too often the image is only a camouflaged “tirade” leading artificially into a dramatic subtitle [intertitle], which from a cinematic point of view is a crime of high treason. You can too easily sense a desire to go for cheap effects and to make the actor, in the theatrical sense of the word, far too important. As in old Italian operas, there are in all this too many cavatinas, ariosos, and bravura arias sung in front of the prompter’s box and not enough orchestral and harmonic atmosphere. But, by an effect of immanent justice, it is not this flattery of the masses and the concessions to the dramaturgy of the old Porte Saint-Martin3 that will bring this formidable work the success Gance has been counting on.
He will in fact owe his success to the few moments in which he searches resolutely and wholeheartedly for the purely cinematic. That is when we find the real Gance, with all his qualities, his technical virtuosity, his insight and visionary mastery. I personally would give up the whole of the second part just for the few meters of that prodigious ride around Corsica in which a translucent horseman, literally a “journeying soul,” passes through landscapes whose contours blend and intertwine with a smoothness of rhythm that is unforgettably beautiful. Every time Gance has sincerely looked for a means of expression within the resources of moving image, he has triumphed. True cinematic eloquence is indeed to be found not in printed speeches thrown to the crowds like bones to a dog, but in the beautiful visual synthesis, the striking combination, the powerful or really appropriate image conveying feeling and thought, the arrow of light that strikes us in the heart, or the reflection that almost penetrates our unconscious. Abel Gance is more expert in this sublime language than anyone else, and he proved that many times in the course of yesterday evening’s performance. His triple screen, whose wealth of possibilities I was the first to describe in an earlier issue of this paper,4 has allowed him to reach effortlessly the highest peaks of the lyricism of the image. The titanic counterpoint of the double storm of the sea and the convention shows what could be expected from so crucial a technical innovation. When the curtains are drawn back, opening out in the wall of the theater that immense breach of light, the effect produced is one of an astonishing power.
In the present state of French cinematography, Abel Gance has a liberating mission to fulfill. He is capable of it. Only he is currently in a position to resist the commercial cartels that want to maintain cinema as a slave to a profitable and demagogic Taylorism.5 He showed us yesterday that we were right to place our trust in him. And that is why I will always offer as a homage to this prophet my most vehement and impassioned curses whenever he forgets to preach his noble gospel.
1 Critics of Gance’s films often compared them to the romantic verse dramas of Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), the highly successful turn-of-the-century playwright. Georges d’Esparbes (1865–1944) was keeper of the palace of Fountainebleau and an enthusiastic writer about Napoleon. Gance had been invited by d’Esparbes to write his screenplays [for the six planned films about Napoleon] at Fontainebleau in 1924, and later hoped d’Esparbes would write a book based on his cycle of films.—TRANS.
2 Ingres, the nineteenth-century painter, was an amateur violinist. The term “violin d’Ingres” refers to a hobby or pastime.—TRANS.
3 The Porte Saint-Martin district was the home of the boulevard theater in Paris.— TRANS.
4 Le Temps (8 January 1927).—TRANS.
5 A reference to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” studies, which were used to control the labor process and promote efficiency in early twentieth-century manufacturing industries. An indirect reference to the production practices of the American film industry and its imitators in Europe.
Translated by Norman King in his Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 43–48. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Abel Gance et Napoleon” in Cinemagazine 7 (25 November 1927), 335–40.
THIS TREMENDOUS work has already been subjected to the same fate as the map of Europe, cut up and pieced back together by the lank-haired Corsican. We have seen it stretched and shrunk like the wild ass’s skin . . . that is, like a fragile empire set up by an overambitious soldier. This grandiose and heterogeneous film has at last been reduced to normal dimensions for commercial exploitation. But in this shortened form, it is no less significant a composition. The abridged version merely underlines the essential characteristics of its author’s psychology.1
In this respect, we must not forget the explicit indication contained in its rather unexpected title. We are not being offered a biography of Napoleon or a page of French history. What we are invited to look at is Napoleon “seen by Abel Gance,” that is to say the heroic encounters of the young Bonaparte and the “Little Corporal” of French cinema. In fact there is as much in this adventure story, and perhaps more, of Abel Gance as there is of Napoleon.
That is not a reproach. I actually have more sympathy for the former than for the latter. I have frequently had occasion to exalt the exceptional qualities of a dynamic presence who has brought to the screen the advantages of his visionary gifts, his poetic intuition, and his pictorial virtuosity. We owe to him all kinds of conquests in the untilled land of animated vision. I feel myself particularly well placed, then, to address to this conqueror—in the sense of the ancient tradition of the march to the Capitol— remarks which are intended to remind him that he is a man and that he must be mistrustful of apotheoses which lead to the paralytic state of demigod.
Abel Gance was born to make films. That is nature’s express desire. Light and shade obey him and at every moment he discovers in the vocabulary of luminous vibrations turns of phrase and expressions which are strikingly new and original. He is, then, a man of 1927, perfectly capable of understanding his own times, which is, as you know, an exceptional privilege and something of a rarity in an effete society nurtured on an outdated “literary” culture.
But by a strange irony of fate, this man of today is afflicted with a handicap that he must at all costs overcome if he is to exert an effective influence on the young generation of creators who will present us with the aesthetic of our century. He is a romantic. Romantic in the most outmoded, anachronistic, and “antimodern” way. This master of the mechanical eye and of the luminous ray, this virtuoso of the electric brain conceives of lyricism in about as artificial a way as Alexandre Dumas père, Sardou, Edmond Rostand, and d’Esparbès.2 A cruel, almost tragic anomaly: d’Artagnan as factory manager, Cyrano as director of a laboratory. This perfect filmmaker will only realize his full potential the day he has cleared his brain and his imagination of an idea of the sublime which is purely literary in essence.
It is in this sense that I have never hesitated to say to this artist, whom I esteem above all others, that his Napoléon is at once a fine work and a reprehensible act. On a philosophical level it is impossible to approve of such subject matter especially when Napoleon is seen by Abel Gance, that is to say systematically and tendentiously misrepresented by a man whose lyricism is sincere.
What we have to reproach him with as author of a production whose artistic quality is not at stake is in fact a rather puerile, yet dangerous desire to seek at all costs to present more or less fantasized conceptions of the poet as though they were part of history. Just as the director of King of Kings [Cecil B. DeMille, 1926] hides all the time behind the authority of the Gospels, giving chapter and verse for every single subtitle [intertitle] to prove that it is taken from the New Testament, Gance doesn’t give a single line of dialogue or even an exclamation (even something as basic as “Death to Robespierre!”) without certifying in brackets and in italics that the quotations are authentic. We should interpret that as meaning that they conform to the literary orthodoxy of a Frederic Masson,3 which, it has to be admitted, is not a totally convincing argument.
There is something unpleasant in all this. Why does the author not accept responsibility for his inveterate taste for “panache,” that coquettish-ness so typical of generals and of hearses? He ought to have the courage of his extrapolations and after showing us Bonaparte seizing an enormous tricolor from outside the Ajaccio town hall and using it as a sail during a Shakespearian tempest, he should not insert the subtitle “This Bonaparte left Corsica to go to fight at Toulon.” Of course not: that is obviously not how things really happened! The departure by boat leads into a symbolic and theatrical development which is entirely Gance’s own creation. He should assert his paternity here rather than trying to pass off as historical (what, after all, is history?) scenes which, however decorative they may be, should not for loyalty’s sake be foisted onto the popular imagination as though they were official truths.
One has no right to let French people, or foreigners for that matter, believe that Napoleon was a kind of Douglas Fairbanks holding out single-handed against a hundred armed opponents, leaping through the window and into the saddle of a fiery charger, galloping across the whole of Corsica like some fantastic cowboy, braving with a smile countless pistol shots at point-blank range and emerging without a scratch. One has no right either to affirm that on arriving at the encampment of the army of Italy, this young upstart had only to throw his sword vigorously on the table, and stare arrogantly at the formidable Massena, the invicible Augereau and their fierce companions to crush their dignity completely and transform them instantaneously into cowering lackeys, slaves brought to submission by their fear of the master’s whip.
All this theatrical romanticism dominates Gance’s vision to an unfortunate extent, and that is certainly not the best part of his work. There is, in this overindulgent apotheosis of dictatorship, a flattery of the basest demagogic instincts of the masses who, as one knows, have never had enough of being kicked in the pants. And it’s not very logical on the part of our visonary author to have tried to reconcile the irreconcilable by presenting us with a Bonaparte who is a democrat, the son of the Revolution, of Dan-ton, Marat, and Robespierre, placing his sword at the service of an international Republic, whereas the whole of the cinematic portrait clearly denounces the tyrant, the opportunist, the unscrupulous conqueror, and the soldier who sowed throughout the whole of Europe the seeds of all the imperialisms of the future. Either Bonaparte was sincere in his love of liberty and, in that case, he should not have been portrayed as conqueror, or he was not and it would have been honest to draw attention to his duplicity.
Since Gance is so partial to historical texts, he will know that his altruistic hero had as his breviary the following dogmas: “To be a successful conqueror you have to be ferocious . . . Those who haven’t learned to make use of circumstances are fools . . . I have an income of a hundred thousand men a year . . . If the aggressors are wrong up in heaven they are right down here . . . Nothing was ever founded except by the sword . . . There are moments of crisis when the public good necessitates the condemnation of an innocent person . . . You can’t do anything with a philosopher. A philosopher is a bad citizen, etc.”
Confronted with a social morality of this order, one has to take sides. To go all out, in such conditions, to dress up the figure of a despot in all kinds of romantic frills, to decorate the statue of a tyrant with cinematographic flowers, is to produce a work which is philosophically and historically despicable. That is what Abel Gance will realize in ten years’ time, when the evolution of our poor, maimed civilization has shown him the terrible consequences of warmongering cinematography as it is being organized by the international commercial interests of today, casually throwing into a belligerent crucible the real and the sham, history and fantasy, sacred relics and the trappings of carnival, in order to preserve at all costs those convenient cliches of the masses which leaders of peoples need if they are to be able to mobilize them in the future. Making the strategy of massacre seem noble by romanticizing it, making butchery respectable or simply fresh and enjoyable is in effect, my dear Abel Gance, taking on a heavy burden of responsibility in respect of the mothers whose children will be gunned down tomorrow.
These things have to be said to relieve the consciences of many spectators whose dignity as civilized people is beginning to be deeply wounded by Parades great and small.
But, after speaking so bluntly to the author of this portrait of Napoleon, it is only fair to stress the technical values of his achievement. From the purely professional point of view, a film of this kind does the greatest honor to our national cinema. The assurance of its style and the power of its internal rhythm make an irresistible impact. Gance is the most courageous and the most secure of our orchestrators of visual symphonies. He sees everything on a grand scale. The magnificent counterpoint of images that he has created in the duet of the “double tempest,” when the waves of the crowd and those of the sea rise up in synchrony, will continue to be a model of this new form of writing.
At every moment he provides glimpses of new techniques and innovations whose potential cannot yet be measured. One can never praise enough his lightness of touch when the translucent silhouette of the young Bonaparte glides through landscapes of the Enchanted Isle which blend harmoniously into each other with an unforgettable smoothness. One feels that he is the master of all the techniques of shooting images which usually signal the ethnic origins of a film: German etchings, Swedish soft-points, resplendent American chromo-lithos.
Here is a writer of the screen whose dominance of his style is magnificent.
But it is especially his invention of the triple screen which, as one of the great victories of cinematic writing, demands our attention. The use he has made of it in Napoleon can only give an idea of its potential, since the cameras were perfected too late to allow him to exploit the process as freely as he would have liked. But we see enough of it in this film to realize that the point has been made. There is an extremely valuable element of polyphony and a plurality of rhythms here which could completely transform our traditional conception of visual harmony. The monody of the optical melody is supplemented by the possibility of a notation of the music of images on three staves. That is truly revolutionary.
We can already see sketched out here what will eventually be the principal applications of so rich a technique. The triple repetition of the same phrase in unison is not the most promising of them. But others are quite remarkable. When the field of vision is stretched to left and right, as if the screen were opening wings of light, the impression that is produced electrifies a crowd. No superimpressions are needed to entrance it then. But, a moment later, the plurality of rhythms comes into play with its infinite resources. The central unit can sing a powerful melody to the double accompaniment of its two neighbors. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is a theme that superimpression—the muted tone of the image—makes it possible to overlay discreetly on the principal orchestration. At yet other times, the same phrase, turned round like a reversible counterpoint, will be played to the right and the left of the principal theme, a moving frieze suddenly as solid and as balanced as a purely decorative composition. Synchronism, delayed rhythms, stylization, consonance, dissonance, chords, arpeggios, and syncopation, all are now available to musicians of the screen who were until now restricted to elementary harmonization and orchestration.
We must give the warmest possible welcome to this liberation of the screen’s vocabulary that we owe to a French filmmaker.
Napoleon will go all round the world. It will be acclaimed everywhere. I sincerely hope that spectators of all latitudes will not reserve their enthusiasm for the effects of literary grandiloquence imposed in this tumultuous fresco on the art of silence, and that they will pay homage not to a warrior who left France poorer and weaker than he found it and who stirred up throughout Europe a bitterness and hatred that we are still paying ransom for, but to the creative spirit of a young French artist, whose pacific victories will earn our country a prestige and a glory for which we will not have to pay nearly so high a price. I also hope that Abel Gance will take more carefully into account the heavy sociological responsibilities of tribunes of the screen who have at their disposal a surreptitous but irresistible power to sway audiences. And that he never forgets that by making light of the history of yesterday he is, without realizing it, helping to write the history of tomorrow!
1 The Opéra version of Napoléon, which premiered 7 April 1927, measured between 4,800 and 5,600 meters. The Apollo Cinéma version, which premiered 9–12 May 1927, measured between 10,800 and 12,000 meters. The Salle Marivaux version, released in November 1927, measured between 3,700 and 4,000 meters. For further information on the various versions of Napoléon, see Kevin Brownlow, Napoléon: Abel Gance’s Classic Film (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 286–87, and Norman King, Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 148–49.
2 Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) wrote popular, tightly constructed comedies and historical melodramas—for example, Les Pattes de mouche (1860), Patrie! (1869), La Tosca (1887), Madame Sans-Gêne (1893). The latter play had just been adapted and directed by Léonce Perret for Paramount, starring Gloria Swanson—Madame Sans-Gêne (1925).
3 Frédéric Masson (1847–192 3) was the author of a long series of books on Napoleon and his family that were enormously popular in the early part of the century.—TRANS.
From “Metropolis,” Le Crapouillot (1 November 1927), 55–56.
Metropolis purposely wants to be taken as an apocalyptic vision of the A VXmachine age. Let me state at once, so I don’t have to insist, that this little story is one of the silliest I have ever seen.1
In the beginning, there are five minutes of undeniably marvelous spectacle, at a ponderous, strictly regulated pace, whose purpose is to represent men enslaved to machines. You probably remember Abel Gance’s La Roue: the effect here is just as powerful, but the movement of the machines is infinitely more varied and the play of light as well as the superimposed diagrams of motion nicely augment the power of the machine spectacle.2 The first accident is also marvelously worked out. And despite the usual problems with miniatures, I have to admit that the image of the great city and its towers is perfectly realized.3 It’s something like New York as seen one day by a poet with a migraine. The movements of the crowd recall everything in The Ten Commandments that depicts the servitude in Egypt.4 And machines such as the dial-works and the huge mechanical gong have a firm, restrained Cubist design.
By contrast, the whole human part of the film is profoundly disappointing.5 There is an old scientist who is little more than a sentimental Caligari and a Master of the City who, once deprived of machines like the dial-works and the mechanical gong, becomes little more than commonplace. The young hero, who otherwise lacks neither charm nor intelligence, is continually compelled to make excessively quick movements. And the heroine, who stands at the center of the film, and finds herself forced to play two completely different roles, is strangely weak in the sympathetic role and unusually fascinating and even amusing in the role which ought to be hateful. Instead of once again risking the desperate experience of vainly fighting against the bad luck that overwhelms virtue in the cinema, it would be better, once and for all, to renounce any attempt to put morality in the position of being useless.
After the slow movements of the crowd at the beginning, at the end we have quite rapid crowd movements. They, too, are very successful, especially those of the children. Yet it’s rather odd that the movement of the water in the deluge is consistently excellent at the first signs of its encroachment but much less so at the height of the flooding.
Finally, among the miniatures or enlarged sets, the destruction of the huge electrical machine (very likely achieved by fitting two sections of a metal model to a Windhurst machine) is stunning at first and then grows a little monotonous. One tires of everything, even catastrophes.
One scene seems designed to salvage the actors’ share of the film, since otherwise they are sacrificed to the machines: that is the meeting between the old diabolical pedant and the young prophetess in the catacombs. The author has come up with an excellent idea here: the malicious projection of the lamplight into the most forbidding niches of the cavern. But the characters, who have a wonderful opportunity to display genuine emotion, fail to extricate themselves with honor. They have the look of being overwhelmed by all the machinery that surrounds them, and of being pressed, in the shortest time possible, to produce all the complicated machinations imposed on them by the scenario.
Metropolis has sprung from a biblical sensibility’s reaction against the machine civilization. Unfortunately, one finds that the party on the side of ideals and hope, which can only naively be assumed in the real world, has been outshown by the spectacle of machines. The director has owned up to noticing this disparity, for he has done some cheating. The machines he offers us lose steam in the face of those who manipulate them, yet they give off an overpowering degree of heat and are extremely tiring to operate: in brief, they are very poor machines. Besides, this civilization exudes such an impression of power that one automatically thinks: just a little more effort—which could be made up by a slight increase in production—and these workers would become docile and stupid, but perfectly happy. Now that would make a dramatic situation. Finally, even in the way the problern is posed, there is a serious psychological error: it is in the nature of men and workers, even the revolutionary worker, to love the machine and detest only their fellow men. The beginning of Metropolis is a prodigious spectacle, but the conception of this barbarous universe comes from the mind of a false artist, who refuses to understand what he is seeing, and concludes that industry is to be damned simply because it makes too much noise.
Once again, the beginning images are quite lovely and almost cause us to forget the scenario’s ineptitude, but I find it odd that Fritz Lang has put so much genius into producing the migraine fantasy of a four-year-old.
I also believe that spectators are realizing how much this work seeks to overwhelm them rather than to please them, which is curtailing their admiration. It was lovely, yes, but to what end? . . .
JEAN PRÉVOST (I901–1944) was a brilliant essayist and populist novelist who occasionally wrote articles on the cinema as well as film reviews in Les Nouvelles littéraires, La Nouvelle Revue française, and Le Crapouillot, in the later 1920s.
1 The scenario for Metropolis was written by Thea Von Harbou and Fritz Lang.
2 The cinematography in Metropolis was done by Karl Freund and Günther Rittau.
3 The special effects for Metropolis were done by Eugen Schüfftan.
4 The reference is to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923).
5 The cast of Metropolis included Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang), Alfred Abel (Fredersen), Gustav Fröhlich (Freder), and Brigitte Helm (Maria).
From Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud. Translation copyright © 1976 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Translated by Helen Weaver. The original French text first appeared as “Cinema et réalité,” in La Nouvelle Revue française 170 (1 November 1927) and was reprinted in Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 22–25.
TWO PATHS SEEM to be open to the cinema right now, neither of which, undoubtedly, is the right one. On the one hand there is pure or absolute cinema, and on the other there is that kind of venial hybrid art which insists on translating into more or less suitable images psychological situations that would be perfectly at home on the stage or in the pages of a book but not on the screen, since they are merely the reflection of a world that depends on another source for its raw material and its meaning.
It is clear that everything we have seen up to now that passes for abstract or pure cinema is very far from meeting what seems to be one of the essential requirements of cinema. For although the mind of man may be able to conceive and accept abstraction, no one can respond to purely geometric lines which possess no significative value in themselves and which are not related to any sensation that the eye of the screen can recognize or classify. No matter how deeply we dig into the mind, we find at the bottom of every emotion, even an intellectual one, an affective sensation of a nervous order. This sensation involves the recognition, perhaps on an elementary level, but at least on a tangible one, of something substantial, of a certain vibration that always recalls states, either known or imagined, that are clothed in one of the myriad forms of real or imagined nature. Thus the meaning of pure cinema would lie in the re-creation of a certain number of forms of this kind, it would lie in a movement and follow a rhythm which is the specific contribution of this art.
Between a purely linear visual abstraction (and the play of light and shadow is similar to the play of lines) and the fundamentally psychological film which relates the development of a story that may or may not be dramatic, there is room for an attempt at true cinema, of whose substance or meaning nothing in the films that have been presented to date gives any suggestion.
In heavily plotted films, all the emotion and all the humor depend solely on the text, to the exclusion of the images; with a few rare exceptions, all the thought in a film is in the subtitles [intertitles], and even in films without subtitles the emotion is verbal, it requires the clarification or support of words, for the situations, the images, the actions all turn on a clear meaning. We have yet to achieve a film with purely visual situations whose drama would come from a shock designed for the eyes, a shock drawn, so to speak, from the very substance of our vision and not from psychological circumlocutions of a discursive nature which are merely the visual equivalent of a text. It is not a question of finding in visual language an equivalent for written language, of which the visual language would merely be a bad translation, but rather of revealing the very essence of language and of carrying the action onto a level where all translation would be unnecessary and where this action would operate almost intuitively on the brain.
In the screenplay [of La Coquille et le clergyman] that follows, I have tried to carry out this idea of a visual cinema in which even psychology is engulfed by actions. No doubt this screenplay does not achieve the absolute image of all that can be done in this direction; but at least it points the way. Not that the cinema must renounce all human psychology: that is not its principle—on the contrary—but it must give psychology a form that is much more vital and active, and without those connections that try to reveal the motives for our actions in an absolutely stupid light instead of spreading them before us in their original and profound barbarity.
This screenplay is not the re-creation of a dream and should not be considered as such. I shall not attempt to excuse its apparent incoherence by the facile subterfuge of dreams. Dreams have more than their logic. They have their life, in which there appears an intelligent and somber truth. This screenplay seeks the somber truth of the mind in images which have issued solely from themselves and which do not derive their meaning from the situation in which they develop, but from a kind of powerful inner necessity that casts them in a light of inescapable clarity.
The human skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this is the primary raw material of cinema. Cinema exalts matter and reveals it to us in its profound spirituality, in its relations with the spirit from which it has emerged. Images are born, are derived from one another purely as images, impose an objective synthesis more penetrating than any abstraction, create worlds which ask nothing of anyone or anything. But out of this pure play of appearances, out of this so to speak transubstantiation of elements is born an inorganic language that moves the mind by osmosis and without any kind of transposition in words. And because it works with matter itself, cinema creates situations that arise from the mere collision of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions. It does not detach itself from life but rediscovers the original order of things. The films that are most successful in this sense are those dominated by a certain kind of humor, like the early Buster Keatons or the less human Chaplins. A cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humor. A certain excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions and surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD (I896–1948) was an actor in Charles Dullin’s Atelier Théâtre as well as a poet, playwright, and dramatic theorist. He was a member of the Surrealist group from 1925 to 1927 and again briefly in 1928, around the time of the release of La Coquille et le clergyman. Artaud performed in a number of important late 1920s French films—for instance, Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928), Poiriers’s Verdun, vision d’histoire (1928), and L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1929).
Translated by Tom Milne in Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), 9–16. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Art d’événement,” Comoedia (18 November 1927), 4.
IGNORING three analogous assignations made with or by three different women, a young man, happy to be on holiday as it were, alone and free, takes his sports car out of the garage and speeds away . . . until he smashes himself up on the road to Deauville. With a little stab of its beak between his eyes, a swallow flying even faster than the speeding car had killed this refugee from love.
The fifteen pages of Paul Morand’s short story, “La Glace à trois faces,”1 thus melt into a scenario dedicated in its simplicity and truth to the cinema. After those stories supposedly without end, here is one which sets out to have no exposition or inception, and which stops dead. The incidents do not succeed each other, yet there is an exact correspondence. Fragments from several pasts take root in a single present. The future erupts through the memories. This is the chronology of the human mind. Each character is introduced alone and the narrative keeps them definitively apart; nevertheless they live together, in association with each other.
Is this a new dramaturgy toward which images are now reaching? More or less stripped of all technique, they really signify only in association with each other, just as words that are simple but rich in meanings must do; noble thought and thought noble. And among these images two, strangers to each other, meet in the eye of the spectator across twenty meters of film, only then sounding their real note; in the same way, the notes of a chord a semi-octave apart yield their musical significance only to a musician’s ear.
Among tokens of reality, banality is the least relative. This meticulous, deep-seated, dissected, intensified, itemized, applied banality will lend the cinematic drama a startling depth of humanity, an immensely enhanced power of suggestion, an unprecedented emotive force. The events in slow or accelerated motion will create their own time, the time proper to each action, to each character, our time. Our first French compositions at school are written in the present. The cinema narrates everything in the present, even in its intertitles. Learning more of grammar and rhetoric, pupils then use the past and future tenses in their narratives, alternating but agreeing. The fact is that there is no real present; today is a yesterday, perhaps already old, colliding with a possibly distant tomorrow. The present is an uneasy convention. In the flow of time it is an exception to time. It eludes the chronometer. You look at your watch; strictly speaking the present is no longer there; and strictly speaking it is there again, and always will be from one midnight to the next. I think, therefore I was. The future “1” is shed as “I” past; the present is merely this instantaneous and perpetual sloughing. The present is merely an encounter. The cinema is the only art capable of depicting this present as it is.
A carefree motorist seems an insignificant character; a swallow in flight even more so; their encounter; the incidence. That little mark which the bird’s beak left on the man’s forehead had against it the desires of three hearts, the miraculous vigilance of love, all the reflexes of living, all the probabilities in three-dimensional space, every temporal chance.
But it took—and the phrase is appropriate—place. In an instant, super-saturation produces crystallization. And so with the drama, appearing out of nowhere, appearing everywhere, like an egg at the fingertips of a naked magician. Before and after it, characters and actions suddenly fall obediently into place. In the future, a wrong road unexpectedly intersected in its turn by the ultimate. In the past, viewed enumerated, interlinked, comprehensible, comprehended. “Of course—these actors intimate—that is why we were there.” As with the difficult syntax of a Latin sentence, you come back from the final verb to the subject. And it proves to be untrue.
1 Paul Morand (1888–1976) was a clever, refined author of novels, short stories, and travel books. “La Glace a trois faces” was published in L’Europegalante (1925).
From “Cinéma: Expression sociale,” L’Art cinématographique, vol. 4 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1927), 23–49.
AGREEMENTS, misgivings, and even certain attacks of conscience already are widespread [in discussions about the cinema]. Certainly we do not lack for assertions. I myself have made some . . .
However, we reach the heart of the matter with René Clair, the author of Entr’acte and Le Voyage imaginaire, for he places the cinema clearly in its social sphere, outside of which everything else is merely intellectual speculation: “A film only exists on the screen. Yet, between the mind that conceives it and the screen which reflects it, there looms a huge industrial organization and its craving for money. . . . It seems futile to anticipate the existence of a pure cinema, therefore, as long as the material conditions of the cinema remain unaltered and as long as public taste does not advance. . . ”1 (See also Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du cinema.) Let’s move on then to the conclusion of our thinking and say: in its essence and its deepest realities, the cinema corresponds to the greatest forms of collective expression: an art of space and time, universal and international, it can free itself of the foreign influences which enslave it and really live only through the independence of a new economic system formed on the base of a new social organization. This condition is a direct extension of the problem which Count de Laborde already posed in 1853: the Union of Art and Industry.2 A chimera vainly pursued ever since, up to and including the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which constituted the most glaring demonstration of the impossibility of such a union: because of the irreparable antagonisms between capital and labor.
As the consequences of ceaseless scientific discovery, mechanical inventions have stimulated the transformation of technical means; they have made it mandatory that we have constantly improving tools and an organization answerable to continually accumulating demands, on the universal as well as the national and international levels. . . . From this follow ever increasing outlays of working capital and ever more unreasonable demands—and logic decrees so. But because of this also the chasm widens between an art which is dependent on the means provided by industry and the artists themselves. Because of this heightened necessity to acquire industrial means, all those characteristics that the other arts already possessed to some degree—in order to create—the cinema has gathered together and elevated to their maximum power. This has led to a hastily derived conclusion which permitted the other arts to think they could separate themselves from the cinema, by reason of their conditions of existence.
The house will burn , down while the firemen play cards—upping the ante for the pot—naturally.
Now, everyone who even glancingly considers the present situation of the cinema, gripped as it is by commercialism, poses the same question. The only answer—which is logical, strikingly logical—makes them uneasy or frightens them in that it shocks their habitual ways, their education, or their class biases. For myself, I have often found evidence of this among my correspondents. They can be summarized like this:
“Monsieur, the cinema is less disinterested than the other arts. Perhaps it’s this lack of freedom which has affronted our intelligence up until now; undoubtedly that’s why we have refused to grant it our approval. Don’t the Ciné-Club de France, the Cahiers du mois, the Vieux-Colombier, and the Studio des Ursulines all act in such a way as to lance a wound that cannot be healed; don’t they mean to heal it in spite of that?”
Or like this: “Besides the fine notions which I share with you, Monsieur, I want to make you aware of the concerns that I believe constitute an essential part of the problem. Vis-à-vis the few sous needed by a writer or the few francs which satisfy a painter or sculptor, you have stressed the considerable outlay of capital which the cinegraphic work requires and which puts it totally at the mercy of money interests. Isn’t that an irreparable defect which disfigures this new art? To hope for the independence of a better social condition, you must concede, is to indulge in an optimism which is far too excessive and to believe in an awfully long-range payoff! For, to return to first principles, the cinéaste of tomorrow—like the scriptwriter, poet, architect, musician, photographer, painter, physician, industrialist—must also find the capital with which to sustain his activity. If it doesn’t come from a huge personal fortune, how will he safeguard his independence? And, if young and unknown, how will he find the financial means that will allow him to realize his ideas, to assert his mastery the first time around . . . ? I’m simply afraid that, in the current state of social relations, you cannot convince me, Monsieur, of this revelation (which I too wish for) of making an art come alive within the bounds of an industry
“All art is made essentially through the disinterestedness of the artist; he is solely preoccupied with his creation and, to make that creation complete, lets go of it for the benefit of all—thus in the past, when the arts required of the artist rather limited material means for working, the force of genius supplied everything; it overcame obstacles, created the means itself; and, when necessary, the artist gave up a little of his own blood. But we now find that the arts—where we are discovering equivalences and facile comparisons—are, theoretically, opposed to the cinema in practice. They say that especially in the case of Music and Radio. They play freely on words (what else do you expect) and say arts and Art. They confuse ends and means. So that art proper is not only a new material such as aluminum or rubber but “the consciousness of man which has come into the world with man and which is still taking shape.”
Certainly, in the current social conditions, the cinegraphic work is totally at the mercy of money interests. But this acknowledgment calls for a line of reasoning which leads to the question of all or nothing. In order for the cinema to realize its potential, it has to be freed from the domination of capital. What will do that? The system of production of a socialist economy. And since this socialist economy is only possible through revolutionary means, we await the Revolution—or prepare ourselves for it, according to the degree of our courage. We cannot go against that. It’s a mathematical springboard. We will not avoid the perilous triple somersault in space between two drum rolls. It’s only a question of landing on one’s feet and setting out again straight ahead. . . .
Conceived well ahead of the time over which it will rule, along with other forms of expression known or yet unknown, the cinema, the firstborn of the cinematic arts, can only suffer severely, and more so than all other organisms of production, from the crisis of the social economy which has become impotent and obsolete because of recent events and which already has outlived its usefulness. It’s only a question of time and more painful suffering for eyes to be opened. Everything in the present holds it up to the light and condemns it, as we have seen. But time is not wasting and knows what to do in this waiting. The heroism of true cinéastes—already there are several in the world—now assures the cinema of its theoretical and practical preparation. This comes thanks to improving technical means and fragmentary accomplishments that have succeeded in spite of and sometimes in opposition to business partners, stars and their hangers on, producers, distributors, and exhibitors. Here, too, exceptions prove the rule. So let’s support the cinéastes for their cunning and their courage in holding out and fighting on, against the French film serial, the American trust, and the corrupt press consortia. They are gradually perfecting an instrument that will soon be ready for great tasks.
The cinema then isn’t disfigured with an irreparable defect. It isn’t marked by an excessive optimism. And if the payoff, to which the correspondent I cited earlier alluded, is more or less a long way off, is that any reason to stop working with all our effort? Then—and only then—will the cinéaste have no need of a personal fortune. Spiritual assets will have a value that material assets have not known. The community will guarantee the artist his independence because that will be in the interest of the community. To each according to his needs.3
1 Quoted from René Clair, “Cinéma pur et cinéma commercial,” Les Cahiers du mois 16— 17 (1925).
2 Marquis Léon de Laborde (1807–1869) was a French archaeologist who explored Asia Minor and the Nile Valley. Earlier in this essay, Moussinac quoted from his famous paper extolling the “applied arts,” which was published in conjunction with the 1855 International Exposition in London.
3 Part of this essay also appeared as “Le Cinéma sera!” in Cinêgraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 3–4.
From “Eisenstein,” Le Cinema soviétique (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue française, 1928), reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1967), 201–6.
Of all the arts, the most important for Russia, it seems to me, is that of the cinema. —Lenin
WE KNOW that Eisenstein [1898–1948] came out of the theater; but at 23, when he was training with the greatest man of the theater today—that is, Meyerhold1—he barely had time to begin to define the spirit of an art and almost no time to assimilate its methods. We understand that he experienced his revelation of the cinema while attending a screening of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance. If the fact is questionable—and I don’t think it is-—it remains a distinct possibility. Indeed, the films of Eisenstein and those of the master of the American cinema share a certain number of characteristics in common. Specifically, the best qualities of the author of Broken Blossoms reappear in him, but with the addition of that power and lyricism which are often lacking in Griffith and which have appeared only here and there in the films of Thomas Ince, in the heroic era of the Triangle Company, and in certain images tossed up in the cinematic disorder of Abel Gance.
Personal discipline and a passion for the truth. That sometimes results in a certain brutal realism and a cruelty (which immediately recalls that of Dostoevsky), an inspiration of rare amplitude, a poetry of collective energy, an emotion springing directly out of the mind and spirit of men, a timeless rhythm of great forms of expression, which every age creates in its own image and to the scale of its intentions. Griffith raises the commonplace to the level of tragedy by approaching it singularly through its individual, psychological aspect. Eisenstein raises the commonplace to the level of epic by envisioning it through its social and collective aspect. Two civilizations. And we already know which of the two is of more consequence.
Eisenstein, like Griffith, is not afraid of certain excesses. He doesn’t hesitate to represent reality at its most horrible because he is of a younger generation that feeds on reality and digests it, something the older generations are incapable of doing, condemned as they are to remain stubborn until death in their ignorance of and their disgust for life and its rhythms—an ignorance and disgust which is their only (provisional) guarantee of security. Eisenstein, like Griffith, uses simple, timeless contrasts, as in the struggle between the beautiful and the ugly, the past and the present, truth and error, which are used in the beginnings of every art so as to exalt the masses, contrasts which naturally affect the choice of the film’s cadence. Eisenstein, like Griffith, pushes his concern for detail almost to the extreme, which sometimes results in minutiae; but this is less embarrassing with him because of the rhythmic power which carries everything along. On the other hand, his concern for composition tends much less toward the perfection of the ensemble than toward a rigorous unity: hence the radiant virtue of his works, so that each marks a more complete culmination of his system, a more vigorous expression of his personality: Strike [1925], Battleship Potemkin [1925–1926], October [1928], The General Line [1929].
If one can note that he resembles Griffith in certain ways, much as Gance resembles him, Eisenstein actually far surpasses his master, through a greater breadth, a healthier and fuller constitution, a more sophisticated level of thinking, a sense of inspiration and desire that strains toward the purest destiny of the cinema and refuses to tire. Unlike the best cinéastes in France, Germany, and America, whose period evocations of a historical reality long dead or whose individualistic, psychological dramas have now been overtaken by the living reality of today, by the world social drama, the domain of Eisenstein is collective pathos. His personality sets him free; for he knows that the new mode of expression he is employing, and which he commands with assurance, comes with the sense of opportunity of all discoveries, so as to express the times when universality and grandeur are no longer frightening, so as to transfigure a marvelous new human phenomenon above and beyond the characters which he exalts: the communist revolution.
Eisenstein uses a technique at once learned and simple, according to the material means he has at his disposal: learning is forgotten in the vigor of expression. He works with some misgivings because he doesn’t have an absolute confidence in his means and because he proceeds by choice or, rather, by successive eliminations in the work of composition. He doesn’t go for a strikingly elaborate effect but for as many effects as possible, in order to allow for chance to operate. In other words, a romanticism rather than a scientific spirit informs certain elements of his work. Transition.
He has been strongly influenced by the theories and example of Vertov,2 in the sense that in every part of his films he tries to make us forget the performances of the actors and the artificial mise-en-scene in black and white studios, so as to get as close as possible to the “newsreel” document, to images caught on the run and interpreted solely by the cinematographic lens and camera. From this comes the variety of shooting angles that he uses and the alternations in juxtaposed or successive shots which give so much life to certain sequences of images. Thus does he rarely show us the overall view of an ensemble [establishing shot], preferring to suggest the ensemble, as if mechanically, through the presentation of the most characteristic details—for instance, the revolt on the ship or the action of clearing the deck or the Odessa massacres in Battleship Potemkin.
Eisenstein never accentuates the performance of crowds to the point of making us forget the personality of certain actors, which is the heart of real cinema. In the montage, Eisenstein endeavors to spread out the oppositions of his effects and to reinforce the expression of a shot not only through the careful determination of its durational value but particularly through the maximum intensity of its expressive quality, due largely to deciding on the exact place it has to occupy in the film.
HE LOVES to work in a rich, abundant medium, which is why he rarely economizes on filmstock. And that’s not because Pudovkin’s way3 is not his way of doing things but because he thinks more advantageously in practice: once the best of his effort and knowledge has been brought to bear on the composition of a shot, he takes chances—that is, he shoots the same shot several times, each time applying different methods of filming. It bears repeating that Eisenstein, as I have already alluded, trusts the lens more than his own eye, the mechanism of the camera more than his artistic system. Jean Epstein once said: the surreal of the cinema is everywhere. The cineaste of October thinks it is there to be provoked. As long as its placement is timely and explicit enough.
We should note that Gance uses a rather similar straightforward method. With this difference—that Eisenstein constantly dominates his work, that he carefully curtails in advance the quantity of cinematographic material which he will have to eliminate, a quantity which he continually has in mind during the course of shooting; and, therefore, he does not risk, as Gance does, imprisoning himself because he has too much freedom and impoverishing himself because he has a surfeit of riches.
If, in Eisenstein’s films, there still occasionally are some emphases on performances or several fragments of rhythm which clash in an ensemble of inspiration that’s otherwise magnificent, it’s because the cinéaste remains unconsciously under the influence of cinematographic compositions in which Griffith sought to achieve a certain style (in the acting: Lilian Gish’s smile in Broken Blossoms, for example) and of otherwise remarkable German films in which either the impact of the theater survives too obviously or else the effort at “artiness” is too perceptible.
In the fragments of October which I have been able to see, those kinds of failings did not occur. Eisenstein has carefully eliminated them in his montage, for I think one could still find a certain number of them in the “rejected” negative. October thus constitutes a flow of images filmed with an astonishing mastery, a degree of plasticity carried to the maximum point of expression and richness, a precise form of dynamism, a kind of lyrical epic.
1 V. S. Meyerhold (1874–1940) was a celebrated and controversial theater director, before as well as after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1921–1922, Eisenstein attended the State Advanced Directorial Workshop that was supervised by Meyerhold.
2 Dziga Vertov (1895–1954) was a major film theorist and documentary filmmaker who worked separately from Eisenstein and the other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s. He wrote, directed, and edited a good number of short documentaries and newsreels, including the Kino-Pravda series (1922–1925), and then did several feature-length documentaries—Kino-Eye (1924), One Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Year (1928), and Man with a Movie Camera (1929). On 23 July 1929, Vertov presented a lecture and screened Kino-Eye at Studio 28 in Paris.
3 Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) was a student of Lev Kuleshov’s workshop, an offshoot of the Moscow State Film Institute. His major silent films included Chess Fever (1925), Mechanics of the Brain (1926), Mother (1926), The End of Saint Petersburg (1927), and Storm over Asia (1928). His book entitled Film Technique (1926) seems to have become familiar to French filmmakers and critics in the early 1930s.
From “La Question du film dit d’ ‘avant-garde’,” Le Cinéma soviétique (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue française, 1928), reprinted in Moussinac, L’Age ingrat du cinéma (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1967), 218–20.
BECAUSE all film research in the USSR currently is directed toward increasing the social significance of the cinema, one doesn’t find any of those experimental films which, according to general opinion, represent the international avant-garde cinema. A “so-called” avant-garde. For it is really an artificial, arbitrary grouping, following close on the heels of any old theory that comes along, and contradictory theories at that. “Pure cinema,” as they say in Paris and Berlin, has interested the Russian cinéastes only in so far as it has been responsive to the needs of the human spirit or heart. The “abstract film” (Ruttman, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Chomette) is merely a laboratory experiment, useful of course, but contrary to the real destiny of the cinema, since it can only be useful to a small number of initiates and experts. That is why the Russian cinéastes are only enthusiastic about such works as professionals, in the laboratory, and see no point in displaying them in public to convince themselves that they are struggling against government prejudices, the ignorance of the masses, or universal commercial practices. They know full well that the cinematic poem, in which the image appeals to the eye just as sound appeals to the ear in symphonic poems, requires a level of visual education that will be reached quite naturally once the cinema has established the range and spectrum of its diffusion with more certainty.
The practical necessities just now closely correspond to the artistic necessities of this new mode of expression—and its possibilities beckon at every rung of the ladder. Life, once more, is on the ascent. Art is reaching beyond the decadent, superficial, and conventionally deluxe character of [avant-garde] cinema—or esoterism—in order to satisfy the moral and intellectual needs of the masses. In the most inspired works, it is achieving real character and power. The rest inevitably is diminutive and vulgarized. Conceived and nourished by the Revolution, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Ver-tov, and several others among their comrades are not mistaken in what they are doing. . . .
From “Les Images de ciel,” Cinéa-Ciné-pour-tous 107 (15 April 1928), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 189–90.
CHANGE is vital for the artist, it’s assumed, and he cannot be reproached for changing his aesthetic beliefs from time to time; but now we hear it professed that either the cinema hasn’t made any progress since UArroseur arrosé [1895] or else the American western has remained the purest achievement of our art. If it is true that a paradox is capable of animating the human spirit, that paradox still has in its elegance to contain an aspect of truth. Otherwise, it’s a joke.
The occasion of Jean Tedesco’s screening of La Belle Nivernaise [1924] at the Vieux-Colombier the other day surprised me and compelled me to recognize the actual progress that has occurred in the cinema. This progress— to give it the relative meaning ordinarily attributed to a variable whose value is absolute—can be figured arithmetically and summed up like this: the time it takes an ordinary spectator to read a cinematic image has decreased in five years by 30 percent. Not one older film can be screened without giving an impression of slowness and attenuated rhythm. And this is not a matter of hasty generalization based on the technique they call “rapid montage”—which, parenthetically, is much abused nowadays—since such foreshortening is equally and regularly required of each and every shot, each and every intertitle.
I see here precise evidence of an evolution. Each image has a surface value and another deeper value. On the surface, we read a tableau: the frame of a decor, the fold of a costume, the allure of a gesture, the harmony of lighting. Here art is plastic. On account of this, we edit no matter what ensemble shot to a minimum of four meters in order that the spectator has the time to see everything. In the depths, if there are depths, the understanding of an image is nearly immediate. Only the distillate of the plastic ensemble acts on us, or rather the subject of the image itself, the situation of that subject in relation to other subjects contextually, in relation to the overall idea of the film. The image is a sign, complex and precise, like that of the Chinese alphabet. To allow time to admire the sign is to distract the spectator from the meaning of the text and turn his interest to its typography. Dramaturgy is one thing; calligraphy is another, and much subordinate. . . .
Cathedrals are constructed of stones and sky. The best films are constructed of photographs and sky. I call the sky of an image its moral discharge, which is why it is so desired. One has to limit the action of the sign around this discharge and interrupt it or else it distracts from the thought and feeling [of the film] and diverts attention to itself. Pleasure in plasticity is a means, never an end. Once having evoked a sequence of feelings, the images have only to channel their semispontaneous charge just as cathedral spires conduct thought into the heavens. The film itself is a melody for which only the accompaniment is written on the filmstock, but written in such a way that the melody cannot fail but be amplified within each spectator.
Translated by Tom Milne in Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), 35–36. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Les Approches de la vérité,” Photo-Ciné (15 November-15 December 1928), reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 191–93.
ONE WINDY DAY, over the farthermost tip of the Breton islands, I saw a couple of carrier pigeons flying in from the ocean. In two great sweeps, the birds recognized the island, land! The erratic beating of their wings revealed their fatigue. They disappeared to the east. Seafarers who constantly find themselves adrift in their calculations contemplate these aerial navigators with a religious awe.
I have watched the artist Spat at work for long periods. Like the birds, the tip of his pencil is magnetized. Like their flight, its stroke is unerringly aimed at a single goal. Spat’s pencil sets out and arrives; its route is the drawing. But neither Spat nor the pigeon, I think, knows during the journey precisely where he is going and how; what they know is that they have the ability to get there.
The path of a film is like the bird’s flight, like a drawing by Spat. It is undoubted but unknown. The pilot is sure of it; sure of neither the objective nor the ways to reach it; sure like an insect, like the bee feeding its queen, like the ant building its hill. This certainty is the film’s course. It is inexplicable and incommunicable. The pilot is alone, without hope of assistance. The best advice makes for the worst mistakes. Very late in its journey, the true nature of a film lets itself be glimpsed. This nature is so unexpected that each new film seems like a new person, spontaneously born.
Just as the wonders, big or small, presented to us by scientists are limited by the instrumentation, so dramatic conviction on the screen is limited by material or technical imperfections. Most films are an invention which the author tries to make seem real. The cinema’s progress has been in lending an idea the more and more precise semblance of an external fact. Lacking sound, color, and relief, the progress was halted. Meantime, I have tried to achieve dramatic illusion in reverse, as it were, by lending an existing reality the more general characteristics of fiction. I have tried to make that marvel appear, the truth.
Drawn by what I no longer know, I went to Brittany to seek the authentic elements for this film which became Finis terrae. It is not that a place can equally well be the homeland of love or a battle or yet a miracle. There is always a secret bond between the traveler and the place where he apparently elects to rest. Concarneau, Audierne, Douarnenez seem Italian. La Pointe du Raz is inhabited by a clan of beggers. Sein has lost its most beautiful girls to the bars of Brest. And it looks very much as though Andre Savignon1 saw Ouessant only by way of field glasses and his own eloquence. I returned home stunned, like a magician left empty-handed for the first time, wanting to tell no one.
There is, however, a mystery to this Far West. By what command do a thousand men live from birth to death on an islet less than half a kilometer square, without water unless it rains, without cultivation, at the mercy of perpetual storms in winter? What is this weighty ban that prevents them from joining the mainland civilization? Why do they prefer the risk of famine to a few hours’ crossing by sea? The men are sailors or fishermen; but the women are afraid of the sea and take sick as soon as they step on board a boat. One woman, in twenty-eight years of marriage, had slept with her sailor husband only seven months in all; she kept up the house on the island and raised two children for a destiny exactly like that of their father. Another, having never been on the mainland, didn’t know what kind of animals to expect there. When she saw a horse on a post card, she said, “It’s a big pig.” The islanders of Sein and Ouessant also look very unlike the mainland Bretons. They are of a type suggesting the Orient. They do not readily marry except among themselves. One imagines some very old colonies of seafarers, coming from whence?
So I hadn’t looked properly; it was not that there was nothing to see. Warily, I took a seven-eyed camera with me on the second trip. My perseverance was rewarded by the discovery, behind the cloud of seaweed smoke, of the two islands Bannec and Balenec and their cordial colony of algae fishers, the “harvesters of the sea.” In this place and people is resumed the mystery of men dedicated to land that is but rock, to a sea which is but foam, to a hard and perilous trade, thus bowing to some high command.
An irresistible persuasive power erupts from the moving picture when it has the quality of sincerity. Images of an object playing its own role in a drama always bring conviction. An object does not lie. Inevitably, on the other hand, the craft of acting is all too often a school for lies. Sincerity in expression and natural gestures had to be—and still are—avoided, distorted, drawn out, “held,” stylized, because they were too fast, too illegible at normal speeds of shooting and projection; only filming at 30 or 40 frames per second can do away with this basically untruthful quality in an actor’s performance.
Makeup also seriously endangers the truth of an expression. See only one film shot with the cast using no makeup, and it is impossible not to smile while observing the extraordinary distortion of a face, the paralysis of its most subtle and mobile features beneath a mask of paint.
No decor and no costume will have the look, the hang of the real thing. No pseudo-professional will have the marvelously technical gestures of the seaman or fisherman. A tender smile, an angry cry are as difficult to imitate as a sky at dawn or a stormy sea.
Finis terrae endeavors to be psychological “documentary,” the reproduction of a brief drama comprising events which really happened, of authentic men and things. Leaving the Ouessant archipelago, I felt I was taking with me not a film but a fact. And that once this fact had been transported to Paris, something of the material and spiritual reality of the island life would henceforth be missing. An occult business.
1 André Savignon (1878–1947) wrote picturesque essays and travel books on the seafaring peoples of France and elsewhere.
Translated by Claudia Gorbman from “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), 320–28.
There will always be French films, because there will always be little old ladies in France who will want to make movies.—The director of a large Paris cinema
If we could only all agree on it, everybody from the usherette to the producer would make a profit.—-Jean Sapène, director, Cinéromans—F Urns de France
It is highly improbable that the cinema will succeed in developing as an art, given its present economic conditions.—Jacques Feyder
JEAN TEDESCO has said that overspecialization is not the solution. Intelligent specialization, at best, will preserve what is essential in our cinema—and possibly more, particularly if a sufficient number of specialized movie house owners representing substantial material interests, not content merely with forming a living classic repertory, can organize against the powerful film producers and produce films themselves. They could make films of various lengths, original in theme and directorial style. The films could pay for themselves on in-house screens and turn a profit from foreign sales since today there are similar movie houses in all the principal cities of the world. A cooperative system would be the only road to this kind of production.
THE CINÉ-CLUBS laid the groundwork for the development of the avant-garde cinema, but now it appears that they have accomplished that goal. We can only surmise that the ciné-clubs will simply have to change their focus of activities. Historically, clubs like CASA (Club des Amis du Septième Art) and the Ciné-Club of France have played a role of considerable importance. We only need remember the revelations they inspired, and the struggle they led against certain forms of film conception and execution.
It was this need to respond to the public’s curiosity and tastes that led to the organizing of film screenings at the “Salon d’Automne” by Canudo and myself in 1921, film presentations prepared by Louis Delluc at the Colisée (Robert Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, Marcel L’Herbier’s 1922 Prométhée banquier), private screenings by CASA, and then the French Cinema Club, and finally the Ciné-Club de France, at the Cinema Exhibition at the Musée Galleria with lectures and films projections (1924).
The distinterested propaganda published by the growing number of cine-clubs (Film-Club, Amis du Ciema, Club de l’Ecran, Samedis du Cinema, Tribune Libre, etc.) is being counterattacked, however, by the commercial setup of the small specialized movie houses themselves. This is logical, of course. The viewing public today is too large for things to be otherwise. Only organizations like Les Amis de Spartacus, which have a specific critical and polemical focus, could see any significant development on the international film scene.1
FILM TECHNIQUE has developed admirably, contributing enormously to the style of the best films on our screens. Elsewhere I have explained how the principles of technique need to be understood.2 Since then, still more discoveries have improved many once-rudimentary techniques of filmic expression. Recent Americana films are marvels of a technique which is effective but not affected or obvious (Underworld, A Girl in Every Port, Solitude, The Crowd).3
Several causes for concern—in addition to problems raised by the talking film and color—have arisen: namely, problems of projection and of the limits of the screen.
When Gance invented his three-screen system for Napoleon, I pointed out the logical direction for investigations beyond today’s conventional rectangular screen (a format corresponding to the shape of the celluloid film frame). Roger Charpentier, in a study that takes as a scientific point of departure the human eye and its needs, writes in a similar vein that “the cinema has not found its niche,” and that “the retina is not physiologically disposed to appreciate a white rectangle.” In Monde (8 November 1928) he remarked: “It seems that the organ (screen) has to adapt to the function (vision). . . . It is necessary to aim toward an optical fresco (retina to be occupied totally, visual field to be decorated). . . . The screen must be established in the form of a visual field: this form can be compared to a horizontal ellipse. . . . The movie theater can be divided into two parts, the spectator side and the screen side. On the spectator side the theater is narrow so that those in the center and on the side all keep basically the same axis of vision. . . . On the screen side the theater has an elliptical section (horizontal ellipse). The general shape is a paraboloid, in which the screen would occupy the region of the focus. . . . In these conditions, the section of the spectator’s visual cone, instead of being haphazard (e.g., rectangular) will approximate the physiological visual field. . . .”
THERE IS another side of the technological problem, namely decoupage and editing. I believe I was among the first to call attention to this in an article that has since become a chapter of Naissance du cinema. Even its title, “Rhythm or Death,” suggests the importance I already attributed to these tasks of preparation and completion.
The USSR and USA aside, it doesn’t look as if anyone—especially in France—has tried in a methodical way to address this difficult problem of film construction. Not even the essays of the most daring young cineastes show the slightest concern about it. Chance and intuition seem to take precedence over principle and system. Today’s filmmakers write their screenplays in haste; the most important thing for them is the filming, after which they simply grope along. As a result, most French films we see demonstrate a notable lack of movement.
The Americans have understood the pressing need to resolve the difficulty. They have devised a practical solution in creating special departments where professionals, specially trained in all the technical resources and new processes, are on hand to work out a good decoupage of the chosen subject, a decoupage reflecting these rich and varied technical resources. These specialists are called continuity writers.
The Russians, to avoid the standardizing character of this solution and to safeguard the artist’s personality as much as possible, have created special collaborators who work on the decoupage much more closely in tandem with the director and screenwriter. In Moscow and Leningrad, all young filmmakers serve a long apprenticeship on decoupage and editing, and they study theory as well.
Anyone taking the time to study Pudovkin’s own Mother can see what minute and exacting preparation went into it. Having had many opportunities to see this film, I have analyzed certain segments: it certainly contains typical examples of decoupage and editing which have been widely practiced by everyone from novices to “big names” in filmmaking. I have found the same thing in Dupont’s Variety and Paul Fejos’s Solitude. But one can also easily show Pudovkin’s scientific rigor as opposed to those examples so typical of the “trade.” Naturally, we should also keep in mind works like Carl Dreyer’s La Passion deJeanne d’Arc in its original version, to cite a more recent European film, and all the exemplary films of Dziga Vertov, yet unknown in France.
Abel Gance is doubtless the first who used the system of cinematic “measurements” in La Roue. As to the demands of “continuity”—as instinctively understood by the Americans, and which artists like Ince, Griffith, Fred Niblo, and De Mille remarkably resolved in their best films— Lev Kuleshov, who made Dura Lex, was writing theoretical essays on continuity before anyone else, as early as 1919 in Moscow.4
Some laws of decoupage are immutable, like the laws of all rhythmic compositions. One just has to discover them. Each image is closely linked to the one before and the one after, and to the whole film, by mathematical relationships; men of the cinema have not yet realized the importance of investigating and calculating these mathematical relationships. They are generally more concerned with enriching the figurative expression of the image than with film’s rhythmic expression.
For a film is first of all a construction.
CERTAIN essential questions do not seem to cause concern to those who are responsible, nor to those who are leading the cinema toward its destiny.
Elsewhere (in Cinema: Social Expression) I have discussed how people too often think that film’s material conditions of existence are immutable. But long-awaited, necessary, inevitable discoveries are upon us. In businesses in America there already exist television machines. Have the consequences of this discovery—which will necessarily entail, before long, the organizing of radiocinematography—been evaluated? If at present one person can participate in events with others from a distance, this means we will soon be able to receive at home—with music—any film we might want to choose from among the offerings of various broadcasting stations in the world.
Clearly these discoveries, after the inevitable crises of transition, will necessitate a reorganization of national and international economics: what will be needed is an order, a method, and an initial centralization which the current system (except in the USSR) does not have.
“Our imagination must come to the aid of our impatience. Cataclysms, painful and long-awaited deliveries should neither astonish nor frighten us because of the shocks and reverberations they announced to humanity. The cinema is being born. It arrives at the end of an era to which it does not belong, as we have seen, to herald the hidden impulses of an era which will be born along with it. It is suffering from the care of an individualism which is dying out. It is developing amid a system of hostile and indifferent forces which suffocate it even as they cradle it. . . .”
The tool, created, is perfecting itself by virtue of science serving economics—and, most often, against the Spirit.
Other than technique, in filmmaking, everything must be destroyed—and everything remains to be created.
1 There are actually many such groups abroad. Let us mention: Berlin (Heinrich Mann Organization), Amsterdam (Film Liga), London (Film Society), Brussels (Film Club), Ostende (Cinema Club), Moscow (Friends of the Cinema and Revolutionary Cinematographic Association), New York (Film Arts Guild). Le Club français du cinema premiered in France: Abel Gance’s La Roue, Jean Epstein’s Coeur Fidèle, André Obey and Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet, Louis Delluc’s La Femme de nulle part, Lulu-Pick’s Sylvester, Premier Amour with Charles Ray, Sanne’s Polikuchka, and others. Le Ciné-Club de France then presented: J. Brunhius’s Charles XII, Stiller’s The Legend of G osta Berling, Jacques Feyder’s L’Image, Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, André Gide and Marc Allégret’s Le Voyage au Congo, Marcel L’Herbier’s Résurrection, Léon Poirier’s La Brière, René Clair’s Le Voyage imaginaire, Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique, and so on. Les Amis du Spartacus (founded April 1928 and banned in October of the same year) premiered for the public: Pudovkin’s Mother and The End of Saint Petersburg, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October. Among their revivals were Stiller’s Artie’s Treasure, Flaherty’s Moana, and Louis Delluc’s Fièvre.— Au.
Moussinac was the leader of each of these three ciné-clubs. That he helped Canudo organize the CASA screenings at the Salon d’Automne cannot be confirmed.
2 See Naissance du cinéma, 36ff.—Au.
3 The references are to Joseph von Sternberg’s Underworld’(1927), Howard Hawks’ A Girl in Every Port (1928), Paul Fejos’s Solitude (1928), and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928).
4 Lev Kuleshov began writing on the cinema in 1917, but his principal essays appeared between 1922 and 1929. See the “Bibliography” in Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 211— 15.
Translated by Paul Hammond in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 36–38. Reprinted by permission. The original French text first appeared as “Cinéma d’avant-garde” in Documents 7 (December 1929), 385–87, reprinted in Desnos, Cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). © Editions Gallimard 1966.
THANKS TO the persistent influence of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes of 1890, an influence to which we owe, among others, the interventions of Monsieur Jean Cocteau, a mistaken kind of thinking has created much inauspicious confusion in the cinema.
An exaggerated respect for art and a mystique of expression has led a whole group of producers, actors, and spectators to the creation of a so-called avant-garde cinema, remarkable for the rapidity with which its productions become obsolete, for its absence of human emotion, and for the risks it obliges all cinema to run.
Don’t get me wrong. When René Clair and Picabia made Entr’acte, Man Ray L’Etoile de mer,1 and Buñuel his admirable Un Chien andalou, there was no thought of creating a work of art or a new aesthetic but only of obeying profound, original impulses, consequently necessitating a new form.
No, I am attacking here films like L’Inhumaine, 24 heures en 30 minutes, Warning Shadows,2 etc.
I will not harp too much on the ridiculousness of our actors. A comparison between the photographs of Bancroft and Jaque Catelain is enough to show the grotesqueness and vanity of the latter,3 who we may take to be the prototype of the avant-garde actor, just as Monsieur Marcel L’Herbier is the prototype of the director.
Technical processes not solicited by the action, conventional acting, and the pretence of expressing the arbitrary and complicated movements of the soul are the principal characteristics of this kind of cinema, which I prefer to call “hair in the soup cinema.”4
These works have had their apologists. It is enough, to be convinced of the incredible degree of error and artifice to which critics aspire, to read the article by M. Moussinac devoted to his brother-in-law’s film 24 heures en 30 minutes.5
Amphigory, hotchpotch, bloomer, brouhaha, and hurly-burly have a superb champion in this man who concludes by recommending to his working-class audience, who nonetheless will have too much taste to follow him, a pitiful imitation of the original films of Sauvage and Cavalcanti,6 to the detriment of an indisputably human, sound, and poetic work: I mean, of course, Un Chien andalou.
And not the least droll aspect of this confusion is the joining together here in a community of ideas of the eminent critic of L’Humanité and that penetrating Protestant analyst, Monsieur Jean Prévost of La Nouvelle Revue française.
In fact the avant-garde in cinema, as in literature and theater, is a fiction. Whosoever assumes to count himself among these timorous revolutionaries is simply playing the game of “if the cap fits, wear it.”
Fine disguises, but you don’t fool us.
All it would take to convince you of the imposture would be to project a moth-eaten film of yours before or after the admirable Wedding March by Stroheim, in whom we must salute a genius as authentic as Chaplin and equally as important where influence is concerned. Here is a totally human film in all its moving and tragic beauty. Stroheim, this is a story you have lived through! I have found the characters of Foolish Wives, Greed, Merry -Go-Round again. What pain have you borne so long? What pain so great you cannot stop yourself reliving it, from playing over and over again a terrible role you obviously assumed long ago?
But here we must return to our avant-garde.
Even though it only “discovered” Chaplin four or five years after the man in the street, our avant-garde has taken him to its heart. There’s Charlie Chaplin and no one else.
Well, no. I’ve liked and admired Chaplin for twelve years but I must say Stroheim moves me in a more direct way, in a way that appeals more to my temperament.
It’s precisely because Stroheim has the courage to show us love exactly as it is that he is today the most revolutionary and most human of directors.
And not just for his famous apple blossoms, ridiculed by every species of artist, every enlightened soul, which are precisely the kind that move us most profoundly and legitimately, since what really amorous person has not been open to apple blossom, to postcard romance, to the sentimental refrain?
Only candor is revolutionary. Insincerity and lying are characteristic of reaction. It’s this candor that enables us today to equate the real revolutionary films, Potemkin, The Gold Rush, The Wedding March, and Un Chien andalou, and to put in the shade L’Inhumaine, Paitarne n’est pas Paris, and La Chute de la Maison Usher, in which Epstein’s lack, or rather paralysis, of imagination is revealed. In fact there is no more avant-garde cinema than the French cinema in its entirety, whether it be the ciné-roman or the Nal-pas-Gance productions (poor Napoleon), Baroncelli, and all the rest. The question is, avant-garde of what?
Allow me to leave unwritten the forcible and final word that would easily answer this.
To appreciate these advanced souls to the full it would suffice to observe their attitude when sound film came along. (The talking picture is another story: we should know what it is before discussing it. Pardon me for ignoring it, not yet having seen real talking films.)
Nought but a cry of horror left those delicate lips.
They irrevocably condemned an invention just as artists at the beginning of the century had condemned the cinema lock, stock, and barrel. The same arguments were trotted out. The mediocrity of present productions was used to condemn future ones . . .
Meanwhile, outside of all artistic theorizing, in the darkness where Chaplin’s walk and Stroheim’s desperate kisses resonate, in the auspicious darkness of the picture palace, two young people, boy and girl, hold each other in their arms, while on the screen Betty Compson7 signals that she has something to say. And she will say it.
1 Here the author of these lines assumes a slightly modest air.—Au.
An unpublished Desnos poem provided the “scenario” or intertitles for Man Ray’s Etoile de mer (1928).
2 This German film is cited with due consideration, by virtue of the lamentable decadence of cinema on the other side of the Rhine.—Au.
3 George Bancroft (1882–195 6) was best known then as the star of von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) and The Docks of New York (1928). Jaque Catelain starred in the following late 1920s French films: L’Herbier’s Le Vertige (1926), Malikoff’s Panarne n’est pas Paris (1927), L’Herbier’s Le Diable au coeur (1927), Fescourt’s L’Occident (1928), and L’Herbier’s Nuits de prince (1929).
4 Venir comme des cheveux sur la soupe means “to be quite uncalled for or out of place.” I like the evocative power of Desnos’s words so have translated them literally.—TRANS.
5 A reference to Jean Lods (1903–1974) and one of the documentaries he made with Boris Kaufman in the late 1920s. By 1929, Desnos had been expelled from the Surrealist group and no longer felt compelled to support intellectuals who were members of the French Communist Party.
6 André Sauvage (1891–1975) was a major French documentary filmmaker whose films were often premiered at the Vieux-Colombier—for example, La Traverse du Crepon was included in Tedesco’s first program in November 1924. The Cavalcanti reference is probably to Rien que les heures (1926) and perhaps even En Rade (1927).
7 Betty Compson (1900–1943) starred opposite George Bancroft in The Docks of New York (1928).
From “Films de revoke,” La Revue du cinema 5(15 November 1929), 41–45.
APART FROM the films of Man Ray and Luis Buñuel,1 you could search An vain for any other films made in France which have real merit. The anguish that emanates from these films does not come, as is usual, from a well-constructed story or from an ingenious technique. Disdaining the superficial contagion of the anecdote or the image, instead they condemn the spectator to a far deeper sense of disorder. Again and again, everything is put in question. The familiar determinism which governs the ordinary succession of actions is unsettled—in that Man Ray and Buñuel create peculiar breaks in the narrative, each of which strangely never returns to what went before. And when, at the beginning of his first film, Emak Bakiaf Man Ray sets up a camera, it is not, as a documentary author would do, to provide a preface or render homage. Rather, suspicious of the only mechanism that he cannot avoid using, to the point of undermining his requisite technical means, he forces the inflexible camera and its impassive lens to mock and betray themselves by admitting that they are the source of crazy, unreal images.
A challenge, a constant challenge to all matters of necessity, to all the rules, even the most customary rules that habitual usage seems to have deprived of all force. In their deep-seated intolerance, the authors of these films reopen the old wounds we have been saddled with, and that is hardly the extent of what they are endeavoring to get away with.
As for language, which congeals everything, and which Man Ray’s in-tertitles divert from its usual course to become a storehouse of fantastic neologisms and puns which thumb their noses at the authorities, and which Buñuel places right next to disarming, poetic, improbable characters who exceed language’s competence—these four films scarcely seek to elude chastisement. Human faces which are stamped with character and thought, looks which we can read—Man Ray erases or disturbs them: over lowered eyelids he paints expressionless eyes. He dilutes body outlines by multiplying their contours. He conceals faces under nearly opaque lattices which lay over all the characters the same smooth, expressionless, indistinct mask. Buñuel exercises the same destructive comedy on the social conventions of clothing. On a Paris street, a cyclist wears a costume embellished with surprising emblems. The fall of bodies is rendered gently, ignoring the acceleration that physical laws recognize: the bicyclist falls to the pavement with a motion that seems to slow down as he approaches the earth. Similarly, in La Chateau du De, a woman swimming underwater combs her hair, does some juggling, and picks up a pair of barbells, all in comtempt of the most fundamental experiences of the least of us who have taken a plunge into fresh water.
Here it is no longer fresh water, experience, or matter. All the elements are dislocated, the natural kingdoms confused. Andalusians push up like flowers in the seashore sand; forms vacillate and blur and themselves engender vague geneses. Underarm hair is transformed into a sea urchin; flowers become starfish. In order to convey this universe in which the most disparate things are joined in mongrel combinations, new words also appear in the intertitles, generated from monstrous juxtapositions: Robert Desnos expresses his anguish and mystery at night by inventing eternebres, and Man Ray, following his diver, discovers a new universe which opens up through piscinéma3
Man Ray and Buñuel have each taken a position, each exercises his delight in dislocation and his desire for freedom, using the faculties with which he is most familiar. Man Ray, who is more sensitive to forms and less sensual, watches for the miracle of object movements and found images in the world, rather than for the internal movements of his body or nerves. And in his frenzy, he plays with the objects that he distorts and dislocates—or with dream landscapes and material metaphors, which are clipped off with cruel delight by dazzling skies or documentary cliches. Attentive to the boundaries of things, to the arbitrary limits by which the body is distinguished, saboteur of precise forms—he cannot describe a chateau without dispersing it into the air or without taking the geometrical lines so loved by modern architects and charging them with mystery.
It is on the borders of our body, there where our desires pour forth and where the world assaults us, that Buñuel, squared on his haunches, relying on this inner strength, seeks to bring to bear the vertiginous. Everything on which the body rests or halts, everything which limits that strange body—distance, time—is dislocated in the course of his film. Time retreats; a character threatens his own past image with a revolver; space is obliterated for a dying man so that the slow motion agony begins within the walls of a room and ends under the trees. Bodies dress or conceal themselves, undress or dress again, covering themselves with hair or insects, according to the desire that impels them or the death that threatens. And in order to defy even desire, the body suppresses its sensuality by prescribing a slobbering, impotent mask with sorrowful upturned eyes for the lover who caresses naked breasts and buttocks.
More intellectual than Man Ray, more taken with technique so as to avoid technique, or logic so as to defy it, more sensual, in Un Chien andalon, Buñuel’s shared desire for freedom rears up against the powers of the cinéastes, that is, one or another of their prisons. A freedom that seems all the more complete as it obliterates its limits, a freedom that is quickly achieved in that space of our fantasy where all laws slacken, but a freedom without vengeance, without real joy, without possession—in which a fecund exaltation appears neither in the rictus of Buñuel’s character nor under the opaque lattices which protect the guests of the Chateau du Dé from the world and themselves.
That kind of freedom exists in American films, which seem to make every concession to the world. The prisons have jailors. Corporations exhibit the presidents of their executive committees in morning jackets and top hats. Commercial problems are posed. Armies clash in battle. And for their central hero, it’s a question of success or rather, as they say in current parlance, a successful outcome. Such a hero is Buster Keaton. According to the films, his ambition is to marry the woman he loves, in spite of the business rivalry which separates their parents—or to be hired as a cameraman in the film company whose secretary he is courting . . .4 An unpretentious conformist, Buster Keaton accepts every kind of mechanism, whether natural or man-made. Heedlessness is wrapped around him: his awkwardness takes him places steadily and triumphantly up to the very end of the film. It sweeps away all his conscientious, capable rivals, whether malicious or well-intentioned.
Awkwardness triumphant and heedlessness rewarded—these mark a comic spirit and a sense of anarchy that, expressed in the framework of current activity, are all the more aggressive and demoralizing. But Buster Keaton goes further.
In the hopeless, hierarchical society in which two of his films unfold, Steamboat Bill Jr. and The Navigator, he is the cause of a disorder of nightmarish or hallucinatory proportions. However, he accepts everything: clergyman, war, businessmen. Ships and submarines operate according to the mechanical laws of levers. Savages are cannibalistic: and hatmakers make the most of their standard models on Buster Keaton’s head. Everything happens according to the rules of this best regulated of worlds. No laws are violated, nor are the laws of the universe: there is no rent in the concept of determinism. However, as one thing leads to another, without break or digression, in the normal working out of the plot, one of these films culminates in a nightmare on a deserted ocean liner, whose mooring ropes have been cut by conspirators; the other ends in a storm that carries off dwellings and separates things from the earth as well as from reason itself.
In order for hospital beds to take flight, for whole houses to lift off their foundations, and for a storm to carry off uprooted trees without ruffling the surface of the water, for the pitching of a deserted ocean liner, unmoored, lost at sea, to open and close all the cabin portal windows as one, causing a frightful panic, Buster Keaton does not need to be either revolutionary or arbitrary. The films of Man Ray and Bunuel, authoritative but in a void, claim to exercise a dictatorship of annihilation in their relations with the world. In the American films, the will to destruction seems to safeguard forms—all forms of thought, objects, and social relations—yet seeks to penetrate them in order to harrass or violate them. Efficacious as well as acerbic, it accepts the beaten paths and, secretly seeking to mock the rules, lures those forms into traps carefully camouflaged in an action or intrigue.
Action, we know what it means: intrigue, which creates no illusions. The tempests of the melodrama and the conspiracies of the theater mark those who use them with feebleness and second-rate status—and never give someone the impression that “he has arrived.” Yet there the passage from the real to the unreal occurs without rupture; and in the American films adventure, love, and the supernatural are all tangled up with the material, the social, and the rational—the better to defy them and best them on the grounds which are most familiar to them. The revenge of individuals in the very space of their sufferings.
Two images combine in an elementary diptych:
In the chateau swimming pool, which Man Ray was forced to take as the subject of his latest film, a woman in a bathing suit indulges in gratuitous gestures . . . plays of light and poses that the water distorts and attenuates.5
In deep sea water, enclosed in a diving suit, near the anchor of a ship, Buster Keaton lifts his arms in supplication. The desperate gesture of a man obliged by social reasons to descend to the sea bottom where he is threatened with asphyxiation, and still wins.
Two images that the mind can compare with one another, but in reality quite distinct and producing very different sensations.
It is unfortunate that the spirit, whether acting within or outside of the world, can secrete the same images. Connected or disconnected, the mechanism is the same. Every confusion is possible, dizziness and deception. For the boundary that separates world and spirit is transparent in this world where the spirit, in its moments of power, imposes its demands and causes its desire to triumph. On one side of this boundary, revolt can be fecund: on the other, it is merely witticism and harmless onanism.
ROBERT ARON (1898-?) was a writer and cinéphile who became one of the editors of La Revue du cinema. In the early 1930s, Aron, Armand Daudieu, and Alexandre Marc founded an intellectual circle and journal, Ordre nouveau (a forerunner of Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit), which attempted to mediate the political differences between the right and the left in France.
1 Man Ray: Emak Bakia (1927), L’Etoile de mer (1928), Le Mystère du Château du Dé (1929). Luis Bunuel: Un Chien andalou (1929).—Au.
2 Man Ray’s first film, Retour à la raison (1923) had not yet been screened publicly.
3 Eternèbres is made up of éterml [eternal] and tenèbres [darkness]. Piscinéma is made up of piscine [swimming pool] and cinéma.
4 The references are to Steamboat Bill Jr. (1927) and The Cameraman (1928).
5 Le Mystère du Château du Dé was financed by the Vicomte de Noailles as a birthday present for his wife.