Film and art Essay 2.docx

'Early avant garde films sought to turn cinema away from the narrative form it took in mainstream film studios to release the potential of cinema as a new form of art.' Discuss.

In the early twentieth century cinema there was no avant-garde; rather there were avant-gardes. From the narrative films of the French-Impressionist film-makers, the Soviet Kinoks, to the French Surrealists, a multiplicity of motives drove the avant-garde movements into new ways of expressing, subverting and rejecting narrative. I will hereby outline a brief history of early narrative cinema, discuss some of the reasons as to why cinema quickly assumed a narrative form and, with specific reference to the aforementioned movements, explore the reasons why avant-garde filmmakers sought new modes of expression through cinema.

The Kitchen Maid[footnoteRef:0] by Johannes Vermeer is the visual impression of an action. It infers the movement through time of the main character. We recognize the space in which she occupies as a home, from her attire we deduce she is a maid and from this we can assume her class, her quality of life and, to some extent, her past, from her childhood to the moment she began the action of pouring the milk into the bowl. The visual cues which establish our character and the inferred action combine to become a narrative picture, the action being the lynchpin of the tale. It suggests the moments that came before it and the moments which will follow; it is the visual incarnation of time, the substance of which any narrative is sculpted. We can see the effects of time in still life paintings to, but without action they stand as merely evidence of action[footnoteRef:1]; time passed rather than passing. [0: Vermeer, Johannes. 1657. The Kitchen Maid. Oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Netherlands. Rijksmuseum.] [1: Barthes, Roland. 1972. Critical Essays. 1st ed. Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press. pp. 107]

Of course time and movement are the main materials with which moving images are made of. Some of these, found inside of Thomas Edisons kinetoscope, were made for the sole purpose of displaying the technology capable of presenting moving pictures. Newark Athlete[footnoteRef:2] is reminiscent of the cold scientific detachment found in the photos of Muybridge. It is presented without context and the lighting isolates the figure from the background so that the movements become abstracted from time and place. No narrative exists in the film because there are no related events taking place. The first film by the Lumire Brothers however delivered the same kind of micro-narrative that exists in The Kitchen Maid. La Sortie des usines Lumire Lyon[footnoteRef:3] thought by many to be the earliest film (although is pre-dated seven years previous by Louis Le Princes Roundhay Garden Scene[footnoteRef:4]) implies narrative by the simple fact of it presenting action embedded in context. It appears like the fragment of a narrative, the rest of which the audience themselves infer: the workers, whom we know by attire, were working in the factory, are now leaving the factory and, we assume, will return home. There seems to be no agenda by Louis Lumire to present us with a narrative as the films would have not have been shown separately but as if each film were a different scene, the desired effect being to present engaging moving images. When we isolate the films however, we are drawn into their diegesis and the films assume a dramatic quality. Narrative is not shoehorned in but seems to simply happen. [2: Newark Athlete. 1891. Film. William Kennedy Dickson.] [3: La Sortie Des Usines Lumire Lyon. 1894. Film. Louis Lumire.] [4: Roundhay Garden Scene. 1888. Film. Louis Le Prince.]

Tom Gunning in his essay The Cinema of Attractions[footnoteRef:5] refers to the Lumiere style of filmmaking, which was of a realist illusion of motion[footnoteRef:6] as the cinema of attractions. He rightly makes the distinction between this type of cinema and narrative cinema, like that of D. W Griffiths, which I would like to redefine in the following notion; the former found narratives for the sake of images, the latter found images for the sake of narratives. It is by this shift in priority, that ushers in as the phantasmagoric effect wears out, that the cinema finds itself in a narrative rut by nineteen-twenty. Conventions quickly set as filmmakers scramble to repeat the last popular narrative film, harnessing the illusory aspects of the cinema to further plot and characterization With the grand sweep that narrative cinema had made throughout the world the cinema of attractions seemed to be all but lost but as Tom Gunning writes, it [...] rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films[footnoteRef:7]. [5: Gunning, Tom. 1991. Early Cinema. 1st ed. New York: City University of New York.] [6: Gunning, Tom. 1991. Early Cinema. 1st ed. New York: City University of New York. pp.57] [7: Gunning, Tom. 1991. Early Cinema. 1st ed. New York: City University of New York. pp.57]

In 1919, in a written response to the journalist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Fernand Leger wrote: Modern life is full of materials for us: it is a question of learning how to make use of it.[footnoteRef:8] His art at the time was Cubist, his pictures were loud and bold, made up of figures becoming mechanized. There was a sense of rushing movement and noise from his paintings, a reflection of the fast-motion noisy lifestyle that seemed new to those living in modernity, that seemed to be battling against the restrictions of the canvas. So, in 1923, Leger made a film. Ballet Mcanique[footnoteRef:9] is a film comprised of machines pumping and swinging in ceaseless motion devoid of human interaction. At certain points human movement and mechanical movement become to resemble each other, before the film jumps to another illusory assault. There is no narrative in Ballet Mcanique, nor context or characters, because modernity seemed to have no narrative. It was a time of new confusing machinery, speed and mass production. Abstract images now dominated the cityscapes in the form of absurd advertising, which would be glimpsed from the inside a speeding train, tram or car. Tom Singer summarized this rapid change in his essay Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism[footnoteRef:10] by writing The sudden increase in urban population [...], the escalation of commercial activity, the proliferation of signs, and the new density and complexity of street traffic [...] made the city a much more crowded, chaotic, and stimulating environment than it had ever been in the past.[footnoteRef:11] The city became fragmented, the atmosphere heavy with a sense of senselessness. [8: Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry. 1950. 'Fernand Lger'. The Burlington Magazine. pp.67] [9: Ballet Mcanique. 1923. Film. Fernand Lger.] [10: Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama And Modernity. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press.] [11: Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama And Modernity. 1st ed. New York: Columbia University Press. pp.73]

Narrative films seemed to struggle with communicating the sensation of chaos that was felt during this time but Leger had found a way to deliver a shorthand to it. It was in lieu of the cinema of attractions but the sensations in which the Lumieres were trying to instill, similar to that of magicians or phantasmagorias, were replaced with horror and shock. Leger wanted to use the sensory qualities this type of cinema to comment on modernity. By the use of repetition in the film what would be an action (for example the woman carrying grain up a set of stairs), similar to the actions the Lumieres would film, begins to disturb as the intent of the action loses all meaning and evolves into pure motion, pure sensation. When thinking about Leger in reference to the earliest filmmakers the work seems to resemble the early Thomas Edison pictures more so than the Lumieres. The accidentally eerie quality of Newark Athlete returns in a refined form in Ballet Mcanique, by its sheer detachment from diegetic context which transforms action into pure motion. The warmth of La Sortie des usines Lumire Lyon is found in neither film, just as the warmth in a Vermeer is not found in a Muybridge. We can then distinguish this type of cinema from the cinema of attraction because its sensory qualities are directed beyond the need to attract. I would categorize this type of filmmaking as the cinema of sensation.

Narrative in avant-garde films was not always rejected though. The french surrealists with films such as Un Chien andalou[footnoteRef:12] used conventional hollywood techniques to articulate the abstract narratives typical of dreams. Whereas the point of Ballet Mcanique is the sensations it instills, the meaning of Lage Dor or Un Chien andalou is lucid. The use of the familiar language of narrative cinema gives the audience a cue to try and work out the films in the same terms as conventional narrative cinema, and results in them projecting their own unconscious agenda onto it. Its meaning becomes reflective of whoever is contemplating it. These conventions were not used ironically, but were played with as just another material. Michael Richardson in his essay Luis Bunuel and the Snares of Desire[footnoteRef:13] perceptively notes the similarities between the Bunuel films and their mainstream contemporaries: [...] both of Bunuel and Dalis films reveal a continuity of intention with Keaton, Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and so on, in their plays with narrative logic and lack of respect for social codes and correct behaviour[footnoteRef:14] and goes on to note how the surrealists were ambivalent with the reception accorded to the film [Un Chien andalou], as seen as part of the avant-garde they despised[footnoteRef:15]. In keeping with their dadaist heritage the surrealists rejected the notion of high and low-art, and often would assimilate populist, mainstream elements into their works, just as they did with cinema. [12: Un Chien Andalou. 1929. Film. Luis Buuel.] [13: Richardson, Michael. 2006. Surrealism And Cinema. 1st ed. Oxford: Berg. ] [14: Richardson, Michael. 2006. Surrealism And Cinema. 1st ed. Oxford: Berg. pp.175] [15: Richardson, Michael. 2006. Surrealism And Cinema. 1st ed. Oxford: Berg. pp.176]

Another french- based avant-garde filmmaker, Dimitri Kirsanoff, also used and subverted narrative. Kirsanoff, in his film Menilmontant[footnoteRef:16] truncates essential narrative beats to reveal how standard commercial forms of cinema cannot express many sensations felt in modernity, specifically trauma. There is no payoff in the narrative and the story is left unresolved, starting and ending in senseless brutality while the arches of the characters look more like slopes, descending into ever greater depths of desperation. Even within those parameters large portions of the plot are kept from us (for instance, why the character played by Guy Belmore is murdered) leaving us questioning the logic of the film. Richard Prouty summarizes the logic as that of commodity, being [...] the inconclusive return of meaningless difference[footnoteRef:17]. The film draws upon similar themes to that of Ballet Mcanique but whereas Leger deals in sensation, Kirsanoffs film is a cerebral experience, using truncated and sparse narrative as not just a catalyst but the substance with which he expresses his themes. [16: Mnilmontant. 1926. Film. Dimitri Kirsanoff.] [17: Richard, Prouty. 1996. 'The Well-Furnished Interior Of The Masses: Kirsanoff's "Menilmontant" And The Streets Of Paris'. Cinema Journal 36 (1): 3-17. pp.4]

Due to the fact that cinema has been dominated by narratives for over a century It is the contemporary view that the cinema is a sort of multimedia canvas made up of images, design, sound, music, performance and language. When the cinema was but thirty years old though the debate was still being had as to what cinema should be. Dziga Vertov of the soviet Kinok filmmakers brought forward an explicit agenda to wipe clean narrative from the cinematic plate. Theatrical elements were to be done away with (writing, actor, set and scenario) so that all elements of the cinema could only be found in the cinema. This was not an artistic agenda. The who were a Marxist group, believed that through the use of the scenario the bourgeoisie could brainwash the proletariat masses into sympathising with them. Fiction films would not be made about the struggle of the working people, but would focus on the trials and tribulations of the middle classes. Vertov, in the manifesto of Kino-eye, wrote The bourgeoisies hellish idea consisted of using the new toy to entertain the masses, or rather to divert the workers attention from their basic aim: the struggle against their masters.[footnoteRef:18] The results can be seen in the film The Man with a Movie Camera[footnoteRef:19]. The film begin with a series of captions stating the film was made without the help of story or theatre and that it set out to create a cinema free from the language of theatre and literature. We are then shown ourselves, the audience, staring up to the camera in anticipation for the film to begin. This shot epitomizes the Vertovs purpose, to hold a mirror up to the audience and reveal them in revolutionary form on the big-screen. The film is filled with shots of workers at work across the country, running entire industries, bearing immense power. It also displays the cameras ability to enter any space possible (we even see the camera filming from atop a camera), and rekindles the same sense of a cinema of attraction that Tom Gunning placed the Lumieres into. Inface the Lumieres and Dziga Vertov share a very similar sensibility, the sensibility that I referred to at the beginning of the essay, what Tom Gunning calls [...] placing the world within ones reach. For the Lumieres it was merely to impress, but for Vertov it was to reveal to the working masses the totality of their combined power for revolutionary action. [18: Vertov, Dziga, and Kevin O'Brian. 1978. 'The Factory Of Facts And Other Writings'. Soviet Revolutionary Culture 7: 109-128. pp. 115] [19: Man With A Movie Camera. 1929. Film. Dziga Vertov.]

To categorize the avant-gardes and their relationships to narrative is a fruitless task. Even within single groups, the surrealists for example, debates are still had over what work of Bunuel's was truly surreal. What can be said is that narrative was an essential point of contention throughout them all. Whether it was rejected or subverted, narrative never escaped unscathed. Some of the new forms that were discovered through its experimentation, such as the narrative less cinema that Vertov pioneered, never translated into mainstream success as Vertov was sure it would, but its heritage can now be found in countless greatest film polls, such as that of Sight & Sound[footnoteRef:20], and in the diverse array of video artists that now dominate galleries worldwide. [20: McQueen, Steve. 2012. 'The Greatest Films Poll'. http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/1176.]

Bibliography

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