A History of Experimental Film and Video

A History of Experimental Film and Video by A.L.Rees

Page 3

“Art which opposed museum culture is now embalmed within it, with Dada as the classic instance. Furthermore it often follows, the avant-garde in art is now the mainstream itself; there is no establishment against which to rebel, with the final recuperation modern art(including its supposed avant-gardes) into the cultural and media landscape. Only the newest and most outrageous Art attracts the interest of sponsors, curators and advertising agencies.”

Page 41

According to Rees, the Surrealist movement “was founded in1924 from the debris of Dadaism.”

Dada was made up of a “loose connection of artists who gathered in or around Zurich during 1916, some of them pacifists, others war wounded or resisting conscription in their native countries.”

Page 42

Rees argues that Dada was “a mad art for a mad age.” He says there were two types of Dada, “one more tough minded than the other.” The softer side, which included Eggeling, Arp, Janso and Ball aligned itself with pacifism and mysticism and to “the demands of art.” The other, harder side of Dada with its politicised radicals such as Wieland Hertzfelde and Richard Huelsenbecktook part in the and agitation in their native Germany between 1919 and the mid 1920s.

During this time Eggeling and Richter studied “the art of movement” which culminated in creating films. This medium enabled them to produce “unfolding rhythmic patterns which they drew out on scrolls. To Eggeling, film “stayed a means and not an end.” Richter became an “influential and diverse maker of abstract and experimental films which explored the visual language of cinema, as well as on elf the avant-garde’s first chroniclers and historians.”

Man Ray, an American photographer, who soon acquired a new ‘amateur’ cine-camera,

“arrived in Europe in 1921, just in time to take part in the poet war ‘Dada manifestations’ led by Tristan Tsara (an original Zurich Dada) with the dynamic Francis Picabia and the ‘eminence gris’ of modern art, Marcel Duchamp.”

Picabia and Duchamp had participated in the New York Dada before the war.

Page 43

According to Rees,

“Man Ray’s first films, made on the cusp of Dada and the new surrealist group which was to supersede it, anticipate the next phase of film art in surrealism, even as they evoke a Dadaist aesthetic.”

He explains that the major surrealist films

“turned away from the retinal vision of form in movement …towards a more critical and contestory cinema. Vision is made complex, connections between images are obscured, sense and meaning are questioned.”

Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923), an ‘occasional’ piece filmed in one night “begins with photogrammed salt, pepper, tacks and saw blades printed on the film strip to assert film grain and surface. A fairground, shadows, the artist’s studio and a mobile sculpture in double-exposure evoke time and space.”

After three minutes, the film ends with a shot of a nude female torso, “filmed against the light, an illusion to painterly Impressionism, printed first in positive and then negative.”

Rees continues,

“Exploring film as indexical photogram (objects placed directly on the film strip), iconic image (representational shots of objects mainly in the artist’s studio) and symbolic pictorial code (the nude as sexual and artistic image of desire), its Dada stamp is seen in its shape, which begins in flattened darkness and ends in the purely cinematic image of a figure turning in negative space.”

Man Ray’s Étoile de Mer (1928)

“refuses the authority of ‘the look’ when a stippled lens adds opacity to an oblique tale of doomed love, lightly sketched in with punning intertitles and shots (a starfish attacked by scissors, a prison, a failed sexual encounter). Editing draws out the disjuncture between shots rather than their continuity , a technique pursued in in Man Rays other films which imply a ‘cinema of refusal’ in the evenly paced and seemingly random sequences of Emak Bakia (1927) or repeated empty rooms in Les Mystères du château de Dés (1928).”

Surrealist cinema is often regarded as “a search for the excessive and spectacular image (as in dream sequences modelled on Surrealism as in some films by Hitchcock), the group were in fact drawn to find the marvellous in the banal, which explains their fascination with Hollywood as well as their refusal to imitate it.

Rees argues that “the surrealists’ own films rarely invoke the ‘special effects’ and high grade illusions with which their name is often associated” and that that these were the result of the influence of film directors such as Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. The “visual hallmarks” Rees continues are:

“a scathing documentary eye, ‘trick effects’ in the simple and direct manner of their admired ‘primitive cinema’ (often made in the camera) and an avoidance of overt montage rhythm (seen as too seductive)”

Rees states that,

“Man Ray, Duchamp and Buñuel-Dali also encode post-Freudianismin ways which cannot be reduced to a triumphalist or uncritical masculinity. Images that evoke castration and loss are central to all the surrealist classic films, which resist any simple notion of (male) narrative pleasure.”

According to Rees,

“Duchamp cerebrally evoked and subverted the abstract film in his ironically titled Anémic cinéma (1926) an anti-retinal film in which slowly turning spirals imply sexual motifs.”

“These pure images are intercut with words on rotating discs, the letters spell out scabrous and near indecipherable puns (e.g. ‘Inceste ou passion de famille, à coups trop tirés - ‘Incest or family passion, with too much stroking.’ ”

In Rees’ view, Man Ray’s films

“oppose passive ‘visual pleasure’ and the viewer’s participation. In Emak Bakia montage is used to slow down or to repeat actions and objects which both invite and defy thematic connections (spirals, words and phrases, revolving doors and cartwheels, hands, gestures, fetish objects, light patterns. The tactic of the film is seemingly to frustrate narrative and elude the viewer’s full grasp of fantasies which film provokes.”

Rees states that,

“Surrealism is not only the most popular and widely known of all modern movements, but also one of the most influential on the fashion, advertising and cinema industries… in addition to its historic role and to its effect on mainstream and subcultures, it also exerts a powerful influence on new and contemporary art. ”