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DULAC The.Avant-Garde Cinema 653

The Avant-Garde Cinema

....f I f • • f f I • •

The Worksof the Cinematic Avant-Garde: Their.Destiny

beforethe Public and Film Industry
we can use the term "avant-garde" for any film whose technique, employed with
a view to a renewed ex ress1ven s w esta lished
traditions t _ earc out, in the strictly visual and auditory realm, new emotional
cfiofcl's.
The avant-garde film does not appeal to the mere pleasure of the crowd. It
is at once too egoistic and too altruistic. Egoistic, because it-is·the--personal man-
ifestation of a pure thought; altruistic, because it is isolated from every concern
other than progress. The sincere avant-garde film has this fundamental quality of
containing, behind a sometimes inaccessible surface, .the seeds of the discoveries
which are capable of advancing film toward the cinematic form of the future. The
avant-garde is born of both the criticism of the present and the foreknowledge of
the future.
The~a is an art and an industry. Considered as art, it must jealously de-
fend its purity of expression and never betray that purity in order to convince. But
it is also an industry. To make a film and distribute it require money, a lot of money.
Thephotographic film which receives the image is expensive, its processing costly.
Byitself, every visual or audio element used corresponds to a figure, a fixed ex-
pense. The electricity required for a beautiful lighting effect can only be had for
money, and for another example, there is the lens. The list would be a long one,
wereI to go on. .
The film industry produces commercial films, films made with a concern for
reaching the public at large, and it produces mercantile films as well. By mercantile
films should be understood those which make every concession to pursue a simple
economicgoal, and by commercial films t~ose which, ~akingthe gre~test po~sible ad-
vantageof cinematic expression and technique, so~et1mes produc~ 1nte~estmgworks
whilestill working toward a reasonable profit. That 1swhere the un10n of industry and
art occurs.
From the commercial cinema emerges the total wo!_!sthe balanced film for
which th · d 'tr ancftheavant-garde, separafed in their two camps, both work.
e in us y 1 1 h 'b . f
In general, the industry does not attach itself z~daous y ht~t e 1conwtnhut1onho
art ; th e avant-gar d e, w1'th 1·ts opposite impulse, cons1 ers not 1nge se. ence t e
antagonism.
~ ___ [•··]
· · a that is, the art and the i

ost of the
 ALTERN
A~~ ~OCUMENTAR~!_ILM_________
ATIVEMODES: EXPERIMENTAL --
654 l_ PART7

HISTORIC EVOLUTION
. Lo · Lumiere'smechanical discovery,cinema has always excited research by film.
Smee ws the level of the spirit, parallel to th at ofth e mventors.
• ,.u , M,1..lix
vvasnt • hi
t: t:S, m s dav,
makers, on .. f . ~ th .. f h ·J1
an avant-gardefilmmaker,substituting the sp1nt o cmema .lOr e spmt o p otography'?1

It is rather upsetting to consider the simple mentality with which the public received
the first cinematic presentations. First of all, for the public, the c.!!temawas a photo-
graphic means of reproducing the m~chanical movement of life. Tliey were happy with
mesight of a train arriving in a station, without dreaming that, therein, lay hidden a new
contribution offering a means of expression to the sensibility and the intelligence.
The cap e of life-movement envisaged as simple photographic reproduction
became, efore every ot er ort, an outlet for literature. Animated photographs
were assembled around a composed, fictive action; the life angle was abandoned and
only the literature angle kept in view. And so the cinema entered into the cerebral
domain of narrative movement. A theatrical work is movement. The novel is also
movement, because there is an interlocking and succession of situations, ideas, feel-
ings, which interact with one another. The human being is movement, because he
moves, he acts. From deduction to deduction, from confusion to confusion, rather
than study in themselves, for their intrinsic value, the ideas of movement, of the
image and its rhythm, they turned the cinema into a photographed stage show.
They took it as an easy means of multiplying the episodes and settings of a drama,
of reinforcing and varying the theatrical or novelistic situations of the story with the
help of endless cuts, using an alternation of artificial sets and natural backdrops.
The years passed, improving the means of execution and affirming the film
sense, the direction the filmmakers had taken. The narrative cinema evolved, com-
pletely arbitrary and novelistic. The plot was wrapped in realistic forms and the
emotions reduced to proportions which were strictly true and human.
The logic of an event, the precision of a frame, the correctness of a pose con-
stituted the basic structural parts of the new cinematic technique. Moreover, along
with composition, expressive pacing intervened in the organization of the images
and gave birth to rhythm, although, in spite of the visual sense which was beginning
to dawn, the story "for the story" won out.
The shots no longer succeeded one another independently tied together by
nothing more than a title, but came to depend on each other w'ith a moving and
rhythmical psychological logic.
-<rn .
Before long, they thought of photo.graphing the unexpressed, the invisible, the
e human soul, the visual "suggestive emer m the reci-
s10nof photography. Above t e acts, a line of feelin s p •
dominating people and things. g was sketched out, harmomc,
From this the syc logic~.44AUlogicall emer . .
character in a given situation withou evokin Yth ged. It seemed childish to put a
g e realm ofhi . t . u~
added to his movements the perception of hi th .s m enor .le,and so they
With the addition to the bare facts of the drams f :ghts, ~s ~eeling, his sensations.
O
contradictory impressions in the course of an a • e description of the multiple and
themselves,but becoming the consequenc faction-the facts no longer existing in
e o a moral stat e-a d uality
. unperceptibly
.
- DULAC The Avant-Garde Cinema I 655

entered, a duality whi~h, to remain in equilibrium, adapted itself to the cadence of a

rhythm, to the dynamism and pace of the images.
And the avan~-g@I__deactivity began. The public and most of the film industrialists
had accepted realism; confronted with the developed and isolated play of emotional
and e:_rceptu~ eleme~ they rebelled. The cinema must, according to their theories,
belong exclusivelyand dryly to the drama created by the situations and the facts, and
not to the drama provoked by the conflicts of minds and hearts. They fought against
impressionism and expressionism without realizing that all the research undertaken
by the innovators of the day was enlarging the domain of pure action, of emotion set
freeby "psychological projections and analysis of atmosphere." 2
Abel Gance's La Roue marks a great step forward. In this film, psychology, ges-
tures, drama became dependent on a cadence. The characters were no longer the
onlyimportant factors in the work, but rather the objects as well, the machines, and
the length of the _shots,their composition, their opposition, their framing, their har-
mony. Rails, locomotives, boilers, wheels, pressure gauge, smoke, and tunnels act
through the images along with the characters; a new drama burst forth made up of
raw emotions and of lines of development. The conception of the art of movement,
and of systematically paced images came into its own, as well as the expression
of thingsmagnificently accomplishing the visual poem made up of human life-
instincts, playing with matter and the imponderable.· A symphonic poem, where
emotion bursts forth not in facts, not in actions, but in visua1 sononties. Impercepti-
bly,narrative storytelling, the actor's performance lost some of their isolated value,
in favor of a general orchestration made ~p of planes, rhythms, frames, angles, light,
proportions, contrasts, harmony of images .
. "Tostrip the cinema of all those elements which did not properly belong to it, to
f!Dd--itUrueessence in the undersrandins of movement and visual values: this was
the new esthetic that appeared in the light of a new dawn." 3

THE DEFINITIVE RISE OF THE AVANT-GARDE

It was about.1924--whenthe undertakings and experiments of a few courageous di-
rectors split off from commercial production to become what is called avant-garde
production. The divorce between these two forms of pr.oduction became necessary
because the public could not accept cert~in innovative scenes in the films of the day,
passionately involved as they were in the convolutions of the plot. These passages,
moreover,were officially suppressed, if they crept into the finished work, either by
the producers or by the theatre-owners, who were anxious to spare the audience the
shockor the displeasure brought on by a new technique of expressive i~ages: .
Andso there were, from then on, avant-garde production and distribution. Mmim~l
production;limited distribution. Production which was minimal because the experi-
mentsdid not find, in order to multiply, the capital which is continually necessary to any
stablecinematic effort. And the avant-garde, detached from motives of profit, marched
boldlyon toward the conquest of the new modes of expression which it felt would serve
to expand cinematic thought, with nothing to fall back on, mate~i~l~Y. or morally,_but
Withfaith. It studied the expansion it wanted, analysing the posSibihtieS,det~~mm~d
to lllake the expression of every being, of every object, moving. It scorned ndel~_ert e
in~-! 'th' • tic means beyon 1terature
..uuutelylarge nor the infinitely small. W1 1npure cmema '
 ocuMENTARY FILM
656 PART7 ALTERNATIVEMODES: EXPERIMENTALAND D

_fO'~ - olumes and forms, playing

J; ~ • • ovement, v . h' h .
"-C"I'3' and theatre, it sought emotion and feelingin m he era o~pu~1nL~ '~eJect-
-r\. Y with transparencies, opacitiesand rhythms. It wa~.th eme,--g'~i:r'direcny 1ru,u the image,
:'l; ~ ing all other action, wanted to clingonlyto thst 1
w. ~ of the universe." 4 •
~ "in the attempt to givea strictlypersonal expressio ut it tried to attain !hem
Pure cinema did not reject sens t v_ty or c~a::;~motion be ond the limits of
through ~ely visual elements. It went in sear the invist le, the imponderable, to
the human, to everything that exists in nature, tof h .n various forms, both ironic 5
abstract movement. It was this school which set ohrt h1 liberating these from the
an d sens1t1ve,
· · a t h e expres · of mo ent d r t. .m,. m or the dramatic action .
novelistic situation, in order to a low the idea, the cnticis '
to burst forth suggestively.The proofs to be given were:
· h thm·'
1. That the expression of a movement depends on its r Y
f ovement constitute the two
2. That the rhythm in itself and the develo~ment O am of the dramaturgy of
perceptual and emotional elements which are the bases
the screen;
3. That the cinematic work must reject every esthetic principle which does n~t prop-
erly belong to it and seek out its own esthetic in the contributions of the visual;
4. That the cinematic action must be life.
s. That thecinematic action must not be limited to the human person, but must
extend beyond it into the realm of nature and dream.
The essential givens of pure cinema might be found in certain scientific writ-
ings, those which discuss, for example, the formation of crystals, the trajectory of a
bullet, the bursting of a bubble (a pure rhythm, and what a moviIJ.gone! wonderful
syntheses), the evolution of microbes, the expressiveness and lives of insects.
Was not cinema ·potentially capable of grasping with its lenses the infinitely
large and the infinitely small? This school of the ungraspable turned its attention to
other dramas than those played by actors. More than anytfling else, it was attacked
because it scorned the stor~ to lat.chonto suggestive impression and expression and
because it enveloped the viewer in a network, not of events to follow, but of sensa-
tions to exp~rience an? to feel. Today we find the influence of this school expressed
very clearly 1n the actions of certain beautiful films which are accessible to every
taste, such as The GeneralLine [O_ldand New] (transformation of cream into butter
and the movement oft~e mechanical churn) and Dovzhenko s Barth (the rain fertil-
1

izing the soil and running over the flowers and fruit) Alongside of th . -
• · 1 · e pure cinema
school , certain visua composers
. . set out to treat
. . nature itself inn ew r h yt h ms, trans-
forming abstract reveries into concrete and hving realities W'th th .
expanded its sto_ck_ of !hythmic truths. 7 • i em, the cinema
All these contributions of the avant-garde were instinctiv 1 b
mercial cinema, slowly, and without a revolution. While the Ya sorbed by the com-
~tract, other audacious works inspired by it : P~~e c~nema remained
more direct feelings, in general using that technique tow PdPied its t~chniques to
. ar ends which met with
less resistance.
r ••• 1
 CONCLUSION
Tosum up, the avant-garde has been the abstract exploration and real· 1
.mg_ughtand technique, later applied to more clearl uman films. It has not 0 ~~
established the found_at_i~~sof the dramat gy of_the e , bu~ v' S ,
ulti ted e poss1b1 of ex ressio locked 1n the lens a mo e cam · -7 w-
e Its influence 1s undeniable. It has, so o spe , . e e~e of ~he pu~- 5
lie, the sensitivity of the creators, and broke ground 1n ~nlarg1ng c1nem~tic
thought in its totality. . .
The avant-garde, let us repeat, is a living ferment; 1t contains the seeds of the
conceptions of future gener<:ltions, which is to say, progre_ss. .
The cinematic avant-garde is necessary to the art, and to the industry.
[TRANSLATED BY ROBERT LAMBERTON]

NOTES
1. In the case of Melies, the French play on words, esprit= spirit and wit, is important, though
impossibleto translate.-Tr.
2. Das Kabtnettdes Dr. Caligari,CoeurFidele,La Sourtante Madame Beudet, El Dorado.-
Surprisingthough it may be, it was enlightened producers who made such undertakings
possibleat this period.
3. GermaineDulac, LesEsthetiqueset LesEntraves,Librairie FelixAlcan, 1927.
4. JeanTedesco.
5. FernandLeger's BalletMecantque,Hans Richter's series of films, Rene Clair's Entr'acte.
ppus I-IV, Henri Chomette's Refletsdu Lumiere
6. Yi~ingEggeling'sabsolute films, -~-utt111:~nn's.
et de Vitesse,CinqMinutes de Cinema Pur, Deslaw's La Marche des Machines Rene Clair's
Essaisen Couleursand La Tout,Joris Ivens's Le Pont, Germaine Dulac's Arabe~ques,Disque
927,and Themeset Variations.
7· Jean Gremillon'sTourau Large,Dimitri Kirsanoff's Brumes d'Automne Joris Ivens's Regen,
M~celCarne'sNogent,Eldoradodu Dimanche,Jean Vigo'sfilm of social ~riticism A proposde
Nice,Vic.torBlum'smountain film Wasser,Ruttmann's Melodie der Welt,Caballeros's Essence
deVerveme.

.......... .... . . . . . .... .JOHN GRIERSON

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First Principles of Documentary
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