As if to answer my complaints about the utter unavailability of avant-garde films on DVD, Kino has released a gorgeous 2-disc set of experimental films of the 20s and 30s, leaning toward the canonical European avant-garde but including some lesser-known American films as well. And in October, Anthology Film Archives will release a 6-disc set of “unseen cinema“, mostly neglected American avant-garde and non-theatrical films.
Of the visual (plastic) artists working in cinema, Ferdinand Leger is my favorite. His Ballet Mechanique is a kinetic exploration of the human form and mechanical motion that knows how to rise above concept; unlike the Dada and Surrealist artists, seems to be interested in pushing the formal elements of cinema as an analog of his static visual aesthetic.
Human form as machine
That said, others are of note, as well, like Man Ray’s Emak Baria, an experiment in lensless cinema, and Hans Richter’s Vormittagspuk, a Dadaist parable against regimentation of German life made more poignant by its rebuke as “degenerate art” under the Nazis. The Duchamp, meanwhile, is more of historical than aesthetic interest.
Running parallel to the Europeans were a number of American filmmakers. On one hand the American avant-garde was far more vibrant than film historians and cinephils acknowledged until recently. On the other hand, the filmmakers were more isolated, working outside of the patronage system and cineclub circuits that let the European films carve out a new highbrow reception of the cinema. But the lack of familiarity works in the Americans favor, and it was a pleasure to see works like Autumn Fire. And the biggest surprise is a hilarious spoof of surrealism called Even — As You and I, made by a couple of men who would go on to found the homophile organization the Mattachine Society, including Harry Hay. (See Nick’s discussion for more.) Somewhat better known, H20 was my favorite, a photographic study of water, which progresses further into abstraction as the film progresses.
The treat of the collection — for me, at least — are two Impressionist shorts, which strictly speaking are narrative more than experimental. I’m not sure “Impressionism” was a term ever used at the time, but David Bordwell among others uses it to signal a school of French filmmakers in the 1920s, starting with Abel Gance, who developed and absorbed innovations in the medium to capture character subjectivity and to create a dynamic, open cinema. Freewheeling, mobile cameras; superimpositions; location shooting; lyrical composition and rhythmic editing mark both Dmitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant and Jean Epstein’s La Glace à Trois Faces/Three-Way Mirror.
Menilmontant: the subjective experience of time
Glace in particular is one of my longstanding favorite films. In thirty-plus minutes with a minimum of intertitles, it manages three narrative strands, each taking place in multiple tenses. For once, the filmmaker doesn’t show the shift with filmic cues; instead, editing creates unexpected juxtapositions. A montage in the third section could be an iterative equivalent to literary ellipsis, but it is too jarring, too ambiguous to be so literal.
Three-Way Mirror: breaking down the fourth wall of theatre
The film is stylized, hardly what we would call a realist endeavor, yet in comparison to sound stage and dollied work, it seems, well, modern, in a way that commercial features of the 1920s do not.
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