The Dadaism of Anemic Cinema and Ghost Before Breakfast PDF

Preview

Summary

Saggio sul concetto di film dadaisti. ...

Description

An analysis of the use of montage and editing in two dadaist films Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927) by Hans Richter.

Experimental films cover all kinds of movies, feature-length, shorts, films with a vague narrative or those that reject all kinds of narrative altogether. To call a film “experimental” someone must understand what ‘experimental’ actually means. If we want to collocate the beginning of experimental films, this must be researched in the early cinema. If we consider “The arrival of a train” (1895) by August (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumière as the first movie ever projected, the screening that the audience watched was what we would call today a non-narrative film. The footage of the arrival of a train in a station is perhaps the earliest form of non-narrative film. Despite early films indeed capturing real-life events, what became the true and conventional cinema was a fully narrative mode, turning all the other forms of cinema ‘experimental”. Avant-garde films begin to exist in this exact moment, someone might argue that the first films ever made were in fact avant-garde but Avant-garde cinema begins to exist when the conventional narrative cinema started asserting itself as the dominant commercial form of cinema. In the early 20th century many were the forms of avant-garde cinema that started taking shape, one almost overlapped by another one that claimed to have perfected the preexistent form or got inspiration from it. In the case of early experimental cinema it is almost impossible to differentiate the art tendencies from the cinema tendencies. Modernism in art is constituted of various art movements such as Cubism, Futurism,

Dadaism and Surrealism. In the early twentieth century what was considered experimental cinema, was deeply entrenched with the art movements from which they took inspiration. “The avant-garde film of the twenties was a unique fusion of painting, poetry, theatre, and thought which burst forth in spontaneous creation without visible precedent, pursued by visionaries who were attracted and driven to the kinetic promise of the motion picture when their twentieth-century imaginations could no longer be contained within the easel or remain quiescent upon the page” (Reveaux, pp. 27). The fusion of all the techniques is easily recognisable in the work of the early avant-gardist filmmakers. “There is something altogether appropriate about the fact, noted by film historians, that the cinema has no origin other than the multiplicity of chemical, technical, optical, and scientific discoveries and devices” (Kuenzli, Rudolf E., pp.13), argues Thomas Elsaesser in his essay Dada/Cinema? in fact, early filmmakers were everything but just that, what we would consider today as an actual profession, in the early days of cinema directors were mainly painters, writers, engineers, inventors, artists and this opening statement for his essay is very relevant and visible if we take into consideration one art movement: Dadaism. The question is: when a film is considered Dada and why? To historically collocate dadaist films is important to start from the Dada movement in art. Dada was an art movement that claimed to be ‘anti-art’, and indeed a part of society that was anti-society. Like all the art movements that arose in the early 20th century, Dada also had its manifesto. Written by Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) in 1918, a French-Romanian avant-garde poet and performer. Tzara is precise and explicit in his words:

“Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a

protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; know ledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition o/ logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them— with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least—with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE” (1918)

This is the last paragraph of his manifesto in which Tzara expresses all of his dislikes for conventionality and preexistent art forms, in his manifesto Tzara also highlights what he means with Dada and, funnily enough, Tzara writes that “Dada means nothing”. Dada is

nothing as in Dada has no conventional meanings, all concepts of logic and rational thoughts were thrown out of the window, for the absurd and nonsensical. It was to reveal the hypocrisy and meaningless within everyone, including themselves. Various were the filmmakers that emerged from the dada movement such as René Clair, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter to name a few. In this essay, I will focus on two specific films Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp and Ghosts before breakfast (1928) by Hans Richter analysing the different ways in which the editing and the use of montage have been used to reaffirm their affinity to the Dada movement. Those two films, despite being visually different, among others, share a common technique used to achieve what they intended: montage. All the experiments made in these films were influenced by “new techniques of reproducing reality” (Elder, pp. 141), one above all was to see photography in motion. One of the most important pioneers of montage was Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), which describes montage as “the absence of rules of syntax and punctuation marks in film had revealed to him the true nature of this art: juxtaposition and simultaneity” (Elder, pp.141). No more films were made after 1927-1928 that were specifically referring to the Dadaist movement, that is why the decision of taking into consideration two of the final films considered Dada, a movement that culminated and also ended in the same time frame of roughly 10 years. Anemic Cinema, Marcel Duchamp’s first cinematic debut, further experiments with optics and movement. The short was produced with the help of Man Ray (1890-1976) and Marc Allégret (1900-1973) and as Kuenzli describes in his book introduction:

“can thus be seen as an exploration of visual and verbal multi-dimensionality. Moving disks with geometric spirals regularly alternate in a slow rhythm with disks containing spirally printed puns. The rotating disks with spiral lines produce the effect of three-dimensionality, whereas the spiral of verbal puns, although appearing in motion optically flat, suggest multiple dimensions of verbal signs” (Kuenzli, pp.2).

In relation to the montage, Anemic Cinema juxtaposes footage of wheeling disks with spirals with disks with written puns. The frame rate in which the disks with puns appear is approximately 10sec to 20sec, making it impossible for the audience to re-read the sentences and try to make sense of it, the French sentences are meant to be nonsensical, “Duchamp follows regular syntax but the apparent reason for his word choice has more to do with alliteration and consonance than with any clear referential meaning” (Katrina, pp.54). Duchamp later called these drawings of spirals ‘Rotoreliefs’ and was a series of drawings meant to turn on a turntable at 40-60 rpm. In the short film, the rotoreliefs spin alternating with the puns, creating a series of footage that can be perceived as moving drawings. This alternation of spinning wheels, intercut at a specific moment, gives the audience almost an interpersonal experience. In this sense, the time frame scanned by the various cuts gives each viewer a certain time to focus on the spinning wheels and right after a certain time to read the spinning sentences, based for example on the readers’ ability to do so faster or slower than someone else. Taking into consideration that the puns itself do not make actual sense in French, Anemic Cinema uses editing to give the audience a subjective experience, each viewer would focus on one or multiple or all of

the words, Toby Mussan in his analysis of Anemic Cinema argues that “the concept that two different people watching the films at the same time would not be perceiving it in exactly the same way all the time. One’s perception of the film would oscillate according to one’s optical faculties, which we can assume are as widely variable as any other of the other physical characteristics'. (Mussman, pp. 151), this argument to a certain extent can be applied to every movie, but in Anemic Cinema the presence of meaningless sentences amplifies this perception from person to person, “the same variety must be given to the perception of the language. Meaning is perceived as it strikes or pleases the viewer, according to his or her own particular set of linguistic associations” (Katrina, pp. 54). Anemic Cinema is a pure representation of the Dadaists’ precepts, however it also shows the overlaps of other art forms, most of all Duchamp appears to have also applied an Italian Futuristic approach. In the Futuristic approach to literature, as presented by Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, in which he rejects all forms of meter and structured poetry, the singular word is the main concern. This style of poetry was defined by the Futuristics parole in libertà which means “free words” as in metaphorically not tied to a conventional style of writing. The sentences in A.C. have no actual meaning, but considered in the light of a Futuristic approach, each word takes on an individual connotation. The case of Ghost Before Breakfast, in comparison with Anemic Cinema represents the tension between the Dada movement. These two films are both emblematic of this movement, for their similarity but even more for their dissimilarity. If Anemic Cinema is the result of the destructive tendencies of the movement, G.B.B. is the representation of the Constructivism between the movement. Hans Richter seems to have applied the notion of the ‘ready-made’, a term used by Marcel Duchamp for the first time in 1915. In

G.B.B., the objects do not respond to conventional usage, and as if they were ‘alive’ they metaphorically protest against regimentation. The film runs just for 10 minutes, and starts with a statement in regard to the original score originally produced by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963),: “The nazi destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art. It shows that even objects revolt against regimentation”. This statement almost prepares the audience to a narrative film, however that is not what happens, considering the dadaist nature of the film a narrative film would have been in contrast with the movement. To achieve this result, once again the use of montage is very essential. Many are the techniques used in this short to achieve what would have been such a subversive film, “A virtual compendium of the technical devices – superimposition, negative-positive reversals, slow motion and sudden shifts in the camera’s shutter speed – that could be used to deform and denaturalize photographic material” (Suchenski, Sense of Cinema). The political nature of the film is thus established since the beginning of the film, and as many dadaists were involved in political activities, “Photomontage served Berlin dadaist as a chief means for their political activities. By literally cutting up and rearranging, [...] A Berlin Dada film would thus have consisted of a montage of carefully chosen cuttings, and thus would have made visible their ideology”. (Kuenzli, pp. 7). Despite the political message not so hidden in this film, the editing in Ghost Before Breakfast seems to be a powerful tool used to convey a more philosophical concept known as synchronicity, a concept introduced by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). This term means a meaningful coincidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected, thus the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. In Ghost before breakfast some of the events happening seem to be somewhat related with each other, almost as

they are happening all at the same time, in an imaginary time frame of roughly two hours, as shown by the clocks, from the hats that start ‘misbehaving’ to the cups that crash onto the floor. “The Simultaneist work was one that captured the everyday phenomenological reality that, even in one’s immediate vicinity, many events are occurring at once— including events with antithetical characteristics” (Elder, pp. 147). Richter himself in his book Dada: Art and Anti-art writes: “I believe that an artist through his art work transmits not his thoughts but a kind of vital shaking. Art is much more than 'language' or metaphor, for it contributes to communion among people, which is of the highest importance to society”. In its anarchic rejection of codes of “progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities,” Dada opened the door for personal freedom of expression as wide as it would swing, preparing the way for all the situationists, yippies, and punks to come. Many are the modern and contemporary filmmakers that took inspiration from Dadaists’ directors, but as Kuenzli argues: “What Dada was in regard to cinema was not a specific film, but the performance, not a specific set of techniques or textual organization, but the spectacle. One might argue that in order for a film to have been Dada it need not be made by a Dadaist, or conversely, that there were no Dada films outside the events in which they figured. "What is a Dada film?" would resolve itself into the question "When was a film Dada?" (Kuenzli, pp. 19), nor the director or the specific techniques is Dada but its execution.

References: Elder, R. Bruce. DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Kuenzli, Rudolf E. Dada and Surrealist Film. 1996 Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Print. Reveaux, A. 1976, "THE CUBIST CINEMA", Film Quarterly (ARCHIVE), vol. 29, no. 4 URL: http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf [visited on 14/07/2020]

Katrina Martin, K., 1975. Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema. In Studio International 189 no 973 Jan-Feb 1975, pp 53-60. Battcock, G., 1967. The New American Cinema - A Critical Anthology. 1st ed. New York: E.P. Dutton & co., Inc, p.151. URL: http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/great-directors/hans-richter/ [visited on 21/07/2020] Marzio, Peter C. “Dada: Art and Anti-Art by Hans Richter (review).” Leonardo 6.1 (1973): 71–72. URL: http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/three-essential-dadaist-filmsgroundbreaking-works-by-hans-richter-man-ray-marcel-duchamp.html [visited on 21/07/2020] Filmography: The arrival of a train. 1896. [film] Directed by A. Lumière and L. Lumière. France: Lumière Brothers. Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before breakfast). 1928. [film] Directed by H. Richter. Germany: Hans Richter. Anemic Cinema. 1926. [film] Directed by M. Duchamp. France: Marcel Duchamp....