Avant-Garde Cinema and Ballet Blogchanique

For my final post I will be focusing upon Avant-Garde, with close reference to Malcom Turvey’s The Avant-Garde and the “New Spirit”: The Case of “Ballet méchanique”. What I found most interesting that was mentioned in Turvey’s reading was the strange dichotomy that exists in Avant-Garde films of the era – Matei Calinescu notes that Avant-Garde films such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet méchanique (1924) display a “radical criticism of the past and a definite commitment to change and the value of the future”. It is true that such films simultaneously typify a sort of filmic self-flagellation for cinematic wrong doings of the past and a great hope – “a universal joyousness” (Apollinaire) for the future.

Using Ballet méchanique as a reference point it is interesting to deduce how such a theory can be applied to the genre, and how it parallels the general sentiment of post World War I society. In Ballet méchanique “the machine functions as an ideal that human beings should emulate in their behavior in order to achieve the maximum efficiency and productivity”. Ironically, the Avant-Garde’s desire to mechanize humanity came after a war where machines had played such a pivotal role in bloodshed and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

Surrealism and Un Chien Blogdalou

As Buñuel himself stated of his film Un Chien Andalou (1929), "Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why”. I find it fascinating and rather hard to believe that what drove both Buñuel and Dali to produce this film was, as they claim, simply to shock filmgoers, "to disrupt the mental anxiety of the spectator”. This leads me to the question: why did Buñuel and Dali feel the need to pioneer a movement that sought to shock, even offend the viewer? In response, it is my belief that Un Chien Andalou, along with other films of the Surrealist movement, was actually intended to push the idea of film as an artistic medium; Surrealism worked for other artistic disciples, why not film too? This would at least justify the film’s illogical structure and the fact that each frame of the film is nonsensical, with intentions of projecting an emotion, not a narrative. Whilst Un Chien Andalou still makes very little sense to me, perhaps it is filmic Surrealism in its purest form.

Pie and Blog

For my second blog post I will be referring to American cinema, specifically early cinematic comedy in relation to Donald Crafton’s ‘Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy’. Admittedly, even after having watched various early American slapstick comedies, particularly the likes of Chaplin, I found myself oblivious to the rift between narrative and gag; although the two parallel, they never really cross paths. I found it interesting that Crafton should refer to the gag as being “disruptive”, yet a crucial component in the equation that is the comic sketch.

So important is the gag that Brett Page states that “The purpose of the sketch is not to leave a single impression of a single story. It points no moral, draws no conclusion, and sometimes it might end quite as effectively anywhere before the place in the action at which it does terminate. It is built for entertainment purposes only and furthermore, for entertainment purposes that end the moment the sketch ends”. I have to agree with him; from what I‘ve observed, the narrative only acts as a sort of vessel that contains the gag and feeds it only a loose context, but the gag doesn’t necessarily have any bearing upon the narrative. In a way the two act independently, which is precisely what Crafton was making a point of in this text.

An Aesthetic of Blogstonishment

For this, my first post, I have chosen Tom Gunning's An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator to remark upon. I found the reading to be amongst the more interesting of the selection we had to choose from, as its subject matter was not as esoteric as others and it established a very readable recount of cinema's initial reception.

It is a fascinating idea that only a little more than 100 years ago, people walked out of the world's first cinemas, bleary eyed, bemused or bewildered by what they had just witnessed. I was immediately struck by Gunning's retelling of an audience reaction to the Lumiere Brothers' Arrival of a Train at the Station as it reminded me of a similar story I have heard concerning audiences being so fixated on the film projector in action that many first-time filmgoers missed the projection itself. Whilst both stories are likely exaggerations, if not fabrications, it is certainly intriguing to imagine how audiences 100 years ago compare to those of today - how a lack of 'cinema literacy' as it were might have shaped their experience of the moving image.

To this end, I found Maxim Gorky's recount of an early Lumiere screening at the Nizhny-Novgorod Fair, 1896, to be extremely insightful and a little unexpected. Gorky writes that 'before you a life is surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours -- the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.' Personally, I had a now obviously romanticised notion of how early film audiences reacted to the cinema - it ranged from their fits of terror at an oncoming train to their utter astonishment and wonder at the magical motion of a picture. I did not, however, imagine a reaction like that of Gorky's, who thought of film as a sort of representational half-life - 'not life, but its shadows'. Whilst a rather depressing viewpoint, Gorky provides a very interesting way to view cinematic progression across the proceeding 114 years. He speaks of a lifeless cinema, and yet aspects of the moving image he cites (black and white, mute, grainy) are all things of the past - gradually shed like a sort of archaic chrysalis - arguably closing the gap between man and movie.