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.