The French film in the first decade of sound may have been the most imaginative, the most stimulating of its generation: a subtle blend of effective, often poetic, dialogue, evocative visual imagery, perceptive social analysis, complex fictional structures, rich philosophical implication, wit and charm. The maturation of the French film mind in the decade between 1930 and 1940 was partially the result of the growth of the French film mind in the previous decade between 1920 and 1930. The final ten years of the silent film laid the foundations for the great sound structures that would follow in the next ten.
Rene Claire, Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, Julien Davivier
and Jean Epstein all conquered purely visual expression before they began
combining picture and word. The sharp chasm that divided the two Hollywood film
worlds before and after 1928 was less apparent in the Paris film world. The
innovative, experimental minds of the French twenties energetically accepted
the artistic challenge of the new talking machine. Although many French plays
and playwrights found a welcome on the new French sound stages, just as
American plays and playwrights had in America, the French sound film never
turned its back on visual expression. The French filmmakers of the silent
twenties has learned some very powerful and convincing visual lessons.
Paris of the 1920s was the avante-garde capital of the
world in art, music, and the drama. It was the city of Picaso and Dali, of
Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulin and Satie, of Cocteau and Stein. The urge to
experiment, to invent new forms, to challenge the established artistic norms in
music, painting, poetry and drama also dominated the new motion art of the
motion picture. Paris was the city of many modern isms – surrealism, cubism,
Dadaism. Painters exulted in manipulating the pure shapes and textures and
colors of paint on a canvas. The painting did not need to mirror life’s
extended reality; it could mirror its moods, its feelings, its tones, its
dreams. The world was irrational; art could mirror that irrationality. Plays
did not tell logical stories of rationally motivated actions; playwrights
exulted in the irrational, the non sequitur, Jean Cocteau wrote a drama about
an absurd wedding party at the top of the Eiffel Tower; Gertrude Stein and
Tristan Tzara wrote plays whose value was in the sounds of the words rather
than in their meaning. Colonies of artists would gather at parties to show each
other little works they had sculpted or painted, or written – works devoted to
form and sensation rather than to logic and meaning. At these parties some of
the artists would show little movies, created on the same formal principles, to
their gathered friends. They discovered that of all the arts, the moving picture
was capable of the most bizarre tricks with form; a series of purely visual
images, of shapes, of lights, of double exposures, of dissolves, a series of
worlds out of focus, moving too fast or too slow, upside down or inside out.
The lens and crank could be even more devoted to pure irrational from than
chisel or brush.
Ironically, the great experimental leap forward of the
French film in the 1920s was also a step backward into the past. In 1919, at
the dawn of this avant-garde decade, Louis Delluc and Ricchiuto Canudo, two
zealous film buffs, founded the first of many subsequent French societies for
the presentation and preservation of great films of the past. Delluc and Canudo
canonized the movies as the Seventh Art and urged attention to the directors of
an earlier era: to Melies, Zecca, Cohl, Max Linder, Jean Durand, Louis
Feuiilade. The Seventy Art Adventists leaped back into the film past about ten
years, ignoring the theatrical stagey, Comedie-Francaiseish, Film d’Arty
pictures of the decade of the war. This first generation of Cineastes urged a
return to the irrational fantasy of Melies, to the action-filled chases of
Zecca and Sennett, to the tricks with camera speed and motion of Jean Durand’s
Onesome Herloger (1916), in which a magical clock makes the world dizzily speed
up or lethargically slow down. Like the French cineastes of the sixties –
Godard Truffaut, Malle – the paris film maker of the twenties not only used
film history to pack movies with historical echoes but also to embellish earlier
film ideas with the filmmaker’s own distinct and personal extensions of them.
The Parisian avant-garde filmmaker of the 1920s used one hand to rip up
accepted film conventions and assumptions and the other to pull the traditions
of the film past into the movies of the present.
The experimental French films of the twenties were of three
approximate types:
Films of pure visual form
Surrealistic film fantasies in which tricks with visual
form create the surrealistic-symbolic-irrational film universe
Naturalistic studies of human passion and sensation in
which symbols and surreal touches help to tender elusive human feelings.
The three types were far from distinct. A film could begin
as an essay in pure form and then change into a surreal dream-fantasy (Rene Claire’s
Entr’acte, 1924). Sometimes the film would begin as a surreal journey and
change into a study of form (Man Ray’s Mysteries of the Chateau De, 1929). Or
the film could begin as an impressionistic study of human emotions and
relationships only to end as a dream (Jean Kenoit’s Little Match Girl, 1928).
Dadaism, surrealism and poetic naturalism flowed into one another to create new
and surprising compounds in the moves.
The films of Man Ray are the purest examples of movie dada
– of a collage of visual shapes and patterns with no meaning other than the
interesting forms themselves. Ray’s films began quite literally as collages: he
randomly scattered paint, nails, glue, scraps of paper over strips of film, and
then exposed the littered film to light, leaving shadows of the objects
imprinted on the celluloid. Ray gradually abandoned such accidental methods for
more controlled essays in form: Return to Reason (1923), a highly ironic title
since the film consciously rejects reason, and Emak Bakia (1927). In these
films a pair of spinning dice become a pair of spinning lights which become a pair
of spinning sticks which become a pair of dancing legs. And so forth. Visual
similarities and differences of form control Ray’s choice of images. Fernand
Leger’s rhythmic Ballet Mecanique (1924) and Marcel Duchamp’s comic jest of
spinning spirals and nonsense words, Anaemic Cinema (1926), also begin with a
promise of using a succession of visual images related in form, shape and
rhythm rather than in meaning.
The most famous of the surreal films is the Salvador Dali
Bunuel fantasy, Un Chien andalou (1929). Like the title, the film is a series
of non sequiturs, scenes that seem to be related logically and yet are not
related. The film teasingly suggests thematic unities and some kind of
structural logic. Its action consistently pairs the same man and woman; sexual
desires and tensions clearly dominate their confrontations. Dali-Bunuel seem to
contrast sexual desire and social convention: the stigmata and ants in the
man’s hand suggesting Christian sin and human mortality, the man fondling the
woman’s breasts, the two puritans laboriously being dragged along with the
equally heavy burdens of pianos and burros, the doorbell in the shape of a
cocktail shaker, the asocial bawdiness of the man in his jester’s costume.
Despite the whiffs of consistent meaning, Un Chien andalou is pure dream,
irrational, a series of daring and imaginative vignettes with no rational paste
between them. From the opening sequence in which Bunuel slits a lady’s eyeball
with a razor (in intentionally gruesome closeup) to the final one in which the
man and woman wander inexplicably on a rocky beach “in the springtime”. The
film’s goal is to excite to shock, to tickle, to surprise, to make us “see”
differently rather than to preach or explain.
On the other hand, Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of
Usher (1928) uses surreal dream effects to create the atmosphere for his lucid
Poe plot. Epstein uses the tools of cinematic surrealism – slow-motion effects,
out-of-focus lenses, multiple exposure, contrasts of light and shadow,
distortion, cavernous, dream-world sets – as a means of rendering Poe’s eerie
tale. Dada and surrealism become a means of Epstein, not an end – the means of
turning the House of Usher into a house of mirrors.
Ref: France Between the Wars – A Short History of the
Movies p.193-195
