Cubism and Dada

So in class last week, we moved on from the basic avant garde films, and jumped right into some of the really hardcore independent movements in film--namely Cubism and Dada. While all good films require an attentive mind and an artistic outlook towards it, the films that came out of the Cubist and Dada movements require you to buckle down and question whether or not you're watching the true meaning of existence portrayed on film, or just a bunch of spirals. And let me tell you, it's a thin thin line!

We started out watching a film called "Ballet Mecanique" (1923). This film is the perfect example of anything Cubist, as it completely tears apart how you would normally look at things, and shows you what the world would be like if you had kaleidoscopes for eyes. And I don't know about anyone else, but that's a question I've had since I was a child. But along side the incredible film techniques used to get that kaleidoscope effect, this film is laced with all sorts of powerful images. The use of repetition is very important to the understanding of the film, and there are quite a few figures that are shown to the audience in order to drill that concept into their minds. To name a few examples: the girl smiling, a few of the machine pistons moving, the sentence exclaiming "We stole a 5 hundred million dollar necklace, and of course the poor woman who just could not get up those stairs. When all of these unique ways of portraying a message were combined, it proved to create a very powerful film. "Ballet Mechanique" was very good and I feel like it can be interpreted in many different ways, which makes it even more artistically relevant. One of the most prominent themes was definitely the comparison of the movements of machines to that of humans, but there were countless others that could be drawn from it. Not to mention, it's filmed in a style that I could never imagine trying to do on old 35mm film! How they figured out of to get some of their shots and effects is absolutely beyond me.

We then moved on past the Cubist movement and into a new movement known as Dada. This movement is something that we as film students would probably be criticized for today if we tried to do something similar, and because of that, I will always be bitter towards it! It takes on the most simple form that film possibly can and uses it to show the filmmaker's apathy for the rules of film, not to mention who's watching. The first Dada film we watched was "Retour a la Raison" (1923) and it translates to "The Return to Reason," which is a very Dada-esque statement in itself. The film is very dark, and the use of this dark lighting makes the shadows objects in themselves rather than just a "reflection" of an object. The techniques used in this film are much more basic than those used in Ballet Mechanique, but there are still underlying messages which can be drawn from it. Another Dada film we analyzed is "Anemic Cinema" (1924). This film supposedly was a representation of a french game in which sentences were created out of random words. It started out with a large spiral which dived endlessly into the center of the screen. The camera then cut to a sentence (that made no sense) spiraling in a similar fashion. This continued for a good while, which eventually led up to the climax of the film--the end. I don't have much else to say about this one. If the film truly did spawn off of such a simple game, I feel like there is only so much a movie about said game can say!

We wrapped up last week by watching "Entr'Acte" (1924) by Rene Clair. By the time this film rolled around, I was already half dead and hypnotized by the spirals of Anemic Cinema...wait a minute...that sonofabitch hypnotized me! That must have been Duchamp's plan all along! To hypnotize the entire world into realizing that caring about things is totally overrated! How very Dada...anyway! Entr'Acte was a film about something. I'm not at this point 100% sure if there was a definitive plot, but I was used to that by this point, so I tried not to look at it from a linear standpoint. Instead I looked at the images and camera shots, and there were plenty of those which made this film interesting. I can also see how this film might have been a very groundbreaking film back when it was made, because it introduced many techniques that probably hadn't been seen before. For example, the false ending where the man who had been killed jumps through the word "fin" at the end. He is then promptly kicked back through it and the real ending occurs. While we've seen plenty of this on YouTube and in bad horror movies setting themselves up for a sequel, this may have been one of the very first movies to trick the audience like that by breaking the fourth wall.