2 World War I & International Avant-Garde Cinema

French Impressionism

Referred to as ‘the first modern war’, World War I saw the technological clash of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States). This modern war saw the unprecedented use of chemical warfare and military technology, which would result in socio-political upheaval and the deaths of civilians and soldiers on a massive scale. On the winning and losing side respectively, the cinema industries of France and Germany were particularly affected through the immense casualties experienced during the war.

Before World War I French studios like Pathé Frères and Leon Gaumont dominated the international film market, but the loss of conscripted personnel and the use of the studios for wartime purposes during the Great War basically brought these giants to a standstill. Hollywood cinema rose to fill the gap. By the end of the war there was a desire to create a distinctly French cinema, to reclaim the theaters from the hegemony of Hollywood by producing a distinctly national product. In 1918 French Impressionism, a film movement invested in the centrality of the emotions and the subjective spaces of characters, deepened the possibilities of what cinema as a medium could do. Filmmaker-theorists Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier and Abel Gance were strongly associated with the movement and used different aesthetic approaches to explore cinema’s unique ability to make audience’s feel emotions, not simply see them displayed. In a movement away from the more objective world of the earlier actualities, Impressionism allowed audiences to intuit meaning from emotional impressions, rather than the often linear, clear-cut understandings encouraged in classical Hollywood cinema.

Abel Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie (The Tenth Symphony, 1918) is considered the first major film of the Impressionist movement and tells the tale of a composer who, believing his wife is having an affair, expresses his pain through a powerful symphony. The Tenth Symphony showed the possibility of mainstream cinema to be liberated from theater and the novel, which tend to tell meaning directly, in a move towards the sensations that gives rise to meaning and emotional truths within the audience. In Gance’s film the performance of a symphony is felt through visual devices and emotional reactions of the people who listen to the symphony. The bodies of characters layered within the frame heave in shared feeling, moving silently as one as they physically react to impressions inspired by the music. The use of superimpositions and inserts of a woman dancing in a woodland glen evoke the mental space of characters, privileging the creation of mood over plot. The Tenth Symphony showed the possibility of cinema outside a classical Hollywood narrative form dominated by realism.

Impressionism is characterized by point of view storytelling, lighting, and the revolutionary technology of frame mobility that allowed the camera to represent the eyes and experience of characters. Most films around the world were still largely static, but Impressionism saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers who strapped their cameras to carousels, and locomotives in an attempt to facilitate the ease of experiential character movement. In L’argent (1928), L’Herbier’s camera swoops and glides through cavernous rooms, pulled by numerous pulleys and dollies in its visualization of corrupt practices, and shifting perspectives as characters are consumed by their surroundings. Due to Impressionists’ interest in character subjectivity, their films also often played with optical effects to suggest the inner life and experience of its characters. Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet, 1923) presents a narrative concerned with a young housewife’s fantasy of escape from a dull marriage. Dulac uses visual techniques – slow motion, double exposure, irises, dramatic lighting and distortions – to allow the spectator entrance into feminized mental spaces of dreaming and loneliness.

Central to Impressionism was the idea of photogénie, a concept introduced by Jean Epstein that saw as the essence of cinema its artistic ability to enhance the soul or character of things through filmic reproduction. Plot and story should thereby be secondary to the creation of what is truly cinematic, that is moments of photogénie. For the Impressionist filmmaker the camera should be wielded in spontaneous ways to break free of the limits of the traditional film narrative and present fresh ways of seeing and understanding the world. For Epstein, the use of the close-up intensifies emotions and provides opportunity for photogénie.

In Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle (The Faithful Heart, 1923), a stand-off occurs between two men, Jean and thug Petit Paul, over the fate of Marie, an exploited young woman they are both interested in. In a confrontation sequence that shifts between a variety of shot sizes, Epstein utilizes over twenty short, extreme close-ups of faces, fists, and a hand grasping a bottle to highlight the tension and anxiety imbued in the moment. What creates photogénie in this sequence is the many subtle movements made visible by the use of close-ups that generate a world of the emotions and meanings that would otherwise be lost through a focus on dialogue and intertitles. In Impressionist cinema, the rhythms of editing and the distortions inherent in dreams, hallucinations and other mental states, can be confusing and exciting to untangle. These techniques destabilize the neat realist presentations of classical narrative cinema and force spectators to be active in generating film meaning.

Dada and Surrealism

The Dada movement emerged across all media around 1915 as a reaction to the sense of meaninglessness and disillusionment felt over the unparalleled loss of life experienced during World War I. Horrified, artists in Zurich, France, Germany and New York rejected the rationality of science that had led to such a war, choosing instead to adopt an absurdist view of life, one centered in nonsense, irrationality and anti-art, or anti-bourgeois capitalist sensibilities. Entr’acte (Clair, 1924), is one of the best known representations of Dada film. From the very start of Entr’acte, Clair throws the audience into disorientation through his ambivalent shifts from slow motion to fast cutting and unstable camera movements. In one sequence, a canon fires at the audience in a point of view that is absurdist and filled with narrative ambiguity even as a clear statement on war can be read. A hilarious funeral procession ensues when the mourners are forced to chase the hearse when it escapes the camel that is pulling it. Entr’acte challenges traditional ideas of storytelling in cinema through its undermining of conventions of character, plot and setting, its nonsensical images and disconnected scenes that defy clear interpretation, and its overturning of clear temporal and spatial relations. In Clair’s irreverent postwar film, laughter is the only thing that makes absolute sense.

Many members of the Dada movement went on to form the Surrealist movement, originating in Paris from 1924. André Breton officially founded the movement in 1924 when he wrote The Surrealist Manifesto in which he argues that cinema should be understood in terms of dreams. In the 1920s the question of ‘what is cinema?’ and how it could be differentiated from the other arts gained ground. For Breton, cinema was different from other arts in its ability to approximate the dream, and so cinema had a unique way of merging dream-states with reality. The surrealism of the dream forces the spectator to engage in a higher level of thought that escapes the limits imposed by traditional ways of structuring a story through the cause and effect structure and formal aesthetics of Hollywood narrative cinema. While Surrealism partakes in Dada politics of negotiating anxieties concerned with the state of the world, Surrealist cinema combined absurdist imagery with shocking, often sexual and irrational juxtapositions to present new ways of considering reality through dream states. It is no wonder that the critical work of Sigmund Freud on dreams and the subconscious were crucial to surrealist work.

Even as the Surrealist movement grew out of France, its artists hailed from different nationalities and no one specific Surrealist expressed themselves the same stylistically. In 1927 American visual artist, Man Ray, a Dadaist-turned-Surrealist, produced the hypnotic short film Emak Bakia composed of dreamlike images and film techniques that blur the distinction between objects in its presentation of female mental space. The film ends with the famous image of a woman with eyes painted on her eyelids. It is only when she opens her eyes and smiles direct at the audience, that the trick is fully revealed, and the strange unease felt at the woman’s previous blank stare is dissolved. It is a shocking moment that forces the spectator to draw their own conclusions and engage with the cinematic medium at a ‘higher’ level than required by narrative cinema. Ironically, Emak Bakia was criticized by many Surrealists as containing too little narrative.

Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí and Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel are the individuals most associated with Surrealism in cinema, chiefly due to their famous collaboration Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Un Chien Andalou ostensibly presents the story of two lovers, but Buñuel disrupts the clarity of traditional cinematic storytelling by structuring his film along the lines of the dream. Following the title-card, “Once upon a Time”, Buñuel introduces a man who, in a shocking cut to close-up, slices open a woman’s eye with a razor blade. He then proceeds to undermine the narrative continuity by having the woman, who was previously blinded, regain her sight following an intertitle telling the audience that eight years have passed. Un Chien Andalou destroys the linear and logical expectations of seeing and understanding the world of the story in cinema. Filled with aggressive imagery, Un Chien Andalou is composed of vignettes and nameless characters with unclear spatial and temporal relations to each other.

Despite the popularity of Un Chien Andalou, Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928) is considered by many to be the first Surrealist film. Originally an Impressionist filmmaker, Dulac shifted briefly to Surrealism to direct The Seashell and the Clergyman, a film about a priest’s frustrated pursuit of a beautiful woman. Filled with dream imagery, disjointed settings, superimpositions, and split screens among other techniques that place the spectator within character’s mental spaces, Dulac’s film challenges the idea of cinema as representation of reality. By the 1930s and 1940s, many Surrealists emigrated to the Americas as the globe became embroiled in World War II, allowing a resurgence of Surrealist ideas to enter into Hollywood cinema.

German Expressionism

Although Germany lost World War I, hit with sanctions and losses that isolated and devastated the society economically and socially, it would become a juggernaut in the world of cinema production with highly technical and moody storytelling that would challenge the norms of narrative cinema across the globe. The harsh reparations that Germany was forced to pay to the Allies at the end of the war led quickly to inflation. The German economy collapsed, hyper-inflation rocked the country by 1923, and unemployment visited all, including those belonging to the middleclass who had never before experienced economic depression. Discontent, anxiety, and disillusionment were felt everywhere as the national trauma of losing the war and humiliations of ‘peace’ hovered over the society. During the war Germany had banned the import of foreign films, so between 1916 and 1920, with no competition, domestic German film production soared. Expressionism was already a flourishing movement in German art and theatre before World War I. After the war, as the German people increasingly suffered under socio-political and economic tensions, the Expressionist movement gained a foothold in German cinema, redefining the relationship between cinema and realism.

The German Expressionists sought an approach to cinema that questioned the way that reality was traditionally represented and understood in cinema by translating the inner experiences of its characters onto the world around them. The mise-en-scène – makeup, costumes, set design – took on the qualities of character’s emotions, often anger, angst, and shock. While the Expressionists shared the centrality of the emotions as a defining trait of their movement with the French Impressionists, the Impressionists’ focus lay in their camera mobility and cinematography techniques. The Expressionists, on the other hand, used mise-en-scène and simple continuity editing techniques to express emotions. They pushed the human figure into exaggerated performances and expressed character subjectivity through visual distortions in set design, like unparallel lines and jagged shadows. Expressionist cinema also drew heavily from earlier Expressionist theatre and painting, borrowing techniques of stylized sets, geometric compositions, tilted angles, low-key lighting, and heavy shadows. In revealing the artificiality of cinema, that is, by making it clear to audiences that they are watching something that has been carefully constructed, the Expressionists sought to awaken the spectator of Expressionist cinema to their own realities. In watching Expressionist films, we become aware that our worlds also have been structured in certain ways by institutions, like religion, education, and politics. By troubling vision, Expressionism attempts to reveal these systems of control and introduce new ways of seeing and thinking.

In 1920 Robert Wiene’s silent horror The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was screened to audiences. Its unique abstraction of space with oblique lines and angles, dark staging and theatrical movement of characters would signal the beginnings of a new German cinema of expression. Wiene’s film recounts the tale of a psychotic hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, who uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murders. The film played with narrative expectations by telling the story from the point of view of a young man, Francis, who is revealed at the end to be a patient in a mental institution, a classic unreliable narrator. The stylized sets, chiaroscuro lighting, the iris shots that open and close scenes, among other techniques all challenge the perception of the audience and retroactively suggest that the world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is caught up in the twisted mindscape of the mad.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari would be the first of many Expressionist films that would deal with themes of madness, alienation and monstrosity. Horror remains one of the most important genres impacted upon by the Expressionist movement. While some Expressionist films resemble The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with its highly stylized and graphic mise-en-scène that clearly draws from Expressionist painting and theatre, other Expressionist films sought out the expressionism inherent in exotic locales at tension with everyday reality. In 1922 F.W. Murnau released the Expressionist horror masterpiece Nosferatu, a film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Thomas Hutter travels to the faraway Carpathian Mountains to meet a reclusive client, Count Orlok, who wishes to purchase a new home. Unbeknownst to Hutter, Count Orlok is an ancient vampire who will wreak havoc on his life, and those he loves. Everything about Count Orlok is wrong. From his too long body and fingers, to his too long teeth and ears. Starkly highlighted through harsh lighting and exaggerated acting, Count Orlok’s shadow creeps across walls in an expression of his bestiality, but also of his alienation and loneliness. Central to the creation of an expressionist style in Nosferatu is Murnau’s use of real landscapes rather than studio-built sets. In Hutter journey’s towards Count Orlok’s castle, Murnau captures the brooding, alien feel of the landscape through long takes, providing a sense of an insight into the vampire’s very old, yet enduring soul.

With the ‘Rentenmark-currency miracle’ of 1924, the German economy stabilized. Economic and cultural life flourished in what would come to be known as “the Golden Age of Weimar”. Technological advancements abounded and new techniques replaced the old in the face of burgeoning modernity. With the success of the Expressionist movement, many German directors like Wiene and Murnau, emigrated to Hollywood, just as the Nazi party began to gain in power in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Filmmaker Fritz Lang made one of the last German Expressionist films, Metropolis (1927), and this marked the end of the movement in Germany. Set in an urban dystopia, Metropolis follows the fraught love story of Freder, the son of rich management and Maria, child of workers, and their attempts to surmount the gulf between the classes. Fritz Lang used exaggerated movements of characters, geometrical lines of his urban landscape, and stylized contrasts between high and low social spaces to imbue his film with social commentary about the dangers of technological progress at the expense of the human condition.

As film history progressed beyond its early stages, it incorporated new technologies and cultural standards in film industries. But the core principles of storytelling, editing, and cinematography from early cinema remained the same. The feature film is still our standard for widely distributed cinema. In fact, the three-act structure, which was developed in the 1920s is still our screenwriting standard. Since developing continuity editing in the 1910s, which keeps coherent time and space across shots, we have not changed it. And the cinema style developed in French Impressionism, Surrealism, and German Expressionism through cinematography, mise-en-scène, and editing, continue to be our building blocks of style today.