Visionary Film by Sitney P. Adams;

Author:Sitney, P. Adams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

eight

Absolute Animation

NOT ALL AVANT-GARDE film-making of the late 1950s utilized the trance form and psycho-drama. The graphic cinema offered a vital alternative to the subjective. This polarity (and the potential for its convergence) extends back to the origins of the avant-garde film in Europe in the 1920s. Through the examples of Un Chien Andalou, Le Sang d’un Poète, and Entr’Acte, a continuity has been suggested between the Surrealist and Dada cinema and the works of Maya Deren and Sidney Peterson. Another wing of the Dadaist cinema fused with filmic Cubism and Neoplasticism to produce films of equally major significance. In the 1920s the spectrum extending from Surrealism to Cubism in the cinema was continuous. But with the renaissance of independent film-making in America during and just after the Second World War, graphic and subjective film-making ideologically diverged and remained apart until their slow reconciliation in the early 1960s.

Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921), Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1921), Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1927), and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924) constitute the central works of the initial graphic cinema, and they span the scope of its variations.

Richter, who had been a painter and scroll-maker, took the primal conditions of black and white and the rectangular shape of the screen as the essential elements of his film. In sweeping movements which begin in the center of the screen and move out horizontally or vertically, the flat black space becomes white or vice versa. Within this matrix of fluctuating negative and positive space, white, gray, and black squares emerge from and recede into an illusory depth of the screen in a rhythmic pattern that grows increasingly more intricate until its sudden and short reversal to the elements of the black-and-white screen at the very end of the film.

Eggeling worked with Richter, and like him the urge to make films came from a desire to extend his work on scrolls into time. In his film Symphonie Diagonale, figures move along alternative diagonal lines crossing the screen from upper left to lower right and from upper right to lower left. At the same time they seem to move in depth from the surface of the screen to an imaginary receding point at its center, as Richter’s squares had, and back again. Finally, Eggeling’s shapes evolve in straight and elaborately curved lines while they pursue their diagonal and emerging-receding movements. The musicality of Symphonie Diagonale comes from its exhaustive use of reciprocal movements. An elaboration along one diagonal axis is mirrored immediately along the other; the growth at one end of a figure is matched by its disunion at another end; a movement into the screen precedes one out of it.

In Anémic Cinéma, Duchamp alternates head-on views of his illusionproducing roto-reliefs with similarly turned discs of words, elaborate French puns printed spirally, creating a fluctuation of illusory depth within a very narrow spectrum (from the slightly convex or slightly concave illusions) to the flat readings. In this, his only film, Duchamp typically crystallized the significance of the graphic film.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.