In France, each member of the Impressionist group worked both theoretically and practically, creating films that illustrated the concepts embedded in the theory. Key figures include Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Abel Gance. Delluc defined the idea of photogénie through which he called for a return of cinema to its “true nature.” (Wees: 11) Photogénie is the orchestration of movement in a composition and the balance between the individual elements within it. The ethos of all avant-garde cinema revolves around the idea of cinema’s immediate sensory nature and its impact on viewers. Photogénie is an attempt to conceptualize the aesthetic experience of making and watching films. It contains a mysticism and ephemerality born of the Impressionists’ interests in other areas of human knowledge, making it difficult to theorize and analyze.
Jean Epstein’s texts on the nature of cinema not only illuminate the historical context in which the avant-garde group worked but also retain their insight to this day, serving as a reference point for theorists and filmmakers. Originally from Poland, he settled in Paris to study medicine, but the centrifugal force of art quickly drew him into the avant-garde movement. Like other young people, his first contact with cinema was through writing articles for various publications. The creation of films was a consequence of his theoretical engagement with the medium. Epstein’s films are stylistically varied, ranging from avant-garde, in the modus operandi of Impressionism, to commercial melodramas featuring professional actors of French cinema, or films with nude scenes in his British films. He was inspired by the potential of cinema to explore the nature of human relationships, science, and nature (Paul, Keller: 24). The variety of films (he made 40 by the time of his death in 1953) that he made illustrates his exploratory passion when it came to visual-artistic practices. Epstein was one of the few cinematographers who managed to embody his theoretical views in practice. His films shot in France rely on a favourite impressionist technique – the multi-layered imagery creating the effect of double exposure, split screen, optical aberrations, ellipses (e.g., when Jean is looking for Marie in Cœur fidèle, 1923), slow-motion cinematography, and most emblematic of all, the close-up. As for his later British films, they show the seeds that would germinate in Italian neorealism – a striving for a truthful representation of reality.
Epstein’s theoretical texts and early and late films share common explorations – the impact of cinema on one’s sensory apparatus, the nature of movement, and its rhythm. In his view, the human body and the moving image form a relationship in which play with sensory perception is formed. A game that carries no risk, but the outcome is not entirely clear either. The close-ups, slower cadence, and the multi-layered images (superimpositions) are not meant to assist the viewer in the viewing process; on the contrary, they provoke it. The technology of cinema forms a completely different world that confronts the natural psychological world of man. (Paul, Keller: 217) Cinema acts directly on the sensory apparatus. The big screen and moving images transform the viewers’ capacity for visual communication. To impressionists, viewing cinema as a surrogate for reality is inappropriate and misleading. Every film is a highly condensed imaginary reality.
Abel Gance is also looking for the key to transforming the relationship between viewers and the film work. In La Roue (1923), Gance presents the point of view of the character, i.e., he uses a subjective camera. For the modern viewer, the subjective point of view is not a challenge but a habit, but in those years, it was a manifestation of artistic courage. Gance first encounters the audience with the character’s damaged eyes (eyes are an iconographic element in the work of avant-garde/experimental filmmakers, and to date have become a visual cliché), then the audience begins to look through them, and the world is distorted using soft focus. Montage is also a focus of Gance’s work, for example, the rapid change of shots – the life of the man falling off the cliff passes through his eyes – the audience feels the ending coming instantly; in Napoléon (1927), Gance uses a split screen to again make a point about seeing. By forming an onscreen puzzle, the director casts doubt on the unshakeable position of a single point of view. Reflection as a visual-artistic practice finds a space of its own in La Folie du docteur Tube (1915), where mirrors begin to “see” the women looking back at them through oval vignette shots, while the disorganized mental space and the dynamics of the characters’ relationships distort the appearance of reality through distortion shots with wide-angle optics.
Germaine Dulac’s cinema expresses itself in the search for freedom from borrowing from other arts such as literature, theatre, and painting. In addition to the achievements of the avant-garde (from impressionist to abstract), which have left a lasting mark on film history, she directed more than thirty feature films. With a multifaceted nature, Dulac embraces cinema not only as art but also as a tool for social change, making a small number of short reports and documentaries.
Dulac grew up in a period of profound change and advancement in art and science. The Belle Époque in Paris was fertile ground on which nymphs such as Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller blossomed with new movement expressions of the dancing body, alongside composers such as Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. In her films, she often contrasts the inner psychic world of her characters with the real, socially determined, and deeply domestic lives they lead. Dulac’s early encounters with painting influenced her work’s characteristic exploration of natural lighting and nude photography. In addition to lighting, essential to her work was her handling of colour tones in the image, e.g., the deep yellow of La Fête espagnole (1920), the sparkling white of Malencontre (1920), and the variations of grey in La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923). (Williams: 10-13) Dulac aspired to a cinema that was associative rather than narrative.
“She anticipated the emergence of post-war films with her earliest films, constructed imaginatively on musical rhythms, which she built montage-wise with visuals in a silent film aesthetic. Her term “visual music” in the French avant-garde is a revelatory contribution” (Dimitrova: 16).
Dulac’s impressionism is distinguished by its skillful handling of gestures, full of symbolic references. The liberation of gesture, that is, the development of movement in time or rhythmically in a given frame, is a key practice through which Dulac brings to light the desires and fantasies of emancipation of Madame Beudet in La Souriante Madame Beudet. Techniques such as superimposition and close-up shots are used, associatively communicating with viewers. The superimposed image is a technique that continues to be used today mostly as a montage transition, and in formats such as music video as an aesthetic choice. The close-up shot of the laughing Mr. Beudet provokes in the viewers the impression of the grotesque, predatory, and vulgar nature of the character in counterpoint to the contre-jour lighting in the close-ups of Mrs. Beudet.
An inspirational figure for Dulac and the other Impressionist filmmakers was the theatre director Aurélien Lunet-Poe. Fascinated by the paranormal, mysticism, and spirituality, Poe founded the avant-garde Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (1893). He experimented with lighting and sets that helped to transport the audience’s consciousness from the collective reality to the inner world of the characters. According to Poe, a single character is enough to create a spectacle. It is a complete experience, evoking the mysterious universal forces, and a much more intense one than any drama filled with action (Williams: 41).
Sadly, Dulac’s films made during World War I are lost. The only evidence of their existence is the scripts, shooting notes, and her correspondence. In the years between 1923 and 1925, Dulac had no funding for her projects and began directing films, all but one of which were literary adaptations, which ensured greater success with audiences. The first film for the Société des cinéromans, Gossette (1923), was a six-episode series, an adaptation of a novel by Charles Weyret. Series restored stability in the film industry during the post-war period, attracting a loyal audience who were emotionally invested in the escapist entertainment offered on the big screen. (Williams: 135) Aesthetically, although very limited, Dulac manages to recreate the point of view and mental state of the characters using a variety of lenses and prisms to distort the image.
Dulac was the first to compare cinema to music. In 1925, she wrote the article L’Essence du cinéma. L’idée visuelle, which contains a call for cinema to be seen as a kind of visual symphony in which images are linked rhythmically. (Williams: 141) With music comes the question of movement, due to the very nature of sound. Movement is inherently present both within the individual frame and between frames. The narrative must serve the movement and rhythm, not the other way around. In the late 1920s, the existential context of cinema changed as a consequence of the demarcation of cinemas with an attitude towards avant-garde works, a greater interest on the part of art patrons in cinematic experimentation, and the film-club movement.
Like other avant-garde and contemporary experimental filmmakers, Dulac found in dance an expressive means of conveying emotional states. Dance features in the artist’s commissioned and personal films. Among the commissioned works is La Princesse Mandane (1928), in which Dulac relies on the delicate movements of a ballet dancer to present the idea of a captive princess. Dance takes centre stage in the artist’s avant-garde 1929 film Thèmes et variations, which creates a counterpoint between the “marionette-like movements of the dancer” and the “mechanized movements of a machine.” (Williams: 154)
Unlike her colleagues concerned with depicting movement through abstract images, Dulac sought to preserve the actual form of objects and their movement through time as the fundamental modus operandi of the cinematic experience. Avant-garde artists such as Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter borrowed abstraction as they knew from painting, whereas for Dulac it was “the visualization of life itself in movement and rhythm” (Williams: 154). Abstraction consists of the meaning generated by the relationship between cinematic elements. Disque 957 (1928) bears the subtitle “…visual impressions by Germain Dulac, listening to Preludes 5 and 6 by Frederic Chopin.” In it, abstract swirls of light inspired by Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine dance travel across the screen. Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, better known as Arabesque (1928), is, as the title suggests, a figurative tangle – flowers, a body of water, trees, hoops of light, and raindrops all participate in Dulac’s cinematic dance.
In the 1930s, Dulac began making documentaries and reports. Working as a director at Gaumont-Franco-Films-Aubert, she was able to bring the aesthetic sensibility of the avant-garde to the field of documentary. Dulac seeks a frank, immediate contact between the camera and the reality that is contained within the rectangle of the frame. The lens can go beyond the limits of human perception, thereby revealing a new cinematic truth. From this point of view, Dulac’s approach to documentary cinema resembles Dziga Vertov’s concept of kino-pravda outlined in the 1920s.
Stepping into the meaningful unpredictability of surrealism, Dulac created La Coquille et le Clergyman from a script by Antonin Artaud. The intention was for Artaud to take on the role of the priest, but at the last minute, Carl Theodor Dreyer began filming La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), where a commitment to play the monk Monsieur was arranged. La Coquille et le Clergyman subsequently caused a serious controversy between Dulac and Artaud, who viewed the film through quite different theoretical lenses. (Kuenzli: 110) The first screening of the film took place on 8 February 1928 at the Studio des Ursulines, and the audience was unhappy. Probably because of mixing two fundamentally different aesthetic modalities for articulating of desire on the screen – Impressionism and Surrealism. (Kuenzli: 110)
A pioneer of the European avant-garde, Artaud chose Dulac as director for a reason; she has the qualities to translate his text into screen images. Moreover, both have long been concerned with questions about the nature of visual language. Subsequently, Artaud himself resented some scenes in the film that were in opposition to his theoretical views, but never wished to have his name taken off the credits. For Dulac, the film allows for associative work in which metaphors are strung together frame by frame, while Artaud’s position is deeply rooted in Surrealist principles of fragmentation and the liberation of the unconscious. The rebellion during the screening of La Coquille et le Clergyman can be seen as a conflict between the expressive euphoria that Dulac finds in the moving image and the psychic directness that Artaud seeks in the cinematic text. (Kuenzli: 111) Artaud works towards a reformulation of the relationship between visuality, language, and the psychic. This inner reality is the creation of brain function and should not be regarded as a unified whole; on the contrary, it is a gap, a fissure. Cinema, according to Artaud, is not entertainment but rather a “disassociative force” that represents a “figure of nothingness”, a “hole on the surface”. (Delleuze: 167) He, like other artists, foresaw the potential for the development of cinematic language, predicting the possibility of an immediate communication between screen images and the human brain.
Cinema and all other arts should move beyond material reality and directly attack the psychic and sensory system.
Bibliography
Димитрова, Мая. Европейско кино в епоха на глобализация – архив ИИИзк. София, 2009.
Delleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Kuenzli, Rudolf. Dada and Surrealist Film.The Mitt Press, 1996.
Paul, Jason; Keller, Sarah. Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Wees, William. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Williams, Tami. Germaine Dulac. Cinema of sensations. University of Illinois Press, 2014.
