#anemiccinema

[douglaswittnebel]

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Duchamp the #champ #anemiccinema

[moonlightanestethic]

[artotemsco]

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• Happy Birthday Mr. Duchamp • Video portion ( Anemic Cinema by Duchamp) taken at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. #marcelduchamp #duchamp #dada #dadaism #anemiccinema #art #arte #video #modernamuseet #arttour #artmuseum #travel #stockholm #sweden #artist #newmedia ;)

[thevinstant]

#vsco #vscocam #instasize #anemiccinema #summer #cinema #sunset #avantgarde

[cesodero]

Esto es una ñoñada, ver esto me trajo a la mente a #anemiccinema #marcelduchamp #malevich #suprematismo #ruso #bauhaus #prisma #espacio3d #movil #kandinski #mondrian #weimardessaubauhaus (en Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour, Australia)

[maggytee]

This was a paper on the Dada Movement I wrote a while back for a class called History of International Cinema. So yeah, read on.

(I didn't edit it to keep the integrity of what my writing was like at the beginning of my college career)

"Dadaism was not merely a form of filmmaking during the 1920s, rather a whole literary and artistic movement that comprised of fleeing anti-war writers, intellectuals, and artists. [Esaak] France was sinking under the German invasion when Germany opened up its Western Front and bombarded France and Belgium with its heavy artillery. Stricken by the appalling revulsion of the war, flocks of artists – particularly from France and Germany - congregated in Zurich, Switzerland that was mainly neutral throughout the war. The Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature defines Dada to be:

“[A] Nihilistic movement in the arts that flourished chiefly in France, Switzerland, and Germany from about 1916 to about 1920 [and later -ed.] and that was based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization…” (Buell).

          These artists believed that modern-day Europe shouldn’t be fighting or engaging in these petty battles; they considered the capitalistic interest of the bourgeois society to be root of all the raging wars. In retaliation of all the mindless fighting, the artists began to create what Hans Richter considered to be ‘anti-art,’ since these new waves of virtuosity broke all the traditions of what was considered to be “art.” In his book, Dada: Art and Anti-art (1965), Richter mentions “…new art is a new-found freedom!” which principally illustrates the perspective of these emerging ‘dadaists’ (Dorf). The films made from these evolving artists became otherworldly and disjointed, yet fascinating all at once. They were a way for the artists to metaphorically express their romanticisms through the means of moving pictures and synchronized (and sometimes unsynchronized or silent) sound. The films by Marcel Duchamp, René Clair, Fernand Léger, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali all held the Dadaist formula, but were also acutely diverse in their styles and semantics.

          Ballet Mécanique (1923-4) is a nonlinear, plot-less film directed by cubist painter and sculptor Fernand Léger and filmmaker Dudley Murphey. Léger himself fought at the front during World War I and was gassed at the Battle of Verdun; he was hospitalized for a year and then discharged from the army in 1917. He grew an affinity towards machinery and architecture while he was still in the army, captivated by “motors, gears, bearings, furnaces, railway crossings, and factory interiors” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Fascinated with the industrialization of urban life, he combined the elements of humanity with machinery, and mechanized people in his art. Ballet Mécanique involves an overabundance of mechanical apparatus just spinning and spinning, almost to a rhythm. There is a shot of the pendulum-like movements of an ornamental sphere that sways to and fro from the camera and a similar parallel structure shot of a woman on a swing. He employs rapid-cut editing and collaging to combine images of humans with machines in a seemingly motorized ballet. The film also contains a reoccurring theme of round, circular objects, such as rotating gears, painted circles, and zeroes that alternate with other angular shapes and triangles to cause a disorientation in the viewer.

          Towards the end of the film, the collaging begins to cut together more rapidly, increasing the tempo and tension of the film although there is no implicit (and therefore explicit) narrative. There are shots of close-ups on a woman’s eyes and mouth, then a shot of her whole head while she moves her face side to side with her eyes closed. The woman’s androgyny makes the relationship between human and machine pretty clear. Léger has the machines in the film doing most of the movement during this cybernetic ballet while the humans move very little or not at all. Despite the universal fear that machines would soon replace human beings in the workplace, Léger also points out how mechanical human beings can be in their obedient and unquestioning ways. The alternating geometric imagery between the circles and triangles disassociates human beings with their spiritual nature; the Ouroboros versus the Holy Trinity, male versus female, the enclosure and completion versus the chalice and the blade. The film proved that it didn’t need a narrative to have a sharp and lucid message.

          In 1924, Francis Picabia, another French Dada artist, directed the ballet Relâche and hired René Clair to create a filmic ‘entr’acte,’ to be played during the intermission. He created Entr’acte (1924), an illogical and incomplete narrative to fit the break. Entr’acte, like Ballet Mécanique and many other Dadaist films, includes abstract techniques of assembling incongruent objects to create a dream-like, almost nightmarish, state of being. The film customs slow and fast motion for its images. It starts off with a cannon animated by stop-motion photography that moves across the screen and then faces the viewer. Two men (Erik Satie [the film and ballet’s composer] and Picabia) jump into frame in slow motion. There is a new and reoccurring scene of a female ballet dancer that is being shot from directly below, almost as if she’s dancing on the lens. Furthermore, the next scene involves a man pointing his gun at an egg that is balancing on a flowing stream of water. When he shoots it, it becomes a bird that flies over and perches itself on his hat. Standing on the adjacent building, or what can only be assumed is an adjacent building, is another man holding up a rifle. Although they seem to be parallel to each other, the first man falls off the building when the second man shoots his weapon. The following scene is a longer sequence of alternating fast and slow motion of a mob of people running after a hearse that is driving away with a coffin. Collaging images of airplanes, bicycles, automobiles, ships, and steamboats mirror the people that are running after the car. There is even a legless man racing in a wagon. The coffin ends up sliding out the car and when people gather around it, a magician comes out and makes the people disappear one by one as he points his wand at them.

          Like Ballet Mécanique, Clair juxtaposes human beings and machines. As the people run, the images of people on bicycles, of people in traffic, and of a paper-boat sliding across the screen show the industrialized nature of a new automated human mentality. The herding group of people can also echo an image of an assembled army running towards a fight. In terms of the war sentiment reflected in the film, the two men with the guns emulate both sides of conflicting nations, where the first man is shooting towards a harmless target and the second man has his gun aimed away but indirectly shoots the first. Donald Faulkner from the NYS Writers Institute suggests that Entr’acte is about sex, death, and the empire (Faulkner). In the race, the legless man stands out of the wagon and begins to run with the people – an assertion of upward mobility. Faulkner claims that the Dadaist filmmakers in the film, including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp who cameo as two chess players, are all laughing in the face of the bourgeoisie conventions of “plot, character, and setting” by creating a senseless piece that doesn’t quite cut together comprehensibly.

          Marcel Duchamp, who is considered by some to have spearheaded Dadaism, created an even more obscure film in 1926 called Anémic Cinéma. There are no human beings or abstract objects in the film but simply the silent whirring of a spiraling illusion. The rhythmic hypnotic spinning circles were created by Duchamp, which he called ‘rotoreliefs.’ The film consists of blank rotoreliefs that alternate with rotoreliefs that are inscribed with French puns. Any translation to English of the puns doesn’t make much sense; the wordplay and alliteration is also suggested to be largely sexual (DADA Companion). One attempt to translate the final scripture on the rotoreliefs translates loosely to “The aspirant lives in bleach, and I had to live in a spiral,” a phrase left largely to interpretation to all non-French speakers.

          The spinning of the rotoreliefs in Anémic Cinéma and the shrinking of heads in Entr’acte emphasize the confusion and pressure that the French civilians were battling against. Also, spirals are commonly associated with brainwashing, which is what the Dadaists felt the elite were doing to the commoners – brainwashing them to partake in their elitist games of combat and destruction. He designed the words to be read from the outside in – a mesmerizing exercise for the eyeball that causes the viewer to subconsciously create their own images, their own interpretations of the ambiguous scenarios. He was mocking the human psyche; he was controlling people’s minds. Although his methods may seem antiquated and even silly now, the film required the use of “technically advanced equipment and idiosyncratic vision” (Digital Poetry Overview) to still stand in the ranks today.

          The French avant-garde movement consisted of several artistic styles that overlapped so much it was fairly difficult to distinguish one from another. Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and surrealist painter Salvador Dali collaborated together to create Un Chien Andalou, (1929) a semi-coherent and rather unsettling experimental short. The first scene starts off with a man (Luis Buñuel) standing on a balcony and looking up at the moon. He sees a thin razor-like cloud pass in front of the moon and ponders. The next shot is of the same man coming up to a sitting woman, and slits her eye with a razor he’d been sharpening. The subsequent intertitle states “eight years later,” and a new character, a young man, is shown riding a bike in a nuns costume. The woman from the first scene, who has two perfectly functional eyes now, looks out her window and sees the man lying on the curb. She runs downstairs and tries to revive him. The following sequence is a nightmarish series of events between the two young people: they stop to observe ants crawl out of a hole from the young man’s hand; he takes sadistic pleasure in watching a woman outside get run over by a car; in his reverie, he fondles the first young woman’s breasts and bum and she runs away from him offended. He then picks up two ropes as he tries to catch her, but is shown pulling the weight of two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, two priests (one which is Dali), and two grand pianos on which two dead decaying donkeys lie.

          Too many unintelligible events happen in the film, but they somehow subconsciously cut together narratively. Although the story is quite disorienting – the intertitles do not make chronological sense – there is still a sense of lucidity in the whole piece.  The movie epitomizes surrealism and Dadaism – pure trance and social commentary. It is an attest to the concept of Freud’s ‘free association’ technique and almost entirely stream of consciousness- “a mixture of passion, revulsion, eroticism and terror” (Grant). The woman that was hit by a car was clutching a box that contained a severed hand. The hole in the man’s palm, the severed hand, and the man’s daydream of rubbing the woman’s parts indicate a highly charged sexual frustration in the film. The woman’s revulsion to his erotic trance, and her reaction later in the film when he literally wipes his mouth away and replaces it with a patch of her armpit hair, show males’ fear of rejection and/or impotency. The film cannot be put simply, because even deconstructing the film through words is hard to articulate. The theme goes miles deep, and there are just too many things going on at once to fully attempt to decipher the actual meaning behind Un Chien Andalou- if there is one.

          The four following films, Ballet Mécanique, Entr’acte, Anémic Cinéma, and Un Chien Andalou all share similar elements of technique and implications. Their poetic rhythms differ dramatically, however. Mécanique exploits the use of collaging through the extensive use of compiling images that are charged with perpetual movement.

 It simply didn’t make sense to these artists how often and easily war was declared when it was so destructive.  Dadaists lashed out by creating disconcerting metaphors, sarcastic wordplay, and jumbled experimental imagery that refracted their own feelings of oppression onto the viewer.

College.

Ciao,

mTee.