The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant Garde Film of the 1920s (review)

Malcolm Turvey's book The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, published by the robustly avant-garde and definitely modernist series October Books, has an astonishing argument. Indeed, through a close reading of five major avant-garde movies of the 1920s, the author challenges the standard vision of the European avant-garde while at the same time criticizing the so-called modernity thesis of film borrowed from the works of Benjamin and Kracauer. In the former case, Turvey claims that the avant-garde can only be understood as a violent attack on bourgeois, rational, industrial modernity, the avant-garde being the radical side of aesthetic modernism that is in no way compatible with the economic, technological and bureaucratic understanding of modernity as imposed by the gradual spread of global capitalism. His criticism of the modernity thesis states that the filmic medium, no matter which kind of cinema it represents, illustrates a radical shift in human perception summarized by the notion of distraction, the viewing of a film being structurally homogeneous with sensory overload and the subsequent impossibility of focusing on one single subject that defines urban life in the modern metropolis.

Both views, the standard vision of the avant-garde as well as the modernity thesis of cinema, belong to the survival kit of what one needs to know and to accept if one is to engage as a participant in the ongoing debates on modernity and the avant-garde. It is therefore a welcome surprise to see this (stereotyped) idea questioned in what is, for many people, a beacon of radical and critical art history. The times they are a-changin', even in October circles.

Yet what does Turvey try to demonstrate in this very clear, even didactic book? Roughly speaking, simply this: First, that none of the five films under scrutiny (Rhythm 21 [1921] by Hans Richter; Ballet mécanique [1924] by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger; Entr'acte [1924] by Francis Picabia and René Clair; Un chien Andalou [1929] by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel; and Man with a Movie Camera [1929] by Dziga Vertov) enable the critic to confirm the a priori, quasi-anarchist rejection of (bourgeois) modernity that our standard visions of the avant-garde continue to highlight and emphasize. Instead, a careful reading of these works displays much that is ambivalent and quite subtle in its attitude toward modernity. In certain cases, this ambivalence goes so far that we can read certain films as critiques of avant-garde de(con)struction rather than as a defense of anti-bourgeois values. Second, the book asks if modern critical thinking has too uncritically embraced certain intuitions of Benjamin, perhaps because it has not had the courage to question one of its own masters.

Turvey has good arguments for both of the points he proposes. At a general level, he is right to state that avant-gardism was in the first place a critique of bourgeois modernity from within, so that it is not astounding that many avant-gardists actually shared the same values and strategies as their despised enemies. The unconditional praise of individual freedom and the often ruthless individualism of the creator is the most blatant example of this. On a more concrete level, Turvey can also drive home the point that most avant-garde films display several aspects and preoccupations of classic bourgeois modernity.

Each of the five great analyses that compose the book tend thus to disclose the hidden contradictions of the canonical avant-garde movies: Vertov insists on machinism, yet his city symphony also reveals a profound sympathy for the premodern conception of community life as organism; Picabia and Clair construct a film that seems to abolish all known features one could expect from a movie, yet their work is also an homage to the popular entertainment of chase films à la Mack...