DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.

This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

1

The Fate of Reason in Modernity

R. Bruce Elder

This chapter explores developments in philosophy and mathematics that dismantled Enlightenment claims that promoted reason as the foundation for all knowledge, and established the conditions under which the historical calamities of the early twentieth century made irrationalism seem attractive.  It also shows that the reception of the cinema and vanguard artistic programs alike reflected that crisis.

2

Dadism and the Disasters of War

R. Bruce Elder

Here I examine in some detail two artistic movements that extolled the value of escaping reason’s enfeebling effects. In the first of these chapters, I challenge the view of DADA as chiefly a negative or protest movement, and to counter that view, I demonstrate that spiritual themes had a important place in DADA and that they steered it towards constructive ends.

3

Surrealism and the Cinema

R. Bruce Elder

Following on the theme of chapter  two, I turn to DADA’s successor movement, Surrealism and show that DADA’s spiritual and occult interests were taken up by its successor movement. As the previous did for DADA, this chapter explores the cinema’s role as a model for Surrealism and that it provided an incentive to remake poetry, literature and painting so that those forms might take on some of the virtues of the cinema.