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

In his remarkably thorough and succinct new book The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Films of the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey both salvages the genuine radicalism of the major international 1920s avant-garde films and simultaneously places them in a rich historical context. His text, in its fine-honed formal structure and its complex portrait of the films and period, honors the chaos and conflict of the seminal 1920s modernist art movements and makes for a perfect literary complement to its complicated subject.

Working through a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Rythmus 21 (1921), Ballet Mécanique (1924), Entr'Acte (1924), Un Chien Andalou (1929), and The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Turvey challenges what he calls "the standard story" about these now classic avant-garde films and their seminal filmmakers. The most common understanding of these films is that, despite their diversity and origins within different and even conflicting aesthetic theories and art movements, they remain nonetheless unified in their total rejection of outdated, traditional social values and in their dedication to transformation, change, and the future. Instead, through sharp analysis of the films and a keen dissection of the filmmaker's statements, Turvey reveals a far more thorny relationship between the films and modernity, arguing that the filmmakers actually supported some aspects of modern society, while attacking others. In a sense, he uncovers a more reformist perspective on these films that belies their common categorization as fully committed revolutionary works.

To take one example, Turvey uses Hans Richter, and his Rythmus 21, to demonstrate that even an allegedly nihilistic modernist movement like Dada actually contained diverse strains of expression, in this case, what might be called a spiritual call to address problems symptomatic of modern times. Richter's film often gets positioned as a stand-alone abstract film for understandable reasons since it is composed entirely of animated squares and rectangles. Yet Turvey's inspired research unearths Richter's connections to Dadaism through the artist's own conception of the film's relationship to the movement and its philosophical perspectives and goals. Richter, then, did not reject modernity outright; rather, just as Turvey shows with other films and artists, Richter manifested a more complicated view of modernity.

Admitting that rationality remained fundamental to human nature, Richter sought to balance modern society's overvaluation of rationality with a spirit of "unreason" or play. Thus Richter calibrated the precision of abstraction found in movements like de Stijl or artists like Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee with the playfulness and randomness, or irrationality, of Dada. The goal was to offer an antidote to the otherwise necessary role of instrumental rationality. Aesthetic experimentation or Dadaist (anti-)art gets defined by its function (its social role as a balance to rationalism) rather than by any intrinsic aesthetic properties. In a later chapter on Rene Clair's Entr'Acte (1924), Turvey threads the needle with a broader claim about Dadaism, one that underscores his larger conclusions about all of the avant-garde movements studied in this book (and certainly the later movements in the United States and Europe): "only in a society that allows its members considerable personal freedom, and that tolerates nonconformity and dissent, could a movement like Dada arise, and in clamoring for this freedom in a radical form, it can help perpetuate that society" (91). The quotation captures the nuanced approach Turvey brings to his study, for it results from probing and thoughtful reflection and, in that sense, only offers a hint of the rigors of his scholarship. The quotation also captures the surprising and even provocative nature of Turvey's findings. In this sense, it takes Dadaism, that most radical of artistic movements, and demonstrates how it criticized modern bourgeois values from within and not from a radical outsider position (as Turvey points out, all of these canonical avant-garde artists were bourgeois themselves).

This relationship remains true of the avant-garde in general, an indication of the book...