Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect by R. Bruce Elder (review)

The story of 1920s experimental film coincides with the history of modern painting, music, and poetry closely enough that the films seem to art historians to have been minor extensions of painters’ concerns. Some artists, like May Ray, Francis Picabia, Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, and Marcel Duchamp, made (or co-made) just one or just a few films, leading to the received wisdom that avant-garde film’s short list of estimable works was a sidebar to modern art in traditional media.

In his two recent books, Harmony and Dissent (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008) and Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect, Bruce Elder argues at length for an inversion of this evaluation. He claims that the response to, or “the intellectual reception” of, cinema in modern-art circles saw it as a “new paragone” for artmaking. Despite the primitive and vulgar forms it took in the first decades of the century, cinema carried the senses of modernity with intense and suggestive power not just for the artists who would frame avant-garde film in the 1920s but also for modern artists who never touched a movie camera. Elder argues that major avant-garde art movements of the first half of the century were born from an essentially cinematic imaginary – formed inside a widened “intellectual reception” – even if only sporadically expressed in actual filmmaking. This imaginary cinema was often expressed in artists’ writings and media like collage. Harmony and Dissent dealt with the artistic context of abstract-graphics filmmakers, like Viking Eggling and Hans Richter, who realized an avant-garde cinematic form at the start of the 1920s; and with the Soviet-Constructivist school, centred on Sergei Eisenstein, whose films and prolific theorizing defined ambitious filmmaking after the mid-1920s. The new book deals with the twinned movements that ran, in parallel to these, through the centre of the decade, Dada and surrealism. Together, the books form a kind of quartet of revisionist experimental film history.

Dada artists and surrealists did not develop the kind of well-contoured canon of films that the Germans and the Soviets did. Theirs was a more jagged film production. But they articulated enduring ideas of avantgarde cinema and pointed to its phoenix-like re-emergence after the Second World War. Elder does not, however, look to that longer continuity, though, exceptionally, he finishes the book with a detailed discussion of one contemporary surrealist filmmaker, the American Lawrence Jordan, whom he tracks back to Max Ernst’s three famous collage “novels” he completed in the early 1930s. Instead, Elder delves in detail and depth into the intellectual sources and the key theorists and writers of Dada and surrealism, and he puts them to work showing how their leading devices, collage for Dada and automatism for surrealism, were founded in a covertly cinematic conception of art/anti-art. Along the way, Elder provides close analysis of selected works in various media, but he is mainly interested in the artists’ and poets’ concepts of cinema and how these affected their wider ideas on art and poetry.

Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect belongs to a spate of books and articles by critics like Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Elsaesser that have redrawn the importance that photography and film had in the intellectual and artistic history of these movements, formerly canonized only in the form of their front-rank painters and poets. Elder’s contribution to this revised history is, first of all, his encyclopedic compilation and expansion. Elder excels in the sections providing intellectual scrutiny of key figures numerous figures: in Dada, for example, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara; and in surrealism, for example, André Breton, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, and Antonin Artaud. The focus is on what they were reading, thinking, and, especially, saying about cinema. Elder offers a large number of expositions of known but underanalyzed texts, like Breton’s meditation on movies, “As in a Wood,” and Artaud’s “Cinema and Reality,” but also those less noted, like...