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

In DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, Canadian filmmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder examines early cinema’s reception among intellectuals, particularly among artist practitioners of the subject genres. The text proper is divided into three chapters, which comprise 569 pages.

The first chapter sets the discursive context, delineating how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in mathematics undermined man’s faith in calculative reason as a means for describing reality. Elder does not deny the well-established links between the unexpected and unprecedented tragedy of the First World War and the avant garde artistic (or anti-artistic) movement known as DADA. He acknowledges both the ramifications of advanced warfare technologies on the collective psyche and the public and private trauma ensuing from the death, dismemberment, and deformation of millions of soldiers. In this weighty volume, however, Elder emphasizes the “historical dynamic through which reason had lost its grip on reality” (33), that is, how Western conceptions of time and space that had prevailed for thousands of years lost their representational power – and hence validity – in light of the implications of modern mathematical theories. The Dadaists, pondering the spiritual vacuum in the wake of the paradigm shift, saw in the new medium of cinema – with its ability to effortlessly portray spatial and temporal discontinuities – a vehicle to embody the Geist of the times.

Elder goes on in the second chapter to demonstrate how DADA not merely protested against the primacy of reason and the complacency of bourgeois society but also “stood for the recognition of negative forces’ power to liberate” (116). He marshals an array of DADA artists who engaged with the cinema as the medium they deemed best capable of recasting the traditional arts of painting, music, theater, and literature in an era jarred by confusion, rupture, collision, and vacuity. In an extended analysis of Duchamp’s abstract film, Anémic cinema (1924–26), for example, the author sees the rotation of off-center circles throughout the film – a two-dimensional projection – as symbolic of the third dimension of depth, a gesture that recalls the three dimensions of the quotidian world and the newly posited fourth dimension of time. Meanwhile, Elder’s close, nearly psychoanalytic, reading of the film’s different texts reveals the director’s playful juxtaposition of divine and coprophilic elements. Indeed, his interpretation of Man Ray’s Emak bakia (1927) argues that the film depicts the kinship between collage (which occurs in the conscious world) and dreams (which occur in the subconscious one).

In the bulky third chapter (306 pages and 500 footnotes) on Surrealism, Elder lifts off with Bacon’s philosophical treatise, The Advancement of Learning (1605), gathers momentum via Apollinaire’s play, Les mamelles de Tirésias (1903), and accelerates his line of reasoning with help from the metaphysical writings of Schrenck-Notzing, F.W.H. Myers, and Theodore Flourney (perhaps best remembered as the author of From India to the Planet Mars [1922]), among many others, asserting that the Surrealists valued the cinema for its pneumatic, or spiritual, qualities. With their interest in the occult and distrust of rationalism, these artists discovered that the “cinema image was of a fantastic, and marvelous character” whose “extraordinary detail, […] protean nature, […] shifting viewpoints, and the ease with which it could be juxtaposed with images from a different time, space or scale gave the cinematic image an affinity with hallucinatory or dream images” (261). Elder then meticulously traces the Surrealists’ exploitation of this viewpoint, primarily in Luis Buñuel’s films Un chien andalou (1929) and Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933/34) and Max Ernst’s graphic novel, Une semaine de bonté (1934), bringing the discussion to the present with identification of alchemical elements in the films of Lawrence Jordan.

DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect is clearly the product of many years’ reading. Elder uses a myriad of theorists – Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, McLuhan, et al – as well as mathematicians – Russell, Dedekind, Cantor, inter alia – to make...