The French Avant-garde ed. by Stephen Forcer and Emma Wagstaff (review)

Nottingham French Studies celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with this special issue on the French avant-garde, developed from papers given at research seminars at the University of Birmingham and supplemented and tailored to cover literature, film, painting and philosophy. Publications over the last two or three decades have enhanced the appreciation of surrealism, for example, as an international, diverse, and polyfocal movement, escaping the reductive chronology, geography, and gender bias of old potted histories and dated preconceptions. This volume reflects the application of a similar spirit of renewal to the whole field of avant-garde studies. It necessarily recognizes the contribution of theoretical pioneer Peter Bürger, but explodes his frames of reference, which essentially encompassed historic, heroic avant-garde movements from the early decades of the twentieth century. Ordered chronologically, these new studies reach up to the here and now and prefer centrifugal explorations to any synthesized overview. Eric Robertson offers a characteristically dazzling study of abstract cinema, visual music, and intermedial synaesthesia before and during the GreatWar, investigating artistic applications of optical technologies and scientific colour theories. He notably includes a new interpretation of Blaise Cendrars' L'Eubage, a journal of intergalactic travel, read as a literary response to Léopold Survage's cinematic series of coloured rhythm paintings. Chris Townsend shows how 'implied kineticism' in the paintings of Francis Picabia from 1912 onwards led to his collaboration with Erik Satie on the ballet Relâche and with René Clair on the filmEntr'acte, a joyful experiment that influenced 1920s mainstream cinema, particularly Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine. Ruth Hemus continues to trawl the archives and extends here her previously published work on Céline Arnauld, showing how Arnauld's publications in France, Belgium, Lithuania, and Romania carried her literary career into the late 1940s, well beyond the confines of Dada. The collection's editors Stephen Forcer and Emma Wagstaff pool their expertise in a chapter on artists' books by Tzara and Miro´, Leiris, and Giacometti, exploring links between literature, psychiatry, and mental health but leaving little space for the interplay between word and image. Like Hemus, they promote a holistic view that envisages entire creative careers, not just the usual canonical blips. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett apply queer theory to Georges Bataille; Sabina Stent discusses the erotically charged fashion designs of Elsa Schiaparelli (a timely look at a fashion house that is currently being relaunched); Leslie Hill addresses the relationship between Blanchot and Breton; and Nathalie Wourm highlights the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari to the practice of contemporary film-maker Pierre Alferi, who contemplates disintegration and chaos but also imagines new patterns of human sociability. Martyn Cornick's essay on Jean Paulhan, Roger Caillois, and Armand Petitjean at the NRF during the 1930s seems to have crashed the party: well informed and fairly interesting, it nevertheless looks out of place in such adventurous company. This Nottingham French Studies issue showcases a convivial community of scholars of every rank, from postgraduate to professor, brought together from various institutions and informally coalescing as the brilliant and highly communicative UK School of Avant-Garde Studies.