Page 21 - Studio International - November December 1975

and variation, attempts at synesthetic effects, theories of position of extreme 'purism' or 'essentialism.' Ironically,
counterpoint. anti-illusionist, anti-realist film has ended up with many
But this influence, and the films associated with it, are preoccupations in common with its worst enemies. A
marked as much by what they excluded as what they theorist like André Bazin, for instance, committed to
included. Primarily of course verbal language was realism and representationalism, based his commitment
missing and also narrative. During the silent period, the on an argument about cinematic ontology and essence,
absence of language was not foregrounded ; it which he saw in the photographic reproduction of the
seemed a natural quality of film, but in retrospect its natural world. We now have, so to speak, both an
significance can be seen. Language is still excluded from extroverted and an introverted ontology of film, one
an enormous number of avant-garde films, which are seeking the soul of cinema in the nature of the pro-filmic
shown either silent or with electronic or other musical event, the other in the nature of the cinematic process, the
tracks. Again, there are real technical and financial cone of light or the grain of silver. The frontier reached by
reasons for this, but these practical disincentives coincide this avant-garde has been an ever-narrowing
with an aesthetic which was itself founded on concepts preoccupation with pure film, with film 'about' film, a
of visual form and visual problems which exclude verbal dissolution of signification into objecthood or tautology.9
language from their field, and may be actively hostile to it. I should add, perhaps, that this tendency is even more
This is part of the legacy of the Renaissance which has marked in the United States than in Europe.
survived the modernist break almost unchallenged,
except in isolated instances — Lissitzky, Duchamp,
Picabia and, extremely important, recent conceptualist Where does the other avant-garde stand ? Here, as one
work. would expect, the tendency goes in the opposite
There is one further important point which must be direction. The Soviet directors of the twenties, though
made about the development of film in relation to art they saw themselves in some sense as avant-garde, were
history. Film-makers at a certain point became also preoccupied with the problem of realism. For the
dissatisfied with the search simply for 'kinetic solutions to most part they remained within the bounds of narrative
pictorial problems',8 as in the films of Man Ray and cinema. The most clearly avant-garde passages and
Moholy-Nagy, and began to concentrate on what they episodes in Eisenstein's films (experiments in intellectual
saw as specifically cinematic problems. Structural film- montage, etc.) remain passages and episodes, which
making over the last decade has thus represented a appear as interpolations within an otherwise
displacement of concerns from the art world to the film homogeneous and classical narrative. There is no doubt
world rather than an extension. The way of thinking has that the dramaturgy is modernist rather than traditional —
remained one which film-makers have in common with the crowd as hero, typage, guignol, etc. — but these are
painters and other visual artists, but an effort has been not features which can be attributed to a break with
rather than a renovation of classical theatre. They are
modes of achieving a heightened emotional effect or
presenting an idea with unexpected vividness or force.
In Eisenstein's work the signified — content in the
conventional sense — is always dominant and, of course,
he went so far as to dismiss Vertov's Man with the Movie
Camera as 'formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera
mischief,'10 contrasting its use of slow motion with
Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher, in which,
according to Eisenstein, it is used to heighten emotional
pressure, ie to achieve an effect in terms of a desired
content or goal. Vertov's film was, of course, a milestone
for the avant-garde and it is a sign of its richness that it
can be seen as a precursor both of cinema-verité and of
structural film, though also, evidently, a sign of its
ambiguity, of its uncertainty caught between an ideology
of photographic realism and one of formal innovation and
experiment.
In broad terms, what we find with the Soviet film-
makers is a recognition that a new type of content, a new
realm of signifieds, demands formal innovation, on the
level of the signifier, for its expression. Thus Eisenstein
wanted to translate the dialectical materialism of his
world-view from an approach to subject-matter to an
approach to form, through a theory of montage which was
itself dialectical. The aesthetic was still content-based, it
saw signifiers primarily as means of expression, but at the
same time it demanded a radical transformation of those
means. It was an aesthetic which had much in common
with the avant-garde positions of, say, Léger or Man Ray,
but which also kept a distance, a distance of which the
fear of formalism is symptomatic. It is as if they felt that
once the signifier was freed from bondage to the signified,
it was certain to celebrate by doing away with its old
Peter Gidal Room Film 1973 master altogether in a fit of irresponsible ultra-leftism and
Utopianism. Which, as we have seen, was not so far
wrong.
made to insist on the ontological autonomy of film. Thus, The case of Godard, working forty years or so later, is
for instance, Gidal's work has foregrounded and been in a slightly different. In Godard's post-1968 films we glimpse
sense 'about' focus; Le Grice's work has foregrounded something of an alternative route between content-ism
and been in a sense 'about' printing or projection. The and formalism, a recognition that it is possible to work
tendency of painting to concentrate on its own sphere of within the space opened up by the disjunction and
materials and signification, to be self-reflexive, has been dislocation of signifier and signified. Clearly Godard was
translated into specifically cinematic terms and concerns, influenced by Eisenstein's theory of dialectical montage,
though here again 'specifically cinematic' is taken to but he develops it in a much more radical way. In the last
mean primarily the picture-track. resort, for Eisenstein, conflict was primarily between the
Thus the impact of avant-garde ideas from the world of successive signifieds of images. Although he recognizes
visual arts has ended up pushing film-makers into a a form of dialectical montage in the suprematist paintings
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