The main factions of avant-garde cinema

There are obvious differences between the early and late stages of this art movement in France in the 1920s (1917-1928). The early theoretical exploration and artistic practice mainly focused on the understanding of light; after 1925, they tended to be abstract. Therefore, the French film art movement before 1925 is called "Impressionism", and the French school after 1925 is called the avant-garde. However, Impressionist films are generally regarded as the prelude to avant-garde films, and some even simply classify them as avant-garde. , regarded as the first stage of the movement. The avant-garde film movement in the 1920s was the first film movement in the history of world cinema. The French avant-garde film movement began with the artistic creation principles of L. A complete break with commercial films, requiring the use of film to explore the unique beauty of people and objects. The French avant-garde film movement can be roughly divided into three stages.

The first stage

is three-dimensional. Represented by the film experimental works of painters such as F. Reicher and R. Clair, they also regarded movement as the nature of film. However, unlike the German "avant-garde films", they did not use hand-painted graphics. Instead of taking changes in expression as content, it combines objects or scenes in daily life to express them. For example, Leicher's short film "Mechanical Dance" shot in 1924 and Claire's "Intermission" (1924), these films also do not have a complete storyline and a clear theme. These films are also called "Dadaist films," abstract films, or "pure films."

The second stage

It is based on the young female filmmaker G. Dulac, originally from The experimental films of Spain's L. Bu?uel, stage playwright and young poet A. Artaud are represented by their films, which are influenced by surrealist literature and express people's subconscious. , including dreams, hallucinations, etc. The short film "The Shell and the Monk" shot by G. Dulac in 1928 (screenwriter A. Artaud) mainly analyzes the chaotic psychological activities of a monk through a series of shots that are not intrinsically connected. Follow up with a kind of psychoanalysis; L. Bu?uel's 1928 film "The Dog of Andalus" also uses a similar method to express people's subconscious activities or the pursuit of a new and absurd metaphor. Also known as surrealist film.

After 1929, the "avant-garde movement" of French film also turned into documentary film. This kind of documentary film was quickly divided into two tendencies: one is mainly to ridicule social phenomena, such as French director J. Vigo's "Views of Nice" (1929-1930) mainly uses grotesque images and peculiar editing to use recorded scenes of Nice to mock the ugliness of life in the city's upper class; the other is lyrical or aesthetic. Documentaries with a communist tendency, such as J. Evans was working at W. "The Bridge" (1928) and "The Rain" (1929) were shot under the direct influence of Ruttmann and the French avant-garde movement. The French Cubist painter Fernand Lecher initially engaged in filmmaking with the intention of He used the means of film to conduct his research on painting. In his creation, he naturally realized why the film could not get rid of the constraints of narrative and performance. During the filming of "Dance of the Machine" (1923), he began to He explores this aspect. He combines natural moving objects in daily life, such as pendulums, girls on swings, women going up stairs, moving wooden horses, etc., with machine parts and window mannequins that are made to move through film. The children's legs, daily necessities in the store, as well as posters and newspaper titles are juxtaposed with some of the sculptural objects favored by Cubist painters, forming a scene that is indeed full of cinematic movement effects - the dance of machines.

< p>Because Leicher places great emphasis on the matching of pure compositional shapes and the counterpoint processing of rhythmic editing, all moving objects in the film move like the rhythm of a pendulum. Those natural objects become full of vitality and strong appeal. A moving image, while the movement of the characters has lost its reality, it has created a special way of feeling movement. Leicher once said that his purpose in shooting this film was to "create a common sense." The rhythm of objects in time and space shows the beauty of their shapes. However, in fact, as Siegfried Kracauer pointed out, "The beauty of the shape he showed in the film belongs to the rhythm, not to the object itself covered by the rhythm. For the film An experiment in visual rhythm, Leicher's "Dance of the Machine" is undoubtedly exploring a new field of film artistic expression. The artistic proposition of Dadaism is regarded as a product of the absurd World War Dada. Artists of the 19th century took the anarchist Bakunin's political slogan of "destruction is creation" as their aesthetic creed, and used the masterpieces of Renaissance paintings as objects of satire to challenge the traditional view of art. The most representative one is Dusan's "Mona Lisa with Beard". This anti-art artistic genre is consistent with the surrealistic film aesthetics of the 1920s, and has found its niche in experimental films. Man Ray's "Back to Reason" (1923) is the first work of Dadaism.

The artist sensitized nails, buttons, photos and tapes onto film to create the outlines of the chaotic objects on the screen. When the film was shown, the enthusiasm of the avant-garde film artists almost broke the ceiling. People regarded this time as a very successful party.

The Dadaists were seeking the beauty of the so-called "machine and parasol suddenly meeting on the operating table." The following year, "Intermission" shot by Rene Clair became the most outstanding representative work of Dadaism .

Rene Claire incorporated Chaplin's comic spirit and the humor of "Dance of the Machine" into his work, creating "Intermission", an "absurd masterpiece" . Those are just like the dreams of Dadaist artists - paper boats floating over the sea in Paris, cigarettes turned into pillars of Greek temples, and scenes of games with several Dadaist artists - Man Satie is carrying a cannon , the dancer Jean Boulin comically appeared on the roof of the Xiangshulishe Theater in a hunting suit, and the use of high-speed photography and low-speed photography to create a funeral procession that lost its sense of solemnity and Boulin finally standing up from the coffin, etc. etc., in the rhythmic editing, constitute a Dadaist film that is both imaginative and absurd. It is worth noting that compared with Man Ray's "Back to Reason", Rene Clair's "Intermission" does not use abstract forms, but real-life materials. However, the key to forming their same style is their anti-rational artistic proposition. The real time and space of the visual materials in "Intermission" were consciously cut out by Claire, and appeared in an anti-logical form. At the same time, those visual fragments with reversed order have no story structure to speak of, but are the "transposition method" of Dadaist painting and a new discovery in film editing techniques. Especially the famous shot: shot from below A ballet dancer wearing a skirt and dancing lightly, when the camera goes up, people are surprised to find that it is a man with a beard and pince-nez. Here, Claire creates "different elements." Contact on a flat surface produces a strange visual effect of poetic burning. The purpose is to make the audience laugh. In Rene Clair's Dadaist aesthetic pursuit, real materials lost their reality and became surreal. The aesthetic pursuit of surrealism in Dadaist films eventually led to the birth of surrealist films. Just as literature and painting evolved from Dada to Surrealism. Surrealist filmmakers, on the basis of the illogical and irrational aesthetics of Dadaist films, "tried to transform dreams, psychological satiation, unconscious or subconscious processes (mainly influenced by Freud, and to a lesser extent influenced by Freud) into Influenced by Marxism) onto the screen. Surrealism became the final destination of many avant-garde film arts. Filmed "The Shell and the Monk" ("The Dog of the Andalus" by Luis Bu?uel in 1927), "The Pearl Necklace" by Gaston Ravel in 1929 and Man Ray in 1929. "Star of the Sea" and other works have become representative works of surrealism in this period.

In these films that have dramatic elements but lack dramatic action, love becomes their way of describing the separation between fantasy and reality. The main object. Among them, Dulac's "The Shell and the Monk" is regarded as the first film of Surrealism. The film depicts the fantasy of an ascetic and impotent priest who pretends to be a missionary, a general and a prison guard. It is a story about love rivals competing for a girl. However, when the film uses a series of pictures to reveal the psychological state of the characters, it highlights the pain and sorrow of the pastor more and lacks the humor that should be expected in that era. , so it did not arouse much interest from people. After that, Bu?uel's "An Andalou Dog" (Salvador Dali participated in the creation of the script) described a series of dreams of a mentally troubled tramp, thus entering the human world. Films that explore the subconscious state and try to arouse the audience's inner impulses really attract people's attention and are regarded as a typical representative work of surrealism. In the film "An Andalou Dog", the characters' dreams. and the subconscious state are connected by horrifying horror events and scenes: a man slit a woman's eyeball with a razor, a car accident on the street, a half-hermaphrodite staring at a severed hand, stacks of objects on a piano Rotten donkey meat, an attempted rape, a nest of ants in the palm, etc.

The entire film is full of violence, sexuality and weird humor, highlighting the fact that surrealist works are not governed by reason and logic. The characteristics of "An Andalou Dog" are similar to those of impressionistic psychological narrative and Rene Clair's "Intermission", that is, the scenery and characters in the film are all Realistically, they seem not to be interested in the unrealistic way of painting on film with geometric figures, lines, etc. Naturally, they also have differences: compared with the impressionistic psychological narrative, the plot of the film has no narrative logic at all. , the actions and motivations of the characters in the play have no psychological basis, everything is based on a primitive and irrational impulse. Compared with Claire's "Intermission", the film has lost its carefreeness. Bu?uel said that ""An Andalou Dog" is a desperate and fierce call for killing. It symbolizes the rebellious spirit of young intellectuals in the late 1920s who were full of contradictory emotions towards social reality. At the same time, the film also clearly shifts from the exploration of pure rhythmic form in avant-garde films to the exploration of content. And “this kind of meaningful content clearly belongs to the realm of fantasy.

To be more precise, it is a requirement to make fantasy unconsciously more real and more important than the world of our senses. Inner reality became the Surrealists’ “only reality,” as Kracauer points out: The Surrealists “convinced that inner reality was far superior to external reality. Their primary aim is, therefore, to express concretely the flow of inner life and all its contents through instinctive activity, dreams, fantasies, etc., without any recourse to stories or any other rational method.

The various genres of surrealist tendencies active in France in the 1920s were passionate and active explorations of film aesthetics, although those young filmmakers still had certain limitations in their thinking. , although some of their theories and opinions are too extreme, their understanding of "dynamic plastic arts, the exploration of the structure of film images, and the contribution to the visual language of films are immeasurable. Just as far as Surrealism is concerned In terms of film, it truly realizes the wish of the surrealist writer Bruton: "(Time) is divided, disrupted, and eliminated. The present and the future no longer conflict with each other. It is just as easy to live yesterday or tomorrow as it is to live today, or even to live yesterday and tomorrow at the same time. This undoubtedly became the creative basis for the modernist films that re-emerged in the late 1950s. At the same time, the experimental spirit of French avant-garde films continues to inspire film artists of different periods and nationalities to explore more imaginative, novel, strange and in-depth aesthetics in film art.