This year, 25 FPS is paying a tribute to the grandfathers of all things absurd and irrational on screen. For, reason and ratio are not exactly why we appreciate film. Therefore, check out for DADA in the Odes to Film programme, as a prelude to Competitions, in the company of contemporary unreasonables and experimenters.
DADA was born one hundred years ago, in a pub in Zurich. It sprang from the misery, laments and messy lives of several artists and creative people who sought their ‘right to piss in rainbow colours’ (T. Tzara), among other things. Hugo Ball’s manifesto rejected all things ‘pretty and right’, essentially all that is rational, proscribed, standardised, sealed and dead, and especially blind faith in human progress, which was already then showing an ugly tendency to occasionally culminate in a global massacre. The key word is ‘reject’, not ‘criticise’, because critique is mere intellectualising, and every artistic expression or every expression in general needs to be rooted beyond all reason. Is there a better catalyst for such a noble idea than a medium which is still green and immature and which was still seen in the public eye more as a funfair and less as art? Cinema gave DADA a synesthetic platform everyone could take part in, so a large number of artists from most diverse practices felt a need to try their hand at the new medium. DADA gave cinema an awareness of its own materiality and a wish to examine the possibilities, instead of complying with the existing patterns. This year, 25 FPS is paying a tribute to the grandfathers of all things absurd and irrational on screen. For, reason and ratio are not exactly why we appreciate film. Therefore, check out for DADA in the Odes to Film programme, as a prelude to Competitions, in the company of contemporary unreasonables and experimenters.
The French-American artist Marcel Duchamp built his multidisciplinary work searching for different points of view and dimensions. Made in association with two other pioneers of the movement, Man Ray and cinematographer Marc Allégret, Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1925-26) consists of series of spirals whose rotations – sometimes harmonised, sometimes diametrically opposed – produce an optical effect which simultaneously evokes growth and depth. It attacks the viewer and detaches from him; it enwraps, swallows and opens in one. Some roto-reliefs are complemented with text in cryptic word play denoting a certain sense, but constantly moving us away from it. The Dadaist hissing against the concept of common sense in approaching a work of art oozes from every pore of this fidgety piece. The truth, whatever and however it may be, is not to be reached through mind, but through imagination and spirit. DADA addresses the super-rational or irrational; it is pneumatic, even occult. And cinema, according to Duchamp, is the ideal art form to achieve this effect.
René Clair, in a gesture completely uncharacteristic of the Dadaist discourse of yapping and competing, called his Entr’acte (1924) a mere component of the opera Relâche by Francis Picabia, who openly strived to outDADA the DADA. Nothing to be amazed about; one of the symbols of the movement was ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail – the concept of systematic undermining of the old values and building new ones was considered by the Dadaists the supreme principle, followed by spite and self-aggrandising arrogance in the same package. Clair’s claim, albeit historically accurate, is completely contrary to the current status of his brilliant comic burlesque. Entr’acte is one of the canonical texts, which features a series of most famous personalities of the French Dada, a film that turned the streets and roofs of Paris into a frenzied anarchy-playhouse, a testament to the enthusiasm shared by all members of the movement for absurdity and its manifestations in all the forms of popular culture (especially American comedies), as well as one of the earliest and greatest tributes to the kinetic attributes of cinema. Naturally, today he needs much less presentation than Picabia’s opera.
Swede Viking Eggeling is also one of the pioneers; his Diagonal Symphony (1921) is one of the first animated films ever and an extremely influential study of relations between image and music. Eggeling’s abstract forms, structured around diagonal vectors, represent an image split off into elementary units, similar to music scores and moving in line with musical patterns and the principle of polyphony. It is the concept of polyphony, as something typical of things lasting in time, that drew the attention to the temporality of cinema, and consequently to the inherent connection between cinema and music (another temporal art). Diagonal Symphony is an inevitable title in the tradition of visual music and its strictness in laying bare the audiovisual procedures testifies to the idealism in the very core of DADA, according to which cinema, above all arts, possesses a utopian potential to establish a universal language of form.
Similar to Eggeling’s film, Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923) is a textbook example of absolute film (cinéma pur, Henri Chomette), whose aspirations encompassed basic elements of cinema such as light, motion, tone and rhythm. In his film debut, Man Ray decided to apply the methods he developed in photography onto cinema, which resulted in so-called rayographs – images where the object is placed between the lens and the source of light, instead of reflecting light as in the standard shooting process. Everything else is improvisation, juxtaposition between abstract and natural forms (flowers on the meadow, a nude torso by a window etc.) in close-ups and allowing the ideas and further procedures to evolve during the process.
Hans Richter’s Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928) is among this company the closest to Clair’s film. It also has a tendency to resort to physical humour and popular genres, unlike the violent abstraction of form to which their fellow filmmakers resorted to. The film portrays a rebellion of everyday objects brought to life, becoming independent and revoltingly attacking their fleshy owners, prisoners of their own daily routines. The result is a rowdy pile of visual tricks whose dynamics, as with Eggeling, is structured around musical patterns. Ghosts Before Breakfast even possess a narrative progress in their anarchy, but in this case it gives precedence to visual orgies.
An ode to the iconic title whose material is, paradoxically, brought down to the most essential elements of cinema (light, dark, sound, silence) crept after Tetraplan performance in the Expanded Cinema programme. The Flicker (1966) by Tony Conrad is an invitation to collective hallucination without seductive images, narrative and other opiates, created by way of simple montage manipulation of intervals of black and white frames. Neurological effects guaranteed, as well as a special experience of taking part in the very process of creating an authentic film illusion. Expect inexistent spaces, expect to be overwhelmed by phantom colours of the entire rainbow spectrum, just like old man Tzara wanted it. Leave your fear of epilepsy at the door and let’s trip together – and individually.
Danijel Brlas