DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

By R. Bruce Elder

2

Dadism and the Disasters of War

R. Bruce Elder

Here I examine in some detail two artistic movements that extolled the value of escaping reason’s enfeebling effects. In the first of these chapters, I challenge the view of DADA as chiefly a negative or protest movement, and to counter that view, I demonstrate that spiritual themes had a important place in DADA and that they steered it towards constructive ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554583805

R. Bruce Elder

R. Bruce Elder is an award-winning filmmaker and teaches media at Ryerson University. His book Harmony & Dissent (WLU Press, 2008) received the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Rudolf Kuenzli described DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (WLU Press, 2013) as “that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.”

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DADA, SURREALISM, AND THE CINEMATIC EFFECT

Film and Media Studies Series

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DADA, SURREALISM,

AND THE CINEMATIC EFFECT

R. BRUCE ELDER

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Elder, Bruce (R. Bruce)

   Dada, surrealism, and the cinematic effect / R. Bruce Elder.

(Film and media studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-625-7

   1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Dadaism. 3. Surrealism. I. Title. II. Series: Film and media studies series

N72.M6E44 2013     709.04’06     C2012-903278-6

_________

Electronic monograph in multiple formats.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-641-7 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-55458-380-5 (EPUB)

1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Dadaism. 3. Surrealism. I. Title. II. Series: Film and media studies series (Online)

N72.M6E44 2013     709.04’06     C2012-903279-4

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Cover and Text design by Daiva Villa / Chris Rowat Design. Cover image: Raoul Hausmann, Tatlin lebt zu Hause (1920). Photo: Moderna Museet / Stockholm.

© 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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www.wlupress.wlu.ca

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes

1 The Fate of Reason in Modernity

The Modern Paradigm: Privileging Reason

Geometry and Geometries

Foundationalism Collapses

Logic and Paradox

Continuity and the Foundations of Physics

Cantor and the Strangeness of Infinity

Formalist Mathematics and the Limits of Reason

Consequences of Reason’s Retreat

Primitivism as a Response to the Collapse of Reason

Notes

2 Dadaism and the Disasters of War

The Zürich Coterie and Their Antics

The Dada Conspirators: Tristan Tzara

The Dada Conspirators: Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings

The Dada Conspirators: Francis Picabia

The Künstlerkneipe Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada

DADA: War and Politics

DADA against the Burgeoning of Nationalism: What DADA Might Have Prevented

A Precursor of DADA: The Comic Grotesque

The Diffusion of DADA

The Conditions That Produced the State of Mind Known as DADA

Elementalism’s Menacing Lure

DADA: Art and Anti-Art

DADA and the Life-Principle

Constructive DADA

Hans Richter on the Six Forms of Use in Returning Art to Its Elementary Condition

Dada Forms: Collage

Further on Collage’s New Notion of Form

DADA and Language

Parallels with the Russian Transrationalists and Andrei Bely

Zaum and the Higher Consciousness of Trans-Sense

Picabia, Man Ray, and the Dadaist Art of the Machine

Duchamp and DADA’s Art of the Machine

Entr’acte: Commentary

Man Ray’s Dada Cinema

Emak Bakia: Introduction

Emak Bakia: Commentary

DADA: In Conclusion

Notes

3 Surrealism and the Cinema

Beginnings

Psychoanalysis and the Occult: The Intrusion of Alien Forms into Consciousness and the Poetics of the Surrealist Literary Image

DADA and Surrealism

Hippolyte Taine, Hasard Objectif, the Poetic Image, and the Cinema

The Cinema, Photography, and the Marvellous

Photography, the Surrealist Object, and the Unheimlich

Ernst’s Frottage as a Handmade Trace and Automatist Form

Surrealism, Apollinaire, and Reconciliation

Surrealism and the Hegelian Dialectic

Surrealism and the Freudian Dialectic

Dalí, the Double Image, and Paranoiac-Critical Methods

Dalí against Idealism

Dalí, Paranoia, and Lacan: A New Phase of Surrealism Begins

Lacan’s Theories and Surrealists’ Conception of the Poetic Image

Un chien andalou: Commentary

An Anti-Art Film

The Verbal Image

Surrealism’s Fissures and Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan

Las Hurdes and the Documentary

Dialectical Structure in Las Hurdes

Las Hurdes and Bataille’s Heterology

Las Hurdes and the Sacred

Las Hurdes as an Ethnographic Film

The Hurdanos in History

How Surrealism Has Been Passed Down into the Twenty-First Century: The Marvellous Correspondence between Max Ernst’s Collage Novels and Lawrence Jordan’s Films

Collage as a Pneumatic Device: Through Ernst to Jordan

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Dimanche (Calcination)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Lundi (Dissolution)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Mardi (Separation)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Mercredi (Conjunction)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Jeudi (Putrefaction/Fermentation)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Vendredi (Distillation)

The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—Samedi (Coagulation)

Lawrence Jordan: Surrealism and Alchemy

Lawrence Jordan’s Duo Concertantes: Commentary

Part One: The Centennial Exposition

Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway

Notes

In Lieu of a Conclusion

APPENDIX 1: How Reason Lost Its Purchase on Reality

Notes

APPENDIX 2: Infinity Confounds Reason

Notes

APPENDIX 3: An Account of Gödel’s Proof for Poets, Painters, and Art Historians

Notes

APPENDIX 4: Emak Bakia: A Shot Analysis and Commentary

Notes

APPENDIX 5: Un chien andalou: A Shot Analysis and Commentary

Notes

APPENDIX 6: Land without Bread: A Shot Analysis and Commentary

Notes

APPENDIX 7: Analysis of Lawrence Jordan’s Duo Concertantes

Part One: The Centennial Exposition

Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway

Duo Concertantes Musical Form: Tables

Duo Concertantes Part 1: The Centennial Exposition

Duo Concertantes Part 2: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been very long in the making, and the debts of gratitude I owe increased proportionately with the time that passed. Simply to list the names of those to whom I must express my thanks risks slighting their contributions, but to state what I owe them would make these acknowledgements unduly protracted. I have decided that better than either of those unpalatable options would be to convey my gratitude to each and every one of them personally. I look forward to seeing them all in the coming months and to sharing with them (singly, in pairs, and collectively) some bottles of wine, which I have set aside especially for the purpose.

I do want to acknowledge here the extraordinary debt I one to one particular group of people. Not only has this book been a long time in the making, but it encountered many difficulties, which only the knowledgeable staff at Wilfrid Laurier University Press know about (and they won’t tell). Brian Henderson, Clare Hitchens, Leslie Macredie, and Lisa Quinn—every one of them has been deeply committed to this challenging, troublesome project. Working with such a gracious and knowledgeable group made the preparation of the manuscript and my efforts in its production endurable. Their supporting cast—copy editor Matthew Kudelka, designer and compositor Daiva Villa, and indexer Elaine Melnick—have been exemplarily professional. I want to acknowledge particularly the herculean efforts made by the WLU team’s Managing Editor, Rob Kohlmeier: he has defended and protected this project with impressive rigour and understanding—and his calm, steadying approach kept this project moving relentlessly ahead, despite a sometimes unruly and often nearly despondent author. I owe him—and all members of the team at WLU Press—a lot more than I find myself able to express. They are models of commitment to the humanities and fine arts, and that resolve and understanding is rare these days. To them I want to say, I don’t know how I was so lucky to find you.

An angel must have sent me my studio assistant, Ajla Odobašić. She gives me hope that, despite the darkness of the times, young artists with prodigious talents and critical intelligence still come along, committed to imagining a better world, to developing their talents and putting them to work at nudging that world closer to reality. With her around, working on film is often sheer delight, for she already understands that vision begins in love and finds its fulfillment in love. Her aid on this project—her keen eye and appreciation for the arts, along with her serene, quiet, methodical manner (which cohabit so comfortably with an unstinting imagination)—often spared my thinking from plunging into conceptual folly and my writing from falling into absurdity.

No words could possibly convey my debt to my wife, Kathryn Elder, who has shared in the delights and the setbacks that attended this project, helped me track down nearly impossible-to-find sources, tinkered with the prose, challenged my ideas, identified numerous errors (conceptual, factual, descriptive, and grammatical), assuaged my anxieties about participating in conferences (and generally about speaking in public), and periodically exhorted me not to conclude that the struggle naught availeth. Just being with her has enabled me to take joy in our shared cause. You know, Kathy, that none of what I do or make could happen without you.

INTRODUCTION

This book is one in a series of volumes whose topic is the early intellectual reception of the cinema, especially its reception by those who were associated with advanced artistic practices. The series considers the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and, especially, artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to the advent of the cinema. DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect concerns the cinema’s reception by those who were associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements.

The common view of the cinema’s early intellectual reception is that art lovers wrote about it in an embarrassed and apologetic tone. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry for the Philosophy of Film that provides a useful overview of the field, expounding the common view:

The question that dominated early philosophical inquiry into film was whether the cinema—a term that emphasizes the institutional structure within which films were produced, distributed, and viewed—could be regarded as an artform. There were two reasons why cinema did not seem worthy of the honorific designation of an art. The first was that early contexts for the exhibition of films included such venues as the vaudeville peep show and the circus side show. As a popular cultural form, film seemed to have a vulgarity that made it an unsuitable companion to theater, painting, opera, and the other fine arts. A second problem was that film seemed to borrow too much from other art forms. To many, early films seemed little more than recordings of either theatrical performances or everyday life. The rationale for the former was that they could be disseminated to a wider audience than that which could see a live performance. But film then only seems to be a means of access to art and not an independent art form on its own. The latter, on the other hand, seemed too direct a reproduction of life to qualify as art, for there seemed little mediation by any guiding consciousness.¹

The idea that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s origins in the vaudeville peep show and the circus side show, fearing that its vulgarity made it unworthy of the honorific designation art and an unsuitable companion for the great high arts, has achieved a near hegemony.

That was indeed one strain of the response to the new medium. However, I argue there was another strain that has gone largely unrecognized. This other response was far from anxious about film’s lowly provenance in popular entertainment. On the contrary, it embraced the new medium as the first art that truly was capable of reflecting modern, largely urban, life. In Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo: WLU Press, 2008)—a companion volume to the present book—I made the point this way: with the appearance of the cinema, a new paragone erupted, with many thinkers declaring that the cinema was the ottima arte (i.e., the top art), or that it was destined to become so when the true cinema emerged.² Take, for example, this passage from an early text on cinema, The Birth of the Sixth Art, published in 1911 by Ricciotto Canudo, a scholar, literary entrepreneur, and friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Abel Gance, and Blaise Cendrars (and who is usually said to be the first film theorist, even though Vaćlav Tille, author of the 1908 Kinéma, likely has a stronger claim to the title):

In fact, the cinematographic theater is the first new theater, the first authentic and fundamental theater of our time. When it becomes truly aesthetic, complemented with a worthy musical score played by a good orchestra, even if only representing life, real life, momentarily fixed by the photographic lens, we shall be able to feel then our first sacred emotion, we shall have a glimpse of the spirits, moving towards a vision of the temple, where Theater and Museum will once more be restored for a new religious communion of the spectacle and Aesthetics. The cinematograph as it is today will evoke for the historians of the future the image of the first extremely rudimentary wooden theaters, where goats have their throats slashed and the primitive goat song and tragedy were danced, before the stone apotheosis consecrated by Lycurgus, even before Aeschylus’ birth, to the Dionysian theater.

…

It is desire for a new Festival, for a new joyous unanimity, realized at a show, in a place where together, all men can forget in greater or lesser measure, their isolated individuality. This forgetting, soul of any religion and spirit of any aesthetic, will one day be superbly triumphant. And the Theater, which still holds the vague promise of something never dreamt of in previous ages: the creation of a sixth art, the plastic Art in motion, having already achieved the rudimentary form of the modern pantomime.

Present day life lends itself to such a victory …³

For Canudo, the cinema was the fundamental theater of our time.

The view that the cinema was the top art was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices, and many poets, painters, playwrights, and sculptors excitedly declared that the arrival of this new art—which was so paradigmatically fitted for the modern urban world—had imposed on them the demand that the media in which they worked (or the forms they created using the materials of their various media) be reconstituted so that they might take on at least some of the attributes that made the cinema the ottima arte. Notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged in those media), and about the urgency of doing so, became, I argue, a principal part—indeed, the principal part—of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century.

It is taking several volumes for me to lay out my thesis regarding the cinema’s influence on avant-garde movements and to provide evidence to support it. Dividing my argument among those volumes has not been a straightforward task.⁴ In Harmony and Dissent, I analyzed various proclamations that called for a gegendstandlose Kunst (objectless art) and interpreted the ideals of various Russian and early Soviet art movements (Suprematism, Rayonism, Cubo-Futurism, Productivism, and Constructivism). In this volume, I home in on two of the most vital art movements of the early twentieth century, DADA and Surrealism.

Those two related movements are of special importance to my thesis. I maintain that many, if not most, artists involved in these art movements were very enthusiastic about the cinema and deemed it the top art. That claim, however, raises the question of what these artists and thinkers understood the cinema to be. What features did the cinema possess that made it seem to these enthusiasts to be the ottima arte? Some, likely most, of the thinkers of the early twentieth century who proclaimed the cinema to be the top art held extreme, even bizarre conceptions of the cinema, and the artists and thinkers who associated themselves with DADA and Surrealism were no different in this regard. A wide assortment of esoteric beliefs were common in the last half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth. The bone structure of the argument that led to celebrating the cinema as the top art was this (and here I reduce the argument to no more than a crude caricature): the value of artworks / art forms depends on their capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects; the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device; therefore, the cinema is the top art.⁵ One can well feel shock at the extravagance of this deduction. Why would the artists and thinkers involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements have believed that the value of artworks / art forms depends on the capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects? And why would they have believed that the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device? This book is an effort to answer those two questions. To explore their answers requires us to examine the discursive context in which those movements arose. And to understand the discursive context into which the cinema was introduced requires us to appraise the intellectual morphology of European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century; only in this way we will be able to understand how that culture responded to the advent of the cinema.

We begin our investigation by noting that DADA and Surrealism (along with a number of other vanguard art movements that flourished from 1909 through to the 1960s) embraced some form of irrationalism. Indeed, we can understand DADA and Surrealism as celebrations of what human beings might become when instrumental reason no longer is the dominant agent in identity formation. But why did so many vanguard artists (and vanguard art movements) embrace irrationalism? In answer to that question, often a sociological/historical account is given: the horrors of the First World War, a war that was made all the more brutal by the deployment of chemical and mechanical weapons that so-called advanced technology had made possible, led to the discreditation of reason. Historians of ideas have argued that by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was already becoming clear that technology was more than simply a means for increasing productivity and for overcoming scarcity and want; technology, it was becoming evident, had become a closed system, forged by the application of instrumental reason to the administration of nature (including human beings). If that lesson was becoming clear by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Great War drove it home with a vengeance: it revealed reason to be an antagonist to humans’ animal connections with one another, an adversary to their charity and mutual concern.

The claim that the Great War exposed reason’s destructive character relies on three propositions: first, that it was one of the first experiences of mass killing; second, that such mass killing had been made possible by new technologies; and third, that these new technologies were products of science and reason. But this explanation leaves a very important question unanswered: Why was reason identified as the agent that precipitated this historic calamity? Any number of other explanations might have presented themselves: nationalist ideologies were ascendant, often provoking enmity between nations; the rise of realpolitik undermined the moral principles that had limited the harm that nations were willing to do one another; the pace of historical change had accelerated to the point that no certainties—and definitely no moral certainties—could lay claim to people’s allegiance, and the mind became terrified of plummeting into the abyss; technological developments had increased humans’ sense of mastery over the circumambient world, thereby bolstering a voluntarist view of human be-ing and enhancing propensities towards violence; and/or the violence perpetrated by the rapid introduction of industrial (technological) capitalism was being answered with an irrational counter-violence. Most of these positions have been argued, some of them by Hugo Ball (1886–1927) after he broke with the Dada movement. By way of comparison, the claim that reason was responsible for the calamity that destroyed Europe as it had existed before the war hardly seems, prima facie, the most plausible explanation for the Great War.

The First World War did play a key role in exposing the folly of reason and the tragedy to which the Enlightenment’s dream of reason had condemned us. That admitted, there are other events that exposed the pernicious course on which the dream of reason had set Europeans (and those belonging to cultures derived from Europe), and the nature of those events affected the forms of irrationalism that artists adopted over the quarter-century this book examines. Among the most important of these developments were those in mathematics (specifically in set theory, including Cantor’s transfinite set theory, and in the foundations of mathematics) and in philosophy that unmade reason’s overarching claims. Those developments, I maintain, created a context—more precisely, they created new discourse protocols—for how reason, nature, mentality, and humanity would be understood and spoken of (just as Darwin’s evolutionary theory earlier had shifted the protocols governing discussions of nature, time, and humans’ relations to animals). The discourse protocols that arose from these momentous developments in philosophy and mathematics affected thinkers whose interests lay outside those of the technical philosophers and mathematicians whose works were contributing to these developments. Soon afterwards, Europeans began to identify reason as responsible for (what seemed at the time to be) the West’s great historical calamity.

From the seventeenth century onwards, a compelling image of reality—of the realm of matter and of consciousness’s/spirit’s relation to it—had consolidated itself, becoming at once ever more restrictive and more normative. The imago mundi that emerged in the seventeenth century no longer figured matter as a realm whose origin was divine and whose order was providential and purposive. Rather, nature, as depicted in this image, was a realm whose constitution could not be accounted for by petitioning to any principles lying beyond the material, and especially not (as the Greeks and Christian theologians down to the end of the Middle Ages explained beings) through the purposes that entities and their activities served. The task of understanding nature, in this view, became that of understanding the regularities in events, of identifying laws that describe patterns in the succession of events. The belief that cognition would afford knowledge only of the regularities in occurrences was a principal factor in limiting moderns’ conception of the modalities of time to nothing more than a linear process. Since the work of consciousness was understood to be solely cognition, and since cognition was understood as nothing other than organizing and classifying the world according to the laws governing the succession of appearances, knowledge was reduced to the products of calculative reason. Thus, some of the most profound realms of human consciousness were reconceived so that they came to be understood as lying beyond the bounds of the legitimate activities of the cognitive enterprise. This image of reality depicted consciousness as confronting a world the reasons for whose order we cannot know—a world that is indifferent to individual lives, that came into being by accident, and that will disappear at a time mandated by the initial accidental conditions that gave rise to it. The vagaries of these indifferent, accidental congeries of matter were all we could hope to know.

For many later moderns, this image of consciousness and reality seemed utterly inadequate. They felt the noetic strength and richness of forms of experience that modernity had disenfranchised. As Walter Benjamin did in The Project for a Coming Philosophy, they claimed that cognition encompassed a broader range of experiences, including experiential modalities richer and more fulfilling than reason. Prayer, meditation, trance, dream, and contemplative pursuits, they maintained, provide genuine understanding of reality, including the divine. These domains of experience are the provinces of the religious seeker, the mystic, and the artist. Intuitive bodily knowledge, which remains largely preconscious and unconceptualized, informs us of the continuity of our be-ing (throughout this volume I use the hyphenated term be-ing to refer to the actualizing power that sustains beings in their existence; and as the Greeks did, I believe that power maintaining beings in existence has to do with their esse-nce) with that of other beings. Religious figures, mystics, and artists have insisted that only a participatory form of experience—a mode of experience that recognizes that when we know, we engage with and act upon the reality that is known—can overcome the deleterious effects of instrumental reason, which pretends to be θεωρία (theoria, theory), the observation of nature as though from the position of an outside spectator, and which conceives of knowledge as arising at the position of the outside spectator even while its τέλος (telos) is the control and regulation of nature (and the elimination of chance). But some later moderns knew too that the performative dimension is the legitimate domain of religion and art. The artists associated with a number of the vanguard art movements of the twentieth century felt the importance of these disenfranchised modes of experience and strived to develop artistic forms that might revitalize them, preparing the way for them to assume a greater role in the knowledge enterprise when a new understanding of reality emerged. Indeed, many of these artists believed that one of the purposes of vanguard art was to hasten this emergence.

The disenfranchisement of non-rational ways of knowing came at a great cost. One result was that our capacity for these experiences withered, like organs (such as the human appendix) that, in losing their purpose, are reduced to vestigial forms. Their loss of purpose accounts for the strange forms that these experiences have assumed in recent times, an oddity most conspicuous in the pale and wan new age theologies that any strong-minded thinker must deem as being among the banes of our age. Nevertheless, the occult’s spiritual, moral, and perhaps even noetic worth helps account for the importance of the vanguard movements in the arts of the early twentieth century.

In the first chapter of this volume, I explore how calculative reason undid its own claim to be the foundation for all knowledge. I maintain that the early stages by which calculative reason dismantled its foundational role created the conditions under which the sociological and historical reasons for embracing irrationalism had the effects they did. I contend that if reason (or what moderns identify as reason, viz., calculative reason) had not weakened itself, the external, sociological/historical factors that impelled, first, artists and thinkers, and, later, the greater portion of humanity, towards irrationalism would not have had the sweeping, not to say apocalyptic, effects they did. In this section of the work, I begin by examining the earlier phases of the process by which reason dismantled itself, phases that preceded or were contemporaneous with the time when the Dadaist activities were at their apogee. I then deal with later phases of this process, which I follow to their conclusion in the work of the logician Kurt Gödel, after DADA had dissolved and the Surrealist movement was well under way. Examining this phase provides an illuminating parallel to the work of the artists I consider—in the fields of formal logic and the foundations of mathematics, we will find a critique that resonates with the one that Dada and Surrealist artists offered of reason’s overreaching ambition. An examination of Gödel’s work and its implications will help buttress my argument concerning the fate of reason in the first half of the twentieth century. In the main body of the text, I take only a cursory look at Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, but I invite interested readers to explore them in slightly greater depth in Appendix 3. We must understand the process whereby reason was dislodged from its place of authority if we wish to apprehend why the irrationalism of the early twentieth century took on the particular character it did. I urge even readers whose mathematical interests are slight to take up the challenge of the first three appendices, as the parallels between developments in formal logic and the foundations of mathematics and those in the arts are striking.

If, during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the authority of reason was collapsing, the cinema was seen as an exemplary art form and as vital to the modern sensibility then being formed, one would expect the intellectual reception of the early cinema to reflect not only the developing crisis in belief but also the notions about overcoming the challenges that crisis posed. A study of the intellectual reception of the early cinema bears out that expectation—a good part of the task I have set myself in this volume is to offer proof of my claim. The cinema, I argue, was seen as embodying the era’s Geist, a new form of thinking that might serve as an antidote to the pernicious despondency generated by the collapse of calculative reason, which had been exposed as an impostor. To understand exactly why the cinema was thought of as providing an antidote to those effects, we have to understand how artists and thinkers of the first decades of the twentieth century conceived of the cinema and how reason revealed its own shortcomings. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examine two vanguard artistic movements that extolled the value of escaping reason’s enfeebling effects. In Chapter 2, I challenge the view of DADA that considers it as chiefly a negative or protest movement: I show that spiritual themes had a role in that movement and steered it towards constructive ends. Following that, I turn to DADA’s successor movement, Surrealism, and show that DADA’s spiritual and occult interests were taken up by it. In my consideration of the relations between film and the artistic movements known as DADA and Surrealism, I take two approaches. The first is to explore the cinema’s role as a model for those movements and to demonstrate that the film medium had a privileged status for Dadaists and Surrealists, who wanted to reformulate poetry, theatre, music, and painting so that those forms might take on some of the cinema’s virtues. The second is to study how the advanced ideas about art and artmaking proposed by the Dada and Surrealist circles, and the advanced artistic practices to which those ideas gave rise, reciprocally influenced the cinema.

In Chapter 3, which is given over to Surrealism, I pay special attention to Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (1934). I do so for several reasons. First, I understand that claims regarding the Surrealists’ interest in alchemy and Spiritualism will seem to some outré and highly doubtful, and that no single work could be used as the final evidence of my claims for the pneumatic character of DADA and Surrealism—this should be abundantly clear to anyone who considers how widespread the interest in esoteric phenomena was in the period this book covers. Nonetheless, the depth of understanding of alchemy that work evinces, and the many points of connection of alchemy to psychoanalytic theory that a careful analysis that work can reveal, make an in-depth study of Ernst’s collage novel well suited to our purposes. I hope that a fine-grain analysis of this work, set in the context of my more general commentary on alchemy, psychoanalysis, and Surrealism, will make plausible my seemingly extravagant claims about the extent of Surrealists’ interest in alchemy (and, more generally, esoterism and pneumatic philosophies).

My second reason for focusing on Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness, 1934) is that Ernst’s novel provides an occasion to deliberate on the Surrealists’ use of collage, and to demonstate how deeply imbued with the spirit of cinema Surrealist collage really is. My third reason relates to the fact that Une semaine de bonté is a sequence and presents a tale—an unusually formed tale, it is true, the meaning of which can be discerned only by applying interpretive procedures analogous to those learned in the course of a psychoanalysis. In that way, the tale recounted in Une semaine de bonté resembles those recounted in such Surrealist films as Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), L’âge d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), and Étoile de mer (Starfish, 1928). Finally, our eyes tell us there is an extraordinary resemblance between Max Ernst’s collages and those of Lawrence Jordan, who has felt a deep connection to Ernst’s world, so Jordan’s work (as I show) brings Surrealism into the present.

I recognize it is odd that a book stressing the role of the cinema on twentieth-century art hardly mentions film in the first 150 pages, but I contend that Dada and Surrealist artists were led to their belief that the cinema was the top art by way of an extravagant deduction: the value of art depends on its capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects, and given that the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device, it is therefore the top art. I will be attempting to answer two key questions that arise from their claim. First, what led the artists and thinkers involved in the Dada and Surrealist movements to believe that the value of artworks / art forms depends on their capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects? And second, what led them to believe that the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device?

The first of those questions constitutes the substance of the first chapter, which examines the discursive context in which that belief arose. That context was shaped by developments that were taking place in philosophy, science, and mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to which few art historians dealing with the period have given adequate attention. These developments had a momentous impact on how humans understood the nature of mind and its grasp on reality—indeed, on what humans understood thinking to be. The Dada and Surrealist movements made it plain that notions about the nature of thinking (and about the character of strong thought) were changing; so too did the development of psychoanalysis in that period. I would argue, though the evidence is less definite, that so did the birth and early development of the cinema. The relations among these new ways of understanding what thinking really is constitute the problematic I address in this book. I claim that these phenomena were understood through their connections to irrationalisms (of several varieties). An examination of the discursive context in which the arts and ideas existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that an enthusiasm for irrationalism was widespread. That enthusiasm goes a long way towards explaining why people embraced the first premise of our extravagant syllogism that the value of artworks / art forms depends on their capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects; it also provides a context for understanding why they would have placed such a high stake on its second premise—that the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device.

A common method in art and cinema history is to relate art forms to their social context. But this is often done without systematically addressing how that social context was understood in its time. In the first part of this book, I attempt to unpack the developments that changed the discursive context in which art and artmaking was understood at the time of which I am writing, for that sort of context moulds perceptions and their interpretations; at the level of the individual mind, it also produces schemata that help us decide what we are likely to perceive. It is important to forge a model that develops from the understanding that the relation between social context and mentality is not a direct, mirroring relation—a model that figures the relation between social context and mentality as a mediated relation, one that recognizes that what we understand as a social context is not given to us but is something we make. Indeed, there are many tiers of mediation between social context and artistic form and between socio-economic history (or, more exactly, representations of socio-economic history) and forms of thought.

An example drawn from the present, though somewhat oversimplified, might help make my point. Consider the relation between increasing global flows of people and commodities that the past two or three decades have seen (and that we will continue to see for the foreseeable future) and the rise of postmodernist thinking to its present, normative position. There is not a simple, mirroring relation here: postmodernist thinking did not arise directly out of increased global flows of people and commodities (and even these global flows themselves demand to be understood not as givens but as representations constructed by ideology). More important, to understand the relationship between the two, we would have to understand how juxtaposing ideas from different cultures have brought people to challenge the belief that the modern Western paradigm embodies absolute and universal truths. More important still, we would have to understand how intellectual developments in the later modern period (including the waning of the onto-theologies based in Christianity and the epistemologies associated with them) prepared the ground that would make it possible for people to formulate the idea of the diversity of truths. To simply assert that global flows of people and commodities produced postmodern thinking is to leave many necessary intricacies unaccounted for. So it is with DADA and Surrealism: to assert simply that the First World War produced DADA, and that DADA shaped its successor movement, Surrealism, is to conveniently ignore how intellectual developments in the period preceding their founding provided schemata that make it possible to formulate their founding ideas.

Consider the claim that the First World War led to DADA, which was essentially a protest movement. The first questions that should arise regard what DADA was and how its ideas reflected the trauma that the First World War inflicted. One might respond that, in reaction to the First World War, DADA raised a protest against bourgeois culture and its art. But in considering those claims, one would have to ask what features of bourgeois culture it was protesting. Nationalism, imperialism, and militarism, along with capitalism, would be obvious candidates. No doubt all of these were objects of the spleen of the Dadisten, but these claims are much unaccounted for. Why do so few of the writings of Dada artists directly address political issues? Why is there so much emphasis on rhythm and the body in the writings of Dada artists? How could Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling think of their pure abstract films as Dada works when they didn’t explicitly attack, or even allude to, nationalism or militarism? How can Hans (Jean) Arp’s elegant works, which cross biomorphic with geometric abstraction, be discussed as antinationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, anti-capitalist works? They can be understood that way, but I believe that a rich understanding of the relation between the elegant forms of his work and the anti-militarist beliefs of the Dadaisten involves taking into account several tiers of mediation between those forms and this content. To be precise, it demands that we take into account the discursive context of DADA. It is that discursive context that I plumb in the first part of this book.

As I have noted, it is commonly said that the First World War produced DADA. I have also noted that I do not disagree—I simply think that conceiving the relation between that social context and the Dada movement as a direct, mirroring relation is an oversimplification. We have to take into account the discursive context that mediates between representations of the social context and the beliefs of the Dadaisten. Consider this: the Dada artists made creative efforts to develop raw, savage, elemental forms for their works. In learning that, one might ask why, when the First World War represented a slide into barbarism and brutalism, a protest movement would have committed itself to formulating raw, savage, elemental forms. Perhaps to reflect the violence of the culture they were protesting, might come the reply. That response seems fine, or it would seem fine if not for the fact that the Dada artists actually celebrated these elemental forms as an antidote to the toxic effects of a bourgeois, capitalist culture that had descended into barbarism. The question of why they adopted the elementalism they did can be answered adequately only by taking into account the discursive context in which DADA arose. A key feature of that context was a belief that modern cultures (especially in the West) had invested too heavily in reason and that reason had turned out to be a false god. Its effects were stifling. In this period, irrationalist ideas were often associated with vitalist ideas (which in Germany went under the banner of Lebensphilosophie), and the discursive context of the era often associated a functional hypertrophism of the intellectual faculties with a lack of vitality. Conversely, the elementalism that the Dadaisten embraced was associated with irrationalist vitalism. A discursive context that celebrated vitalism and that had become skeptical about reason’s overreaching claims made it possible for the Dadaisten to formulate their vitalist, irrationalist tenets—and that context explains why, implausibly, those tenets could be connected to the celebration of raw, savage forms as a protest against the currents in modern culture that steered it towards barbarism. They believed that the pernicious effects of reason’s overreaching claims were what had led modern culture into barbarism, and that vitalism (even a vitalism gingered by reason’s implosion) could serve as an antidote to reason’s toxic effects. A culture of the body could undo the enfeebling effects of a culture that had invested too heavily in the mind.

Accordingly, in what follows, I emphasize how reason (understood as deduction and inference), by applying its own methods, came to expose its own limitations. Other developments in the science of the time—for example, the theory of special relativity and the theory of general relativity (1905 and 1916, respectively)—certainly affected common conceptions about time and space (often in ways that Albert Einstein would not have endorsed). Ernest Rutherford’s discrediting in 1909 of the plum pudding model of the atom offered by his teacher J.J. Thomson and his (Rutherford’s) demonstration that most of an atom’s mass as well as its positive charge are concentrated in a very small fraction of its volume (he proposed a planetary model, according to which electrons orbited a small, compact nucleus of positive charge) had a great impact on thinking beyond the narrow scientific community.⁶ Even the cursory examination of Wassily Kandinsky’s writings will serve to make one aware of the shock—and excitement—that artist felt in discovering that matter was mostly void. For him, that discovery confirmed the truth of the Buddhist and Hindu ideas that Theosophy incorporated: that matter is empty, illusory, void, nothingness.

But reason’s undermining of itself by its own methods arguably had a more fundamental impact than either Einstein’s theories of relativity or Rutherford’s planetary model of the atom. For one thing, reason undid itself (in the sense of demonstrating that it had no certain application to reality) with mathematical methods, and mathematics had long been held to be a means for establishing indisputable truths: for millennia, thinkers had maintained that so long as mathematical methods were correctly applied, mathematical thinking would divulge truths about reality. Leibniz wrote this famous passage advocating for his characteristica universalis (a forerunner of modern symbolic logic):

Whence it is manifest that if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in Arithmetic and Geometry.

For all inquiries which depend on reasoning would be performed by the transposition of characters and by a kind of calculus, which would immediately facilitate the discovery of beautiful results. For we should not have to break our heads as much as is necessary today, and yet we should be sure of accomplishing everything the given facts allow.

Moreover, we should be able to convince the world what we should have found or concluded, since it would be easy to verify the calculation either by doing it over or by trying tests similar to that of casting out nines in arithmetic. And if someone would doubt my results, I should say to him: Let us calculate, Sir, and thus by taking to pen and ink, we should soon settle the question.⁷

Leibniz’s dream was to perfect reason by giving it signs appropriate to expressing definitely and exactly all our thoughts, so that then we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done in Arithmetic and Geometry. This was the dream that dominated the eras from Plato to Russell. Describing this calculus ratiocinator (who, reading that term, would not think of George Boole’s Laws of Thought, which established the basis for the digital computer?), the twenty-year-old G.W. Leibniz wrote in 1663, in De arte combinatoria, that the fundamental purpose towards which he was directing his efforts was to develop a general method in which all truths of the reason would be reduced to a kind of calculation. At the same time this would be a sort of universal language or script, but infinitely different from all those projected hitherto; for the symbols and even the words in it would direct reason; and errors, except those of fact, would be mere mistakes in calculation. The idea here was that care in thinking (with thinking here being understood as calculation) would allow us, step by step, to learn the truths about nature. That confidence was demolished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When reason was seen to have ceded its grip on reality, the mind became unmoored from reality. Some responded to this as a catastrophe of the first order; others deemed that cutting the ligatures that bound the mind to reality unbridled the imagination and created the conditions for the realization of that historical advance that Romantics had proclaimed was necessary to save humankind, viz., the triumph of the imagination over reason. Sometimes, as we shall see, thinkers and artists maintained that by setting aside the rational faculty, one releases a noetic process even higher than the imagination, a pneumatic process that liquefies all the fixed certainties of the limited bourgeois self and enables us to live a new life of openness to all.

As momentous as the discoveries were that time and space are not absolutes and that the atom (and, it follows, matter) is mostly void, I believe (as I remarked above) that the critique of reason was more fundamental. What Einstein and Rutherford revealed was that the world is not as our senses perceive it to be. But the idea that the world is not constituted as it seems to be can be traced back to thinkers before Plato—indeed, arguably, it was one of those truths that earlier thinkers would have been bound to uncover. But traditionally, reason was assigned the role of correcting the senses (Plato, for example, maintained reason served that role). Do the senses (touch and sight) yield the impression that matter is solid? Rutherford’s mathematics (applied to the deflection of alpha particles bombarding a thin sheet of gold foil) would correct that. The feeling that reason itself had lost its grip on reality (and so could not fulfill its traditional role of correcting sense errors) had broader implications than Rutherford’s or Einstein’s discovery. One could make the same point with regard to that other great, but troubling, principle discovered by early-twentieth-century physics: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which tells us that one cannot measure simultaneously, and to any arbitrary degree of precision, both the present position and the future momentum (or trajectory) of an electron. Heisenberg’s discovery had a powerful and widespread impact, but it was contained by the discovery that applying Fourier transforms to an electron’s orbital frequencies enables us to manage that uncertainty.

There is another basis for understanding reason’s displacement from its place of authority as having a broader and deeper impact than those other discoveries of early twentieth-century science and mathematics. Human’s self-image, and the value that humans attach to their species, has traditionally been associated with reason. The Classical definition of the human being is that we are rational animals. The discovery that reason’s grasp on reality was feeble was experienced as a traumatic insult to humanity’s self-image. To help humans recover from this insult, an alternative nobility was required, and many thinkers and artists found it in humans’ pneumatic connection with a vital source. As I have noted, the belief that minds had become untethered from reality invited diverse responses. For many, it was a source of alarm. Others, though, took it as permission to liberate the imagination (or some other non-rational faculty): If the mind can’t fathom reality, why then should it try? If our beliefs are erroneous, if they are no better than imaginings, why then should we not at least strive to make those ideas—those imaginings—as rich, as intense, as vital, as life-giving as possible? For the most part, the members of the Dada and Surrealist movements embraced that conclusion and propounded it with a remarkable vigour.

But there was more to this embrace of irrationalism. Artists recognized that there was irrationalism and there was irrationalism. It could be pallid, feeble, defeatist, or it could be vital, intense, sexy, vibrant—because it could affirm the life force. It could even lead to transcendental experiences. Irrationalisms that promoted experiences with the latter characteristics were obviously those that would be of greatest value to artists, for they would sustain and even enhance the imagination. Artists recognized there was a long tradition of a vital, life-enhancing, occult irrationalism that provided symbols with which the imagination could work in elaborating an alternative, intense fantasy-reality.

Moreover, when reason came under assault, humans could no longer turn to science to help them understand reality. But the idea that the mind has no access to truth was one that many found unendurable. People longed to believe there was an alternative, irrational, or super-rational means to discover truth. The noesis (higher intuition) celebrated in many spiritual, esoteric, and occult traditions fit the bill—the occult traditions provided an alternative means of apprehending higher truths. Many thinkers and many artists found that alternative (and the truths it purported to reveal) very appealing. The widespread interest in esoteric and occult topics (often forgotten today) influenced DADA and Surrealism in important ways, and I argue that this interest also shaped the ways in which the cinema was understood. These esoteric interests formed part of the discursive context that arose in response to reason’s limits being exposed; they also help explain how it was possible for thinkers to formulate and embrace the extravagant beliefs that the value of art forms depends on their capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects and that the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device. And these tenets were the basis for the conclusion that the cinema was the top art, at least for modern times.

The seeming oddity of the book’s shape—it opens with an extended treatment of developments in philosophy and mathematics around the time when DADA and Surrealism emerged—can be connected to the peculiarity of the book’s character. Most scholarship about the relation between film and those two artistic movements has analyzed the influence that DADA and Surrealism had on the cinema (often by commenting on Dada and Surrealist films). This book takes a different approach: it focuses on the influence that the cinema had on the ideals of those two movements. It proposes that many painters and writers in the early twentieth century were struck by the cinema’s extravagantly modern character, and proclaimed that it would be necessary to reconstitute literature and visual art so that they took on some of the attributes that made the cinema the most important modern art form (some artists even believed that in doing so, they might surpass the cinema). The central claim—that the birth of the cinema played a vital role in establishing the agendas of DADA and Surrealism, and that the manifestos of those two movements can be understood as proposals, formulated in the wake of the recognition that the cinema was the most important art form for moderns—is entirely novel. I see this book more as a contribution to the history of twentieth-century art than as a film studies book, although I hope my approach opens up some unique insights into avant-garde film studies. The work contains a great deal of material on the cinema (specifically, on the intellectual reception of the early cinema) because it is important to understand how artists who affiliated themselves with DADA and Surrealism understood the cinema if we are to understand how the cinema influenced their proposals for reconstituting poetry, painting, theatre, music, and dance.

One way to understand the Dada and Surrealist artists’ ideas about the cinema is to read what they wrote about the cinema and the other arts (often their writings on painting and music are more revealing of what they thought about cinema than their writings specifically on cinema). Another important way is to study the films that Dada artists like Man Ray and Francis Picabia made (or helped make), as well as films that Surrealist artists like Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel made. If we know how to analyze those works, we can find there evidence of what their thoughts on the cinema were and why those thoughts led them to engage with this heartbreaking medium. It is for what they reveal about the Dadaists’ and Surrealists’ ideas on the cinema and its strengths that I analyze Entr’acte (1924), Retour à la raison (1923), Un chien andalou (1929), Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933/34), and Duo Concertantes (1964). I do not intend these analyses to be taken as case studies for the thesis that the cinema was the reigning art among arts for Dadaism and Surrealism. The relation of the film analyses to my thesis is more indirect. Nor are these analyses meant to be complete and exhaustive—I mine the films that the Dadaisten and Surrealists made for information about what they thought about the cinema. (In that respect, I treat the films in a somewhat similar way to how I treat other primary documents.) I point out that the commentary on Dada ideas about the structural homologies among cinema, dream, collage, and consciousness arises out of my analysis of Man Ray’s film Emak Bakia. My claim that the cinema was considered the top art requires asking the question "How did the Dadaisten and the Surrealists understand the cinema—what did they believe the cinema to be?" My answer is that they considered the cinema to be a pneumatic device. But the idea that the cinema is a pneumatic device is not one that would occur to many contemporary thinkers, so some effort will be required to establish that Dada and Surrealist artists thought of the cinema as an occult-influencing machine, and why my film analyses help make my case that they did in fact think of the cinema in that way.

The commentaries on specific films that are embedded in the text and in the film analyses in the appendices overlap: some of the material that appears in the main text is repeated in the appendices. There is a reason for this repetition. Take Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou, for example. I observe in that film a thorough and systematic use of what I call spatial ruptures—something that has hardly been discussed in the criticism. In the main text, I highlight a small number of instances where that device was used and try to put its use in context. In the appendix, I analyze the complete work—or, at least, a large portion of the work—in order to demonstrate its systematic use throughout the whole. Something similar could be claimed about the demands of exposing the theme of reality’s dreamlike nature in Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (and in fact, about the themes I trace into any of the films that I analyze). The films can be found readily in electronic form.

The film analyses presented in the appendices serve another purpose. Their form is modelled on Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker’s Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (1968), the first book of his I heard McLuhan discuss. Readers familiar with that book will recall that its authors juxtaposed artworks (I have had to rely on descriptions) and commentary to show that art reveals features of its cultural background (the environment in which it is made) that generally go unnoticed. One advantage of that form is that it can import utterly salient connections that, by being introduced, would disrupt the step-by-step-by-step march of the argumentative or demonstrative form used in the main text, from which I have pruned much useful information in order to throw the argument’s form into high relief. The "Through the Vanishing Point" form of the film commentaries in the appendices has allowed me to introduce much indispensible information about the artistic, social, intellectual, and cultural environment in which these films were made, and to do so without disrupting an unfolding argument.

The conception of DADA and Surrealism I propound is grounded in a close reading of Dada and Surrealist sources. I interpret these in a way that (obviously) I believe is consistent with the discursive context that helped generate them. Accordingly, I devote a great deal of attention to primary sources, providing close readings of writings of artists who affiliated themselves with DADA and Surrealism, as well as of the works produced in the same period, or slightly earlier, that I take to give evidence of the discursive context of DADA and Surrealism. I have generally relegated my remarks on more contemporary, secondary sources to the notes.

I understand very well that there are many topics quite directly related to the book’s central thesis that I could have discussed and have not. But I am also aware the book should be no longer than it is now. I have tried to maintain a sharp focus on the central argument (which, I point out again, involves unfamiliar, and seemingly strange, claims about the pneumatic function of art and extravagant beliefs about the cinema’s nature as an occult-influencing machine). I have tried my very best to find that sweet spot, at which I have amassed just enough evidence to establish incontrovertibly the central thesis and (without overtaxing readers’ patience) provided sufficiently detailed treatments of a few important