The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923

By Jennifer Wild

The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild’s interdisciplinary study grapples with the cinema’s expanded identity as a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Found in early methods of projection, film exhibition, and in the film industry’s penetration into cultural life by way of film stardom, advertising, and distribution, cinematic horizontality provides a new axis of inquiry for studying early twentieth-century modernism. Shifting attention from the film to the horizon of possibility around, behind, and beyond the screen, Wild shows how canonical works of modern art may be understood as responding to the changing characteristics of daily life after the cinema. Drawing from a vast popular cultural, cinematic, and art-historical archive, Wild challenges how we have told the story of modern artists’ earliest encounter with cinema and urges us to reconsider how early projection, film stardom, and film distribution transformed their understanding of modern life, representation, and the act of beholding. By highlighting the cultural, ideological, and artistic forms of interpellation and resistance that shape the phenomenology of a wartime era, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1923 provides an interdisciplinary history of radical form. This book also offers a new historiography that redefines how we understand early cinema and avant-garde art before artists turned to making films themselves.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2015.
The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild’s interdisciplinary study grapples

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520340800

Jennifer Wild

Jennifer Wild is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Book preview

The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923

The publisher gratefully acknowledges

the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund

of the University of California Press Foundation.

The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923

JENNIFER WILD

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wild, Jennifer, 1972- author.

The Parisian avant-garde in the age of cinema, 1900-1923 / Jennifer Wild.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27988-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-520-27989-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Art and motion pictures. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)— Influence. 3. Art, French—20th century. 4. Cubism. 5. Motion pictures—History—20th century. I. Title.

N72.M6W55 2015

700.944'09041—dc23

2014038863

Manufactured in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

10 987654321

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For G.O.T.

And in memory of Jack and Lorraine

The openness upon the world implies that the world be and remain a horizon, not because my vision would push the world back beyond itself, but because somehow he who sees is of it and is in it.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Contents

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction The Cinema’s Lessons

1. Seeing through Cinema Projection in the Age of Cubism

2. Apollinaire’s Aura Picabia, the Diagram, and Early Film Stardom

3. Duchamp’s Diagrams Film, Spectator, Star

4. The Vertical Gaze Cinematic Beholding in the Age of War

5. The Radical Time of Reception The Cinema of Ballistics

6. The Distribution of Subversive Systems Dada, Chaplin, and the End of an Age

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. Photograph, Le Cinématographe Lumière Géant, 1900 12

2. Postcard, Restaurant Bonvalet, 1910 25

3. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 26

4. Pablo Picasso, Sailors on a Spree, 1908 28

5. The Lumière brothers, film still from Repas de bébé, 1896 30

6. Pablo Picasso, Bouteille de Pernod et verre, 1912 39

7. Architectural plan for the Gaumont-Palace, n.d. 41

8. Pablo Picasso, Assemblage with Guitar Player, 1913 48

9. La Fantasmagorie de l'Odéon, n.d. 50

10. Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Optical Theater, 1892 51

11. James Gillray, Ci-devant Occupations, 1805 60

12. Francis Picabia, The Merry Widow, 1921 67

13. Francis Picabia, Mechanical Expression Seen through

Our Own Mechanical Expression, 1913 69

14. Photograph, L'Illustration, 1907 76

15. Advertisements, Cine-Journal, 1912 77

16. Candido de Faria, poster, c. 1908 79

17. Advertisement, Femina, 1913 85

18. Matthews, poster, 1913 87

19. Francis Picabia, De Zayas! De Zayas!, 1915 97

20. Advertisement, Femina, 1911 99

21. Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass, 1915-1923 103

22. Leopold Survage, Colored Rhythm: Study for the Film, 1913 112

23. Marcel Duchamp, film still from Anémie Cinéma, 1926 113

24. Marcel Duchamp, The, 1915 118

25. Marcel Duchamp, Fania (profile), 1916 119

26. Advertisement, The Moving Picture World, 1915 124

27. Marcel Duchamp, Belle Haleine, 1921 132

28. Advertisement, Comoedia Illustré, 1919 133

29. Illustration, Le Tir au Cinématographe, 1912 138

30. Poster, anonymous, Journée Cinématographique du Poilu, 1915 143

31. Kinemacolor handout advertisement, American Biograph, 1911 148

32. Auguste Jean Baptiste Roubille, cover, Fantasio, 1913 162

33. Illustration, Fantasio, 1914 163

34. Lucien Boucher, poster, Les Grands Films Français: Jean de Merly, 1928 165

35. Illustration, Le Film, 1914 179

36. Poster, Fantômas, 1913 184

37. Charles Tichon, poster, Les Mystères de New York, n.d. 195

38. Edwin S. Porter, film still from The Great Train Robbery, 1903 197

39. Bernard Becan, cover, Cinéa, 1922 198

40. Francis Picabia and René Clair, film still from Entr'acte, 1924 215

41. Carni, illustration, La Baïonnette, 1917 230

42. Advertisement, Kinema, 1916 234

43. H.B., poster, Le Masque aux Dents Blanches, 1916 237

44. Advertisement, Kinema, 1916 240

45. Marcel Janeo, poster, Le Mouvement Dada, 1918 244

46. Harford, poster, Les Vampires, 1915 246

47. Ruy Leymaire, poster, Agence Générale Cinématographique, n.d. 248

48. Adrien Barrère, posters, Têtes Comiques, c. 1919-1920 252

49. Adrien Barrère, poster, Prince, c. 1915 253

50. Erwin Blumenfeld, Bloomfield, President-Dada-Chaplinist, 1921 266

51. Adrien Barrère, illustration, Fantasio, 1920 270

Acknowledgments

I began and finished this book in a room that overlooks Lake Michigan. Like the writing process, on some days the view is enveloped by white fog; on other days, the lake and the sky meet along a crisp blue line that seems to extend forever north and south. Many institutions have made this project possible. Even more people have illuminated my point of view, and have helped me bring this project into clearer focus. The first of these are the anonymous peer reviewers at the University of California Press whose generosity, plasticity of mind, and poignant critiques were crucial to transforming a ranging manuscript into a book. Equal thanks are due to my editor, Mary Francis, who has been an unfailing supporter of this interdisciplinary project ever since I first described it to her in 2007.

The publication of this book is made possible by generous donations from members of the Humanities Visiting Committee at the University of Chicago. In 2011-2012,1 received a Faculty Fellowship at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, where I completed my research and took part in weekly writing workshops with a dynamic cohort of fellows who provided invaluable insight on this project. On the Hyde Park campus, I have found an unrivaled independence, and the support of colleagues whose imagination and generosity are matched only by their sense of intellectual freedom and rigor. My deep gratitude goes to James Chandler, whose incisive conversation and professional and intellectual magnanimity were essential to completing this book. Daniel Morgan offered his consummately perceptive feedback both early on, as I developed some of my central claims, and later as I wrestled with certain tensions in the manuscript. I am also beholden to D. N. Rodowick for his superior collegial and intellectual vivacity. His careful reading, enthusiasm, and advice have been nothing less than a spectacular gift. Alison James has been one of my most abiding interlocutors on the subject of the French avant-garde. I owe her much for sharing her literary expertise, and for always encouraging nuance when thinking about radical form. Rebecca West offered sage advice and encouragement at many crucial moments, as did Judy Hoffman, who has been an invaluable friend and colleague at every turn. Special thanks go to Marin Sarvé-Tarr, a talented art historian, and my indefatigable research assistant during the most critical periods of this project: your excellent work has made mine better. I am also grateful for Christina Peterson’s research assistance, and Kym Lanzetta’s and Katherina Loew’s help with German language research and translation. Dan Bertsche and the France Chicago Center, and the attendees and student organizers of the Mass Culture Workshop, deserve my thanks for providing discussion forums during the project’s developmental stages. The work and friendship of my colleagues in Cinema and Media Studies have inspired me along the course of writing this book: Dominique Blüher, Robert Bird, Xinyu Dong, Julia Gibbs, Tom Gunning, Loren Kruger, James Lastra, David Levin, Rochona Majumdar, Richard Neer, Noa Steimatsky, Jacqueline Stewart, Yuri Tsivian, and the late Miriam Hansen.

Beyond the South Side of Chicago, I have benefited from the feedback I received at the following institutions where I presented my research: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, the University of California at Berkeley, Georgia State University, the University of Iowa, and the Fundación Telefónica. Thanks to the Association of Graduate Art Students at the University of Georgia, I was met with the timely insight of art historians Nell Andrew, Alisa Luxenberg, and Isabelle Wallace. At the 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, Carlos Kase made key suggestions that impacted my thinking in important ways. Stephanie Salmon welcomed me countless times to the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, where she provided invaluable research assistance, advice, and images. The archivists and librarians at La Cinémathèque Française, La Biblothèque Nationale de France, Le Musée Gaumont, and La Bibliothèque Kandinsky, and Nancy Spiegel at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, were all essential to building the archive found within these pages.

Bernice Rose, a cherished adviser and friend, first gave me the opportunity to expand my study of Picasso and Braque in 2006, which was essential to the evolution of this project. With her expert eye, she taught me how to really look at, and question, Cubist pictures. Elza Adamowicz and Eric Robertson organized a conference on Dada in 2006, where I initially presented research for chapter 2, which appears in their collection Dada and Beyond, Volume 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012). Michael Hammond gra ciously included my essay in Early Popular Visual Culture (2010), where I developed some of my ideas about Chaplin that appear in chapter 6. Each of the following people has helped me shape this project in different and subtle ways: Richard Abel, Karen Beckman, Angela Dalle Vacche, Mary Ann Doane, Susan Felleman, Bruce Jenkins, Sarah Keller, Rudolf Kuenzli, Eivind Røssack, Louis-Georges Schwartz, John-Paul Stonard, Aurelie Verdier, Christophe Wall-Romana, Linda Williams, and Lisa Zaher.

With unwavering support and energy, Karl Schoonover helped me navigate the choppy waters that sometimes accompanied this project, which bears the imprint of his friendship and intellectual fortitude. The scholarly buoyancy and creativity of Nick Davis and Christa Noelle Robbins has been an incentive both personally and intellectually. As always, I have counted on my friends and family in inestimable ways: Sony Devabhaktuni; Franck Le Gac; Lee Enger; Johanna Hibbard; Kelly Kress; Jason Livingston; Aaron and Anne Magnan-Park; Cecilia Sayad; Megan Twohey; Sasha Waters Freyer; Kris Woods; Peter O'Toole; Tim Schultz; Mary, Jim, and James Weller; Patrick Wild; and Rollyn Wild and Kathleen Campbell. My dear Christopher Wirtjes has sustained me time and time again with his humor, kindness, and unfailing love. I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Jack and Lorraine Wild, who introduced me to the cinema as a real space and place of becoming. And to Grace O'Toole, my great friend who is gone but never forgotten, this book is for you.

Introduction

The Cinema’s Lessons

You've got to cut horizontally if you want to see the inscription.

ANDRÉ LEROI-GOURHAN

This book is about an uncharted relationship between the early cinema and the avant-garde in the period 1900-1923.¹ I call these years the age of cinema/’ a familiar designation about which André Breton once remarked, it should be recognized that this age exists in life—and that it passes.²1 believe this age does pass when, in the early 1920s, films canonically associated with Dada and Surrealism emerge adjacent to the narrative experiments of French Impressionist filmmakers such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and Louis Delluc. Thus, 1900-1923 may be considered a kind of prehistorical era, preceding the age of avant-garde film in which filmmaking is recognized as a more available and visible means of avant-garde exploration. By consequence, the age of cinema also appears as the ancient stratum underlying expanded cinema" and contemporary art practices that developed in subsequent decades as artists moved beyond filmmaking to embrace moving-image installation, broadly speaking.

The driving conviction here is that the age of cinema contains unexplored areas that reveal new historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubist paintings, proto-Dada machine forms, and Dada acts of shock, media hybridity, and appropriation. This book’s central aim is to make these relationships visible, and to rediscover the following truism on distinctly different grounds: that the early cinema not only shaped the culture and experience of urban modernity, but also played a significant role in the development of modern and avant-garde art. To reveal the mutually illuminating, yet undisclosed, dynamics of early cinema and art practice in this period, I adopt an approach that grapples with the cinema’s expanded identity as itself a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Cinema’s horizontal reach arises in the spatial, relational, and conceptual parameters organized by early methods of projection and exhibition and in the film industry’s expansive, extrafilmic penetration into cultural life by way of stardom, advertising, and distribution. As both a literal axis and a formal heuristic, horizontality therefore defines a historiographic method, a projection style, forms of conceptual and media-based knowledge, and early cinema’s heterogeneously relational and nonfilmic means of display.

By changing the locus of attention from the film to the horizon of possibility that occurs around, behind, and beyond the cinema screen, canonical works of modern art may be understood as not only grappling with the autonomous formal principles of the picture plane, but also as rhetorically reiterating and responding to the changing phenomenological characteristics of daily life after the cinema. In a 1948 comment on Picasso, Tristan Tzara wrote, My intention is not to explain Picasso’s painting, but to fit it into a system of relations suited to the spirit of the time.³ (The same should be said of Tzara’s Parisian Dada practices, which he made legendary in 1920 upon arriving in the French capital.) Despite broad interest in the place of cinema in the history of twentieth-century visual practices, this shared system of relations has remained hidden from our view; in order to account for it critically and historically, a new perspective on the modern horizon must be adopted.

Paris, my primary prehistorical site, has already been amply excavated, and its contents carefully inventoried, by many scholars from both film studies and art history. After decades of work by cinema historians and media archaeologists, the reproductive, technological, and cinematic animus of Parisian cultural modernity has become clear. In the 1980s, the new film history was reconceptualizing the historical object of the cinema, its spectating subject, and doing history.⁴ Consequently, new approaches to the history of film form, exhibition, and reception ushered in innovative approaches to film as an event of the production of meaning, and the cinematic medium as a modern cultural, experiential category.⁵ The rise of historical materialism that took hold in the field of cinema studies in the 1980s and 1990s has been characterized as a backlash response to the earlier dominance of semiotic, post-structural, and psychoanalytic methods of inquiry.⁶ Because semiological and psychoanalytic accounts focused on the idealized film spectator and the ideological valence of the cinematic apparatus, they could not imagine the empirical audience member, much less the shifting identity of the cinema as a historical object in both national and international contexts. With the historiographic insight of a concept like Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions, however, the formal address of early film could meet the avant-garde in productive new ways.⁷ Film history could also now be found in the street, to invoke Maurice Blanchot’s description of the everyday. There, the cinema and its effect as both a cultural and a filmic dispositif attained its status as a vicissitude of modern life whereby, in Blanchot’s words, "the spontaneous, the informal—that is, what escapes forms—becomes the amorphous and when, perhaps, the stagnant merges with the current of life, which is also the very movement of society."⁸

Here, a once fugitive intuition about the influence of popular culture on avant-garde and modernist art now stands as an expansive interdisciplinary subfield that explores the cinematic turn in the visual, literary, and theatrical arts of the twentieth century. Since 1975, when Standish Lawder’s touchstone study of Fernand Léger proposed an initial method for grappling with the eruption of filmic visuality into avant-garde art, scholars working in this area have continually renewed what is meant by the cinema’s relationship to the other arts in formal and aesthetic, as well as social and economic, terms.⁹ Whereas avant-garde filmmaking, cinephilia, popular culture, and iconography were all productively used early on to tackle questions concerning the cinema’s extension into art practice, there is now a wealth of scholarly approaches that absorb the formerly monumental high-low and medium-specific divides into a view of the cinema’s more subtle shaping of modern criticism, literature, and the visual, musical, and theatrical arts. In art history, the historical and theoretical stakes of the avant-garde’s engagement with the cinema have been broadly resituated within questions about medium and formal autonomy. Approaches to context have been revisited as the aesthetic and cultural consciousness of modern life after the cinema, which, for R. Bruce Elder, is central to understanding the philosophical currents of art before 1930.¹⁰ If, in previous decades, a painter’s revenge was primarily conceived in terms of Leger’s turn to popular cultural icons and avant-garde filmmaking, today it can be understood as a filmic strategy used to underwrite the visual intensity of painting qua painting such that painting itself becomes Leger’s revenge on film.¹¹

In this context, my book poses perhaps recognizable questions in a slightly different key: What changes in a history of the cinema when art works and artists are granted fuller agency in its telling? What happens to a history of modernism when it progresses from a historical consideration of the cinema’s varied and nonfilmic forms of address to the modern spectator? One way of going about answering these questions is to look again at the diversity of film forms and techniques that populated the age of cinema. This approach might aim to pinpoint the specific films that Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, or Marcel Duchamp saw at local Parisian cinemas. Drawing on the arresting formal display of editing strategies, shot scale, and the roving content of trick films, actualités, and newsreels, or the fantastically outrageous French comedies of the prewar period, the implied conversation between Cubist fragmentation and the skewed perspectives of the filmic world may be reconsidered more precisely. Just as our perspective changed when scholars recognized the importance of Etienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotographie motion studies to Duchamp’s Cubist response in Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), further evidence regarding which films artists actually saw would likely generate a more subtly comparative, formal, as well as contextual view of formal innovations in painting.

From another perspective, my approach may be thought of as architectural or archaeological. Rather than focusing on the cave drawings from this prehistorical period, I turn our attention to the structure of the caves and to the artifacts located in the surrounding topography. This is another way of saying that the primary focus here is not on the films, but rather on the formal and symbolic aspects of the spaces that accommodated their viewing, the projection techniques that permitted their display, and the ephemeral artifacts related to films and cinema that were deposited within the cultural surroundings.

Plato’s cave is a familiar allegory for thinking about film viewing. Most famously, in the mid-1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry used this metaphor to diagram the ideological mechanisms of production and distribution that were invisibly at work during mainstream film exhibition and spectatorship in the cinematic cave.¹² 1 have adapted my approach to the cinematic cave, however, from the French archaeologist and prehistoric ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan. His methodology emphasizes the topographical, spatial unfolding of caves in relation to the drawings found within them. Hypothesizing that cave drawings were in fact given an order provided by the very configuration of the cave, he came to see that the caves’ decor does really form a décor, that is to say, a framework within which something magically or mythically unfolds.¹³ His understanding of the cave as itself a text, a mythological vessel¹⁴ whose shape forwards a view of prehistoric drawing as a form of writing, became widely influential to subsequent generations of prehistorians, including Lascaux specialist Gilles Delluc (who, incidentally, was the nephew and biographer of the filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc).¹⁵

In a similar way, my approach emphasizes the cinema first and foremost as a varied means of spatial display through which moving images, for one, were permitted to emerge and autonomously address the beholder. In underscoring how cinema’s filmic and nonfilmic displays were constructed—indeed, how the displays were themselves oriented in space— different questions arise. For example, do projection, exhibition, and distri- bution contain a formal heuristic? Can we read them also as forms? How does the early cinema present a new system of relations between the image and the means of its display—and, hence, between the image and beholder? More importantly, are there similarities between how cinematic displays constructed an address to the beholder and how Picasso went about conceptualizing and constructing the address of Les Demoiselles dfAvignon (1907), which metaphorically reached into spectatorial space to transform the classical work of both painting and beholding? In these questions, the solution is not strictly bound to the domain of representation, or how cinema and art similarly pictured their modern concerns. Rather, these questions reframe the stakes of the problem around the modern, and modernist, address, and the field and aesthetics of its reception. The stakes of my questions are both formal and historical in nature, insofar as the addresses and forms I explore correspond to changes in the experiential domain of culture after the cinema and to a change within painting that changed the relationship between artist and image, image and viewer, as Leo Steinberg remarked.¹⁶

Leroi-Gourhan also highly valued the archaeological artifacts that were found in and around the spatial areas surrounding the caves that he understood as texts. In fact, he derived his understating of caves largely from his radical innovation in excavation technique, which he perfected at the site of Pincevent, located about an hour outside of Paris. For two years beginning in 1964, Leroi-Gourhan and his associate Michel Brézillon uncovered the remnants of the Magdalenian cave-dwelling culture from the Upper Paleolithic period by proceeding with a horizontal or planographic, rather than vertical and stratigraphic, method of digging. Annette Michelson pointed out that by rotating the axis of inquiry from the vertical to the horizontal plane, Leroi-Gourhan conveyed the power of synchronic analysis, which, from a structuralist point of view, understands its subject in terms of its inner relationships; [the horizontal cut] forced the recognition that the vestiges of former life as spatially situated are not fortuitously disposed.¹⁷ Rather than visualizing the Magdalenian situation within the vertical layers of geological time, the horizontal cut unfolded like a map of Magdalenian urbanism¹⁸ that showed how the fleeting remains (vestiges fugaces) of a prehistoric people—morsels of coal, ossified slivers of flint, bony fragments—were spatially distributed and recorded (enregistré) on each square meter of ground, which in turn were photographed.¹⁹ By cutting wide across the earth’s surface, Leroi-Gourhan succeeded in unveiling Pincevent as an embodied horizon, which he claimed was "indispensible for the in-place freeing (le dégagement en place) of ordinary testimony."²⁰

Leroi-Gourhan’s horizontal analysis is a powerful method for exploring art in the age of cinema as a spatial topography whose axis of inquiry unfolds across the varied surfaces of one periodic layer in a process he likened to a kind ofthree-dimensional surgery.²¹ At stake is not simply an enumeration of the artifacts left behind by the film industry or avant-garde artists: the diverse materials used for early cinema screens and film theater décor; items from popular print culture and the film trade press; film posters and advertising iconography; the promotional ephemera associated with early film stardom; modernist and avant-garde masterpieces, and also minor works by Picasso, Picabia, Duchamp, and Tzara, among others; avantgarde literature, poetry, and a range of avant-garde journals and other publications; manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs. Using a synchronic approach that cuts laterally across the surface of the age of cinema, I instead work to examine the inner relationships of the period by examining how these artifacts emerge in situ. Their spatial adjacency is not just fortuitous but instead reveals new insights about the shared system of relations, and the phenomenological values, of works of art, the cinema, and the age in question. Some examples, further explored in this book, are the metaphorically forward-moving vector in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; the intellectual abstraction of Picabia’s and Duchamp’s prewar and wartime diagrammatic forms; Tzara’s, and Dada’s, assault on the spectator with performative, mass-medial tactics. Moreover, these descriptions also designate the cinema’s spatial, epistemological, and perceptual attributes, which reveal themselves only when the cinema and its social facts are conceived both as a set of relations and in relation to the modernist enterprise.

I chart these relations through imaginative projection, as if inhabiting the terrain like the men who once frequented it.²² While this book cannot claim to be an ethnological study of the Parisian avant-garde in any strict sense, like Leroi-Gourhan, I proceed horizontally across urban, cinematic, literary, and artistic landscapes in step with the subjects who occupied them. Scholars of the everyday tend to share this approach. For Kristin Ross, imagining the lived experience of actors in particular oppositional moments, such as Rimbaud during the Paris Commune, is critical in avoiding] an analytic structure that insists on starting from the predetermined result.²³ Ross and Alice Kaplan explain that as a middle-ground approach between phenomenology and structuralism, the everyday elevate[s] lived experience to the status of a critical concept, while it also offers a new alternative to a subject/object opposition so basic to postwar continental thinking.²⁴ For this study, the value of the everyday and the ethnologist’s outlook is in how they designate the relation between the subject and her culture as fundamentally active. These perspectives also reorient the status of experience—and the personal or archival document— to a more prominent position within the purview of both history and formal innovation.²⁵

In this manner, I pursue avant-garde artists throughout the urban terrain of Paris, while also tracking their movements in Zurich, Munich, and across the Atlantic to New York. I draw on biography, often unreservedly, and deploy it as a locating device to pinpoint artists within the shifting culture of urban cinema at different moments in its evolution before 1923. My methodology encourages me to speculate about which films certain artists and writers may have seen. At other times, their artworks, poems, literature, and film criticism do that work for me. These sources, especially drawings by Picabia and Duchamp and Dada photomontages, are central to how I transform my site into an embodied, modern horizon—a topography that includes their formal propositions for artistic critique and representational resistance. Insofar as I understand my artist subjects as anticipatory or diagnostic about modernity’s symptoms, and as prescient readers of modern life,²⁶ I conceive of their artworks as an important extrafilmic archive capable of providing valuable insight about the experience of early cinema in its various forms. As an archive, artworks tend not to speak to an encounter with individual films. Rather, they speak to the cinema’s value as a set of display techniques found in exhibition spaces and in the daily life of the street, in magazines and print culture, and in the epistemological strata of an era that upended age-old distinctions between word and image, and reframed the classic activity of the beholder in both popular cultural and intermedial terms.

As a diagnostic approach, the ethnologist’s horizontal axis of inquiry captures how modern artists and avant-garde upstarts experienced the cinema more precisely as a phenomenological attribute of their time. Additionally, it brings clarity to the historical variation of cinemagoing in 1900 as opposed to 1915 or 1923, while it simultaneously acknowledges distinctions internal to the Parisian avant-garde. An older avant-garde generation—including Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Picabia, and Duchamp—understood the phenomenological values of the cinema quite differently than generation 1900, or those born around the turn of the century. Among others, this later generation includes Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, who were the founding editors of the avantgarde journal Littérature in 1919 and, by 1920, the core members of Parisian Dada, alongside Tzara. This generational distinction matters for both filmand art-historical reasons, and their different receptive attitudes toward the cinema reveal fissures in a chronological history of the Parisian avant-garde. In this manner, my synchronic approach to cinema history permits another view of the lineage that connects Cubist painting to Dada acts—not their strict continuity, but their dynamic and distinctive inner relationships, which bypass medium-specific concerns of painting or spectacle and encompass their overlapping preoccupation with the phenomenological address of form and the aesthetics of reception. Tracking the inner relationships of Cubism and Dada is one way of examining how the Parisian avant-garde has consistently placed horizontality into the political center of its thought and practice. In turn, horizontality becomes a way to reframe critically the well-worn, but still useful, concept of avant-garde praxis in its concerns with artistic and cultural reception and for formal resistance.

In adopting the point of view of avant-garde artists, familiar film-historical narratives can also be approached anew. Like Leroi-Gourhan’s horizontal cut, seeing through Picasso’s or Tzara’s eyes becomes indispensible for the in-place freeing of canonical accounts of the rise of feature-length, narrative filmmaking and the spectatorial mode of stasis and absorption; the French film industry’s ranging efforts to legitimize the cinema within theatrical parameters; and the European distribution of crime serials, American film westerns, and Charlie Chaplin comedies during the war. Filmmakers, critics, and trade-press editors working from within the film industry between 1900 and 1923 put forward crucial, often overlooked information about these topics. I draw liberally from these sources, and I interweave them with the accounts of popular litterateurs and literary stylists such as Collette, while placing all of these sources into tension with avant-garde poetry, literature, and criticism. Although some vanguardists write screenplays, fantasize about filmmaking, and eventually foray into the film industry after 1923 (Léger and Cendrars being the most canonical examples), in the age of cinema the avant-garde largely makes its historical and formal observations about the cinema from outside of the film-professional domain. Picabia, Aragon, and Soupault were aware of Delluc’s film criticism and Epstein’s experimental writing, for example, just as many artists begin to engage film culture directly by writing film criticism. Even so, they pose their questions about film and cinema from a different perspective, which reveal their investments as framed by contemporary currents in art, theater, poetry, and discourses on artistic legitimacy and nationalism. At times, the artists’ viewpoint calls for the cinema’s liberation from the hierarchical demands of state-sanctioned art; at other times, it emphasizes the film industry’s susceptibility to academicism and patrimonial discourses on taste, quality, and aesthetic experience—subjects that are as central to this book as they were to the avant-garde enterprise itself. Whether they spout opprobrium or convey the enthusiasm of a cinephile, avant-garde artists and writers illuminate classic problems in cinema history from their position as modern, cultural subjects whose stakes in the cinema are neither economic nor tied to making the cinema legitimate in the eyes of the state.

Historiographically, there is much to be gained in maintaining the distinctiveness of different modes of cinematic and avant-garde address across more than two decades, while also animating their shared concerns. The methodology and structure of this book pivot on the recognition that neither the cinema nor the avant-garde is in any way a unitary object or entity. Therefore, I have found it necessary to challenge some of our most basic, seemingly invariable assumptions, especially concerning the cinema’s status as a historical and also symbolic form. Historical film projection finds itself at the center of my critique for restricting our scholarly perspective to its terms of verticality at the expense of what I call cinematic horizontality.

Cinematic verticality is the most common way of visualizing projection. Similar to Baudry’s diagram of the cinematic dispositif, projection is usually conceived as an essentially triangular form constructed by the projector’s placement behind a spectator who sits before a screen. In historical terms, this arrangement is called reflective projection. Standardized early in the twentieth century as the most common projection technique, reflective projection quickly attained its monolithic status. In film studies, and indeed far more broadly, this form dominates our imaginary as the picture of the cinema—a beam of light cast against a screen that creates an enclosed relay between projector, screen, and spectator. As Quattrocento perspectiva artificiales is to painting, the image of reflective projection has become the cinema’s symbolic form; it thus dominates our principal models of spectatorial vision and identification with a projected image. Moreover, this model equally dominates without questioning how the technology and spatial arrangement of projection is conceived in film history and in comparative approaches to cinema and other image-making techniques, including painting.

The verticality of this model of projection arises in how the spectator is arranged and addressed with sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture, as Steinberg pointed out about painterly verticality. Cinematic verticality is thus not literal, as in the painting’s vertical orientation on a wall. Like the uprightness of paintings, cinema screens are always inherently vertical, or upright, structures. Nor is cinematic verticality articulated primarily by way of a film’s shots that may convey a firstperson point of view. Rather, reflective projection affirms its verticality in the projector’s near perfect alignment with the axis of human vision toward the image, as if toward the world. Like the Renaissance picture plane, the reflective address confirms the spectator as an upright being who is rendered sentient by way of vision.

The cinema’s vertical discourse drives some of our most canonical historical narratives. For example, in what Gunning has called the cinema’s primal scene, where something new and either traumatic or ecstatic is engendered, the reflective projection formation often stands as the locus classicus of the cinematic encounter.²⁷ The triangulated dispositif of the Lumiere brothers’ earliest projections in Lyon and at the Salon Indien in Paris was an undeniably powerful encounter with new technology’s triumph over other image-generating technologies. As opposed to the shadows or illustrations of older optical and projection devices, the cinematograph’s succession of automatic world projections, as Stanley Cavell calls them, supplied a concept of the screen, projection, representation, and spectatorship that have since generated a range of comparisons, from Alberti’s Renaissance perspective to the phenomenal dynamics of either Descartes’s or André Bazin’s metaphorical window.²⁸ In this classic concept for cinematic projection, the screen functions primarily as a boundary between life and representation even when the screen is likened to a window that opens onto a perspective of the world, natura naturata.²³

The vertical expression of the reflective projection paradigm has shaped the questions of psychoanalytic and ontological approaches to the cinema. It has also defined how we think about the cinema’s relationship to modernism. For Michael Fried, the idea that the film itself is projected away from us, such that the screen is not experienced as a kind of object existing, so to speak, in a specific relation to us, means that the cinema cannot achieve modernist status.³⁰ Because modernism, for Fried, is a formal resolution of the condition of theatricality in painting, the cinema fails, first and foremost because its technology and spatial arrangement automatically, rather than formally or historically, provide an absorptive escape from the conditions of theater. Cavell extends this point when he understands the screen as an ontological barrier. The cinema screens me from the world it holds—that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me— that is, screens its existence from me.³¹ Hinging their claims on the tran- shistorical invariability of the cinema’s vertical symbolic form, these authors cast the cinema as ontologically and historically alienated, unconcerned even, with any kind of relationship with twentieth-century modernism. Fried seems to rhetorically reinforce this point by collapsing the distinction between the cinematic dispositif of projection and the experimental film when he writes, "The cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art."³²

My approach reverses these positions in asking what would happen to the dominant narratives about cinema and modernism if we began with a different symbolic form for the cinema. What happens to our understanding of early cinematic address, and its relevance to the forms of twentiethcentury modern and avant-garde artworks, should a course of inquiry begin from another—secondary or minor—primal scene for the early cinematic encounter? Might we discover new and different automatisms inherent in the cinema, those that openly engage with the modernist gambit on possibly different grounds, but that have since been obscured by the symbolic intractability of reflective projection’s vertical paradigm?

To respond to these questions, I reorient them formally and historically around another early projection technique and the symbolic form it generates. Between 1900 and 1923, projection par transparence was a common, if more minor, approach to displaying moving images to all kinds of Parisian audiences. Also referred to as rear projection, this system positioned the projector behind a screen that was rendered transparent or translucent with chemically treated water.³³ Transparent projection was part of the Lumière brothers’ inventive approach to the Cinématographe Géant, which they unveiled at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (figure i).The Cinématographe Géant was a spectacular manifestation of transparent projection, and for thousands of fairgoers who had not yet come into contact with the new technology of moving-image display, it was likely a cinematic primal scene. Although Georges Sadoul and Louis Lumière both remarked that the auditorium of the Cinématographe Géant itself could seat up to 25,000 spectators, official reports suggest that around 5,000 spectators normally attended any one screening, and that, in total, around 1,400,000 spectators witnessed the attraction that ran color film programs continuously between mid-May and the Exposition’s end in mid-November.³⁴

Transparent projection was also a common feature in early industrial and film trade-press discourse and training manuals. At times, throughout the age of cinema, it was the preferred projection technique for itinerant film exhibitors, mixed-use entertainment venues, and film-only theaters in Paris. As a product of the early film industry, transparent projection is not avantgarde, nor was it used as a radical response to the film industry, or to counter its characteristically competitive and fast-paced culture of technological change and standardization. Transparent projection does, however, have a different symbolic form, which I suggest is radical in nature. Rather than being triangular in shape, transparent projection unfolds from behind and

FIGURE i. Le Cinématographe Lumière Géant à L'Exposition Universelle 1900. Collection Institut Lumière.

through the screen, passing into spectatorial space like a horizontal vector. With the projector placed in confrontation with the spectator, mediated by a transparent screen, the projected image no longer works as a direct analogue of human sight. Its symbolic power is not contingent on the human axis of vision and its reflection within the projective address or on the screen. Rather, it is found in the relational network between audience, projector, and screen whose porousness