The Legacy of Absolute Cinema

I decided to write a piece on absolute cinema as I felt it was a different, interesting genre to explore, after touching briefly on it in the early stages of my University course; it appealed to me straight away, as the Art Cinema course was totally new to me, the term “abstract” film was what I most associated with art cinema.  I like the way it encapsulates the main ideas and fundamentals of art cinema and also how we can see the influence of the use of absolute cinematic techniques in later genres.  Coming from an art history background I wanted to explore these absolute films further and see how they were of influence to later art cinema features. They are heavily based upon mood, created by images and sound; abandoning reproductions of the natural world.

It was the European Avante Garde movements in the late 1920s who as visual artists really began to explore the medium of film and images together. The term absolute cinema was defined by critic and theorist Rudolf Kurtz in the 1920’s, but actually there is suggestion that the idea was not as unique as they had first thought. If we look back to the turn of the century in the early 20^th century, at the futurist movement in Italy, we could say that this was the most likely place of origin for absolute cinema. Futurism was an artistic and social movement which pretty much exhausted all mediums within art, to name a few they produced films, paintings, ceramics, graphics, industrial design, theatre, fashion, textiles, literature, music and architecture. It was founded by an Italian writer Fillipo Marinetti who launched futurist ideas n the form of radical manifestos. The main futurist ideals were of rejecting old traditions, politically as well as artistically. Instead they favoured speed, technology, youth and violence, so basically they were passionate nationalists. In the interest of film, 2 brothers from Ravenna named Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra made short experimental, abstract cinema style films between 1910 and 1913. They were searching for an analogy between harmony of colours and music. They composed colour sonatas with a “light organ” or The Colour Organ was some ten feet high, with a five octave keyboard which was similar to that of a church organ, being controlled by stops. A line of "colour keys" was situated above the conventional (sound) keyboard, and connected to a lens-and-filters system, so that "colour" was "played". Best effects were secured when the sound and colour were played from separate keyboards. So it was these artists who created the idea of film as a form of visual music.

The manifesto outlined a cinema that was to be “painting, Architecture, sculpture, liberated words, music of colours, lines and shapes, job-lots of objects and a chaotic reality. In essence, it was to be a cinema which privileged abstraction over depictions of real situations which hold meaning outside of the theatre, as a result providing an outlet for expressing a complete freedom of creation and fundamentally, multiple expressions of interpretation.   This idea of the importance of aesthetic and creation of mood over narrative depiction is seen as being highly subjective and that the viewer has no direct transitive link or linear thought process that would be otherwise attributed to mainstream narrative cinema. It is purely abstract.

The viewer is using an entirely different language in their perception of abstract cinema. We can analyse this idea further by looking at the suggestions made by Christian Metz who wrote on “Film Language”.

Hans Richter-

Early experiments were carried out by Hans Richter. For Richter abstract cinema is a pure art form, superior and which requires a thoughtful spectator who must learn to see the beauty of an image and its relation with other images without worrying about intellectual or literal meanings. This may require a re-education or way of thinking- “a joining of the eye and the spirit” He believed it was the duty of the artist to be actively political, opposing war and supporting revolution. He worked and experimented with Viking Eggling. His films were highly influential and his film “Rhythmus 21” was to later influence artists such as Walter Ruttman.

Walter Ruttman-

The real catalyst of the cinematographic Avante Garde came in 1916 when the manifesto of futurist cinematography was published and internationally distributed, pushing influences across Europe particularly in France, Russia and Germany. Moving forward to the Avante Garde’s of the 1920’s, where the body of films produced across Europe mostly defines “absolute Cinema”. Starting in Germany, the German Abstract cinema centred itself upon rhythm and shape. More importantly this was the beginning of a cinema which based itself upon an optical, rhythmic “game of signs”. The main artists of the German abstract cinema were Walter Ruttman, Richter, Eggling and Fischinger. It was these artist who in majority pursued research into this genre of cinema, after the 1916 futurist manifest on cinema.

Ruttman came from a musical background as well as an artistic one. He was a painter; this will become fundamental later on. He wanted to expand the limits of fine art and saw the medium of film to be liberating. His films epitomise the idea of the absolute film, in that the concept of the works is that the use of the music & abstract images make up a universal language. Music is another layer added to the works, the image and music go hand in hand, without either one of them the pieces would fall short of their intention on the audience’s experience. Ruttman’s films were described as visual music, in film making he wanted to achieve the similar sensations in the way that music did.  Visually this was achieved by producing optical rhythms, we can see an early example of this work named Opius 1- which was the beginning of a series of Opius films.

Oskar Fischinger

He was known as an abstract animator, film maker and painter. In total he made 50 short animated films. His works were very much inspired by Walter Ruttman; however Fischinger’s work researched and experimented with new artistic techniques using various materials- one of his most famous is “motion painting” No.1 (1947).

Cinema Pur

At the same time in France, French Filmmakers such as Epstein and Germaine Dulac also refused conventional filming methods which included dramatic narrative, and above all theatricality, which was the French cinemas main emphasis at that time. They broadened the horizons of abstract cinema even further with the creation of Cinema Pur, a progressive offshoot, claiming rhythm can become an “alternative structural principle” that goes beyond novelistic exposition. But unlike the German abstract Cinema, pure cinema used all natural, inanimate elements to create a visual symphony triggering a series of unknown visions. Kuleshov effect

Pure cinema definition- Is the film theory and practice whereby movie makers create a more emotionally intense experience using autonomous film techniques, as opposed to using stories, characters or actors.

"The cinema is not limited to the representative mode. It can create, and has already created a sort of rhythm...Thanks to this rhythm the cinema can draw fresh strength from itself which, forgoing the logic of facts and the reality of objects, may beget a series of unknown visions, inconceivable outside the union of lens and film. Intrinsic cinema, or if you prefer, pure cinema – because it is separated from every other element, whether dramatic or documentary, is what certain works lead us to anticipate..."

- Henri Chomette

Another abstract tendency in France in the 1920s was the Dadaist movement and dada film, which has been claimed as producing some of the masterpieces of Avante Garde cinema. An exemplary film of this dada contribution to film is Entr’acte 1924, by Clair. A film which used a mode of production called instantanéisme, which depicts slow motion, people moving in slow motion, watching clips in reverse,  fast forward, watching an egg over a fountain of water get shot and instantly become a bird and watching people disappear. And again accompanying music.

In keeping with the theme of legacy of abstract cinema, there is a mild lineage of influences one after another. The French dada film makers as well as the absolute film makers of Germany stylistically paved the way for the surrealist film movement. So much so that to differentiate between dada and surrealism would prove difficult. We can see a mixing or merging of subgenres in films such as Un chein analou, can be seen as building upon abstract ideals, through the use of visuals which initiate dream like states, and the feeling of fantasy through the use of spontaneous, clashing disjointed visuals.

Cocteau describes this kind of cinema a “realistic documentary of unreal events, where the style of the image is more important than the story and authorises everyone to raw their own conclusions and interpret symbols according to their own spirit.” – this suggests a progression in abstract cinema which includes the introduction of realistic external images, such as humans and images that exist in the natural world, but merges and edited together with certain disjointed techniques, we can evidently see the influence of absolute art.

Experimental Cinema and the post war American Avante Garde.

The next step forward for abstract cinema was the ideal of experimental cinema, not that all previous abstract cinema wasn’t experimental. But it was the experimental aspects that the new independent American filmmakers of the 40s and 50s based their works upon. Again we can see a crossroad in the linkage between surrealism and the independent American film makers; first of all the European Avante Garde influencing the techniques of the American Avante garden d secondly, using the example of Maya Deren, who is usually seen as a surrealist, in fact was highly influenced by surrealist films of the early Avante Garde, she was in fact we could say, the founder of the new American cinema. Again these filmmakers reacted against straight narrative themes and rejected realism in their works.

A major element of their works was the use of poetics within the cinema. We could use Maya Deren’s work as a prime example. She was also a film theorist as well as a filmmaker among many other things, but her writings are quite obscure, even her films aren’t really screened outside of courses and those that incorporate feminist’s issues in film. Rhythmic montage is one of the most dominant elements in Deren’s films, along with poetic psychodrama, which induces temporal and spatial experimentation. It has been given the name “trance film” because of its characteristic of an illogical narrative trajectory; it creates contemplative and transcendental involvement for the spectator- another link back to absolute film. There is a representation of multiple characters of 1 person, like repeated replicas which may provoke a nightmarish vision.

She presented a paper called “poetry and film” in 1953 where she argued that film works on two axis that the representation of horizontal, includes narrative character and action and the vertical which is characterized by the more ephemeral elements of mood, tone and rhythm. We can see influences of Deren’s work in the films of David lynch in films like Lost Highway (1997), where he uses experimentation with narrative.

Harry Smith

So we then move further forward into the post war American Avante Garde. A film maker who was making experimental films most reminiscent of early absolutist film was Harry Everett Smith. Smith was a bit of a bohemian, he was an artist and an ethnomusicologist as well as a film maker. He combined his artistic skills with his film work by creating manipulations directly into the celluloid. In his work we see strong connections with surrealism and dada, again showing a linear progression of influence. Another similarity his work has to early abstract cinema is use of soundtracks and visuals being utilised together. After his death his films were still screened and show in the way he would have wanted them to be shown, but they are given a contemporary touch by incorporating strobe lighting and multiple projections.

Andy Warhol

Moving into the 60s we see the “postmodern renaissance man”- Andy Warhol making experimental films, within a group of artists who called themselves the New American Group in the early 60s.

His experimental film is known for the famous long take, fixed camera aesthetic into what come to be known as “structural film”. He collaborated with the velvet underground- we see the genre becoming even more cultural especially in the 60’s and the use of Warhol and Jack smiths camp and minimalistic aesthetic which dominated most of his films. His films were widely distributed and exhibited, showing a progression in the distribution of experimental film. His "underground" films are known for their inventive eroticism, plot less boredom, and inordinate length (up to 25 hours).

James Whitney

Later on in the mid to late 60’s James Whitney used analogue computer based equipment to create his later films which gave them a kaleidoscope effect, as well as accompanied music, very similar to early absolute film. 

Kenneth Anger

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954-60. According to the legend, various projections of the film in London in 1966 were organized by Anger who “experimented” with an audience under the influence of L.S.D. the actors were also influenced by the drug and begin a sort of pagan eucharist (the “banquet of the poisons”,) that is progressively poisoning at a narcotic - exotic – magic level, which, then, culminates in a ritual orgy marked by increasing hallucinatorysuperimpositions of imagery, sumptuous and very colourful. 

Video art

Moving onto contemporary experimental films being produced today, we can see a progression in the incorporation of cultural issues, much like Warhol’s work which deals with sexuality, quite a lot of work today and since the 60s has dealt with feminism, identity, sexuality, gender, creating a more cultural & politically meaningful abstract film experience. Again Rather than just aesthetically artistic- moves towards and becomes contextualised with the natural world and natural experience.

Tracey Moffatt in her film heaven, she interestingly returns to the gaze and completely shifts our ideas about the male gaze by turning the gaze on male characters.

Contemporary Abstract Art

Finally I wanted to point out that today we can see abstract films that have come so far as to incorporate intrinsic content and provide the viewer with context. But simultaneously going back to our start point of absolute art, we can also see this pioneering style being revived by artists such as Joel Schlemowitz.  He is an American Film maker, he also creates installations, and he is a lecturer of film at the New School.

His films and installations are described in an interview as reflecting the sublimity of light, air, and motion.  With flashes, leaves, and pools of light, suns, flashlights, and handmade light inventions, Joel creates cinema-poems that crack open the infinite. So again we see a full circle return to pure dream like aestheticism and exploration of the imagination.  

Like all art cinema mainstream cinema, has taken ideas from abstract cinema and we can see noticeable influences in the work of directors like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman.

Peter Greenaway "The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film-and let's only talk about good films-is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story."

“Cinema is not an excuse for illustrated literature. But then I am primarily a painter, and my prejudice is that painting is the prime visual art and the very best painting is non-narrative."