In the 1920's, filmmakers and artists who had become interested in the cinema were eager to veer from the traditional forms of narrative altogether. One method of achieving this was through abstraction and the French avant-garde during this decade provided an essential example with 1924's Ballet Mecanique (Mechanical Ballet,1924), a collaboration between painter Fernand Leger and the American modernist Dudley Murphy with some contribution from controversial poet Ezra Pound. The images assembled were arbitrary - much of its abstract movement of gears, pendulums and the like - but the film culminated in long-shots of a working woman laboriously making her way up a flight of steps in an exasperating scene where with each step she is thrust back, resulting in her endless scaling of the stairs and this would be credited with special social significance.
More numerous, more productive and what's more -influential were those filmmakers that were directly connected with Surrealism. At the time there were Surrealists, Dadaists and souls like Jean Cocteau who considered themselves to be violently opposed to the art of Surrealism and everything it represented. Films like 1927's Seashell and the Clergymen, directed by Germaine Dulac from a scenario by Artaud, the famed theater theorist, and Cocteau's first cinematic foray The Blood of a Poet (1930) were actually regarded by their respective creators as extremely anti-Surrealist. Ironically when seen today, these works appear to resemble rather than differ radically from the verisimilitude of Surrealism of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel.
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| A scene from 1923's Qui Dort coinkedentally - Harold Lloyd pulled a similar feat the same year of this release. |
Rene Clair (1898-1981) created his first experimental film in 1923; Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray). It describes the delightful chaos that ensues when a maniacal scientist sends the whole of Paris to sleep by means of an infernal ray. The film was only released in light of Clair's most celebrated film Entr'acte ( Between the Acts,1924) A twenty-one minute short, this film was prepared as an intermission entertainment for Relache, a ballet by the polymath artist Francis Picabia. Entr'acte is not the satire Clair had hoped it would be, for its notions and impulses are sent in all directions to inspire a torrent of images that included one on the level of Busby Berkeley, with the camera getting up through a glass floor at the thighs of a dancer). Several influential artists of the time lent their genius to Entr'acte, among the participants of this passion play were Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.