Sometimes school is kinda awesome. My first day of class – one based on the influence Dada and Futurism have had on subsequent art movements – we got into a discussion about Viking Eggeling, who I’d never heard of, Rene Clair, who I had heard of, and Harry Smith, who I interjected into the conversation.
These folks, by no means, constitute all of the early and notable experimental film makers, but each is pretty cool.
Swedish by birth and weird by nature, Eggeling fell in with Hans Arp among others while focused on his studies. The relationship with Arp, though, resulted in Eggeling finding himself a part of a nascent Dada movement, replete with a significant interest in film. By the twenties, there’d been innumerable features and shorts run around and displayed, but Eggleing’s Symphonie Diagonale was the first film where its director manipulated the actual stock to produce the images projected on the screen. The film itself didn’t really go anywhere and is comprised of a loop, but its interesting to look at and for its historical implications.
Better known than Eggeling, but working concurrently, Clair and a cohort of Dada related artists- including composer Erick Satie, went in on a Entr'acte, a film as experimental as Eggeling’s but in completely different way. Instead of eschewing imagery found in real life, Clair and company devised a series of somewhat fantastical scenarios. Its opening finds Satie accompanied by Francis Picabia jumping up and down in slow motion around a canon. Alone, the sequence is startling as it depicts two men revered in the art world, ostensibly acting like fools. But the entire air about the film is that playful. Even the end of the twenty minute effort finds Picabia jumping through a piece of paper marked “FIN” only to have it reversed as viewers then watch him bounce back up and through the paper again.
Perhaps one of the least renowned American filmmakers working in experimental tropes, he never gained the artistic credit Maya Deren or others achieved. And while Smith’s work can easily be figured as an extension of Eggeling’s and in color, he’s better known for compiling The American Anthology of Folk Music, which helped perpetuate the American song book in the post World War II years. Regardless of that, though, the seemingly random assemblage of shapes and colors Smith’s films comprise are the filmic equivalent to any Abstract Expressionist paintings one might find hanging in museums.
Printer-friendly version