Artists as Filmmakers in Los Angeles

Abstract

Almost all the classic European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s were visual artists who experimented with the new medium. Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany, and Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali in France all created alternatives to the industrial entertainment cinema by elaborating in film the principles of the various schools of modernist painting with which they were associated. The landmark American experimental film of the same period, Manhatta (1921), was similarly made by two visual artists in New York, Charles Sheeler, a painter, and Paul Strand, a photographer. In Los Angeles, however, avant-garde films were mostly made by artists who were themselves regularly employed in the industrial studios. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, one of the makers of a seminal American avant-garde film, The Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra (1928), began his career as a painter, and Boris Deutsch, the maker of the experimental short Lullaby (1929) and painter of a notable series of murals in the Post Office annex, made his living as a studio set designer. In these films, modernist aesthetic influences were mediated by thematic references to Hollywood as well as some incorporation of Hollywood studio production values and formal priorities, especially those reflecting the requirements of sutured narrative. But the effects of the development of sound technology on the one hand and the Depression on the other ended this para-industrial artists’ cinema in the U.S., and after the 1920s, Los Angeles artists only occasionally worked in film. (One notable exception, however, was the painter Sara Kathryn Arledge, who made several films and also wrote a history of experimental cinema.)1