For a Concrete Aesthetics: Against Avant-Garde Film c. 1930 Jennifer Wild (bio) Because it is in the earth considered as a whole (earth, water, air) that geniuses must be sought. —Robert Desnos, “Pygmalion and the Sphynx” (1930) On June 14, 1930, before the members of the Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde ciné-club, Jean Vigo delivered a lecture famously calling for a renewal in filmmaking he described as “social cinema.”1 Pronounced before the second screening of his critical documentary A Propos de Nice (FR, 1930),Vigo sought neither to magically “unveil” (révéler) this new category to his audience nor to “suffocate” the term with too much formulation.2 Rather, he strived to activate an understanding of social cinema by casting its central aims within a two-fold relational structure. First, he underscored the spectator’s own relationship to films by setting out to “awaken” their “latent,” thus established if unrecognized or repressed, “need” for “good films.” Second, he stressed the potential of a “good film’s” relational subject-matter itself, pin-pointing films “dealing with society and its relationships with individuals and things.” Insofar as Vigo’s emphasis on spectatorial and image-based relationality anticipates Guy Debord’s critical thought decades later that examined the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” here I want to situate Vigo’s thought within a line of inquiry that emerges among different factions of the avant-garde working in France during the late 1920s and early 1930s.3 In these years defined by the transition to sound film, a host of artists, writers, and filmmakers made a decisive turn toward a “concrete” rather than an abstract picture of revolution and revolutionary aesthetics. By 1930, the rejection [End Page 67] of certain forms of experimental or abstract film style had become a political imperative insofar as the formal experiments of the 1920s, which often depicted interior states or subjective experiences, were broadly deemed to be a fraudulent engagement with film’s most inherent and material political aesthetic potential. By the early 1930s, traditional forms of filmic experiment were thought by many associated with the artistic avant-garde to conceal the film image’s capacity to function as, echoing Vigo, social aesthetic thought, and also to degrade its ability to question the socio-political dimensions of the human being’s relationship with the world’s materiality. Even as Vigo took Luis Buñuel’s “experimental” or Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (SP, 1929) as his central example of a social cinema, he did so in order to critically counter the formalist strains of “pure cinema” that had become staples of avant-garde filmmaking in the 1920s. Unlike film experiments by Henri Chomette (who coined the term “pure cinema”) or Germaine Dulac who theorized its formal parameters, Vigo argued that social cinema “avoid[ed] the overly artistic subtlety of a pure cinema which contemplates its supernavel from one angle, yet another angle, always another angle, a super-angle; technique for technique’s sake.” Rather than pursuing an empty exploration of filmic plasticity or formal reflexivity, Buñuel’s film, he argued, held the spectator with a powerful “grip” that effectively killed “our spinelessness, which makes us accept all the monstrosities committed by the men dropped upon the earth.” With a camera that functioned “more than one’s everyday eye,” this example of a social cinema provided the viewer with the reciprocal capacity to “see our ingenuousness which turns to cowardice in contact with a world which we accept, this world of exaggerated prejudices, of self-denials and of pathetically quixotic regrets.” An achievement of such magnitude could not be had by purely formal or poetic means, but only with a “savage” approach to poetry that exposed the societal frame guiding the relationships between individuals and “things.”4 Insofar as social cinema engaged a subject matter that forcefully stimulated desire for the cinema, thereby opening a new and powerful relationship with the spectator, above all else these subjects, Vigo argued, “ate meat.”5 With this fleshly metaphor, Vigo advanced a political aesthetics that traded in the material relations and needs of the human being within a social frame. This metaphor resonates with...
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Apr 26, 2022
Jean‐François Gal + 3
Open Access