After the heyday of avant-garde cinema in the 1920s, the 1930s was a period of decline. The greater expense of sound production discouraged some filmmakers from experimentation. Some moved toward documentary, often of a political nature. Official policy under the Nazi regime forbade “decadent” modernist styles in the arts, and most German filmmakers either went into exile (as when Hans Richter moved to the United States) or cooperated with the new regime (as we have just seen with Walter Ruttmann).
Nevertheless, experiment did not disappear entirely. Avant-garde narratives and lyrical films, such as the city symphony, remained popular, especially for newcomers to film. The influence of Surrealism lingered, and independent animation saw a resurgence. During the war, the United States and Canada became centers of alternative cinema, both for emigres and for a new generation of filmmakers.
Experimental Narratives and Lyrical and Abstract Films
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a small support system for amateur experimental filmmaking developed in the United States. Amateur filmmaking clubs proliferated, and the availability of 16mm film stock made production cheaper. Art cinemas and cine-clubs rented and showed experimental films. The Film and Photo Leagues distributed some experimental films, along with their leftist films, and the Amateur Cinema League provided another outlet. Some filmmakers rented out their own work through the mail.
Experimental narrative films took many directions. In 1931, Austrian emigre Charles Vidor made The Spy, an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” A man condemned to hang seems to escape, and the long chase culminates in the discovery that the escape was only a hallucination just before his death. Vidor went into the Hollywood industry, where he directed many feature films.
The city symphony was a favorite genre for those working on slim budgets. Aspiring New York photographer and filmmaker Jay Leyda created A Bronx Morning (1931). This poetic documentary weaves together simple motifs of actions caught in the streets as shops open and people come outdoors to socialize (14.32). The film’s photography and editing won Leyda a place at the National Film School in the USSR, where he studied with Sergei Eisenstein and assisted him in the abortive Bezhin Meadow project (p. 264). In Portugal, Manoel de Oliveira filmed Douro, Faina Fluvial (“Douro, River Work,” 1931) at the mouth of the Douro River. Oliveira used the subject as a pretext to experiment with editing dynamic compositions (14.33). Although he made only a few films over the next decades, much later Oliveira became a prolific director of features.
Herman Weinberg was a movie enthusiast who worked at an early art theater and wrote reviews. He made experimental short films, the only surviving exam-
14.34, left Many shots in Autumn Fire show cityscapes and the countryside without the characters.
14.35, right Abstraction through framing in Geography of the Body.
Pie of which is Autumn Fire (1931). It combines lyrical documentary with a slim narrative thread, cutting between estranged lovers: a woman in rural settings and a man in the city (14.34). Weinberg went on to a career as a film critic and historian.
The lyrical film could also move into abstraction. One of the most daring films of the war period was the 16mm Geography of the Body (1943), by Willard Maas and Marie Menken. Through extreme close-ups, a man’s body becomes a sensuous, abstract landscape of hills and crevices (14.35).
In 1930, the French poet and artist Jean Cocteau shot his first film, Blood of a Poet (released in 1932). His financing came from a rich nobleman, the Vicomte de Noailles (who also backed Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s L’Age d’or in 1930). Blood of a Poet established the dream and psychodrama genres as central to experimental cinema. Cocteau’s film was intensely personal, drawing on motifs, like a lyre and a muse figure, that appeared in his poetry and drawings. Developing upon the dreamlike narrative of Un Chien andalou (p. 179), Cocteau made his hero an artist whose statue comes to life and sends him through a mirror into a mysterious corridor. Behind its doors he sees bizarre scenes symbolically connected to his art (14.36).
After Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or, Luis Bunuel spent part of 1930 in Hollywood, hired by MGM as an “observer” to learn filmmaking method. (With dubbing not yet practical, American studios needed Spanish-language directors.) His intractable attitude lost him the job, and he spent the next few years in France, helping dub Hollywood films into Spanish. He also became interested in making a documentary on Las Hurdes, an isolated, extremely primitive area in Spain. With a tiny budget provided by an interested teacher, Bunuel made Las Hurdes (aka Land without Bread, 1932), emphasizing the region’s stultifying poverty and disease. The catalogue of misery, presented in the dispassionate manner of a travelogue, created an eerie echo of the Surrealism of Bunuel’s earlier work (14.37). Two decades later, he remarked, “I made Las Hurdes because I had a Surrealist vision and because I was interested in the problem of man. I saw reality in a different manner from the way I’d seen it before Surreal-ism.”3 The film was shot silent and shown in that form privately in 1933. The Spanish government banned it, however, on the grounds that it presented the country in a negative light. In 1937, it was finally released in France, with the music and narrator heard in modern prints.
After this, Bunuel worked as an editor and codirector on several Spanish films and then went back to the United States early in the 1940s, where he did odd filmmaking jobs. His career as a director of feature films did not blossom until after the war.
Another, very different Surrealist completed one film during this era. Self-taught American artist Joseph Cornell had begun painting in the early 1930s, but he quickly became known chiefly for his evocative assemblages of found objects inside glass-sided display boxes. Mixing antique toys, maps, movie-magazine clippings, and other emphemeral items mostly scavenged from New York secondhand shops, these assemblages created an air of mystery and nostalgia. Although Cornell led an isolated life in Queens, he was fascinated by ballet, music, and cinema. He loved all types of films, from Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to B movies, and he amassed a collection of 16mm prints.
In 1936, he completed Rose Hobart, a compilation film that combines clips from scientific documentaries with reedited footage from an exotic Universal thriller, East of Borneo (1931). The fiction footage centers around East of Borneo’s lead actress, Rose Hobart. Cornell avoided giving more than a hint as to what the original plot, with its cheap jungle settings and sinister turbaned villain, might have involved. Instead, he concentrated on repetitions of gestures by the actress, edited together from
14.36 In Blood of a Poet, the artist sees a painting with a living head and arm.
Different scenes; on abrupt mismatches; and especially on Hobart’s reactions to items cut in from other films, which she seems to “see” through false eyeline matches. In one pair of shots, for example, she stares fascinatedly at a slow-motion view of a falling drop creating ripples in a pool (Color Plates 14.1, 14.2). Cornell specified that his film be shown at silent speed (sixteen frames per second instead of the usual twenty-four) and through a purple filter; it was to be accompanied by Brazilian popular music. (Modern prints are tinted purple and have the proper music.)
Rose Hobart seems to have had a single screening in 1936, in a New York gallery program of old films treated as “Goofy Newsreels.” Its poor reception dissuaded Cornell from showing it again for more than twenty years. He continued to edit together films—mostly instructional shorts and home movies—in rough form. In the 1960s, he gave these to experimental filmmaker Larry Jordan, who completed some of them as Cotillion, The Children’s Party, and The Midnight Party (1940? to 1968). Many other scraps of films remain unfinished, though Cornell continued his work in painting and assemblage pieces until his death in 1972.
Although relatively few Surrealist films were made during this era, this approach has had an intermittent influence on the cinema ever since.
Some of the most significant experimental films of the 1930s employed animation techniques. This was partly because animated films required relatively little expenditure for sets, actors, and other necessities of live-
14.37 Las
Hurdes shows victims of genetic defects resulting from inbreeding, one of the chronic problems in the remote Spanish regIOn.
Action fiction filmmaking. Instead, with a camera, a few simple materials, and a great deal of patience, a single filmmaker or a small group could create richly imaginative works. Moreover, the stylization of animation made it suitable for advertising films, so some artists could support themselves by making both ads and more personal projects.
Most European animators continued to avoid traditional cel animation, perhaps because they associated it with Hollywood commercialism. Instead, they devised ingenious alternative means of creating motion frame by frame.
One of the most dedicated individualists of this period was Berthold Bartosch, a Czech artist who had made animated educational films in Vienna and Berlin during the years just after World War I. He had also assisted Lotte Reiniger on The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which gave him skill in shooting layers of translucent material to Create land, sky, and sea effects (see 8.18). In 1930, the publishing house of Kurt Wolff (which had discovered Franz Kafka in the 1920s) commissioned Bartosch to make a film based on a book of socialist woodcuts by Frans Masereel. Bartosch set up an animation stand in the Parisian art cinema Theatre du Vieux-Colombier. Using black-tinted glass, smears of soap, and other materials, over the next two years he created The Idea (1932). The film is an allegory of a worker’s conception, personified as a nude woman, which he presents to his fellow workers but which is suppressed by corporate and social tyranny. Although the human figures are simple, stiff-jointed cut-outs, they move through atmospheric, subtly shaded cityscapes (14.38). Although Bartosch made a few ads over the next few decades, he never completed another major film.
Bartosch’s film inspired two important animators to enter filmmaking. Russian-born Alexandre Alexeieff had become a stage designer and book illustrator in Paris. After seeing The Idea, he tried to create the effect of engravings in motion pictures. Around 1934, he and
14.38 The hero of The Idea speaks to factory workers of his idea. The film was shot on a transparent table with light from below.
His American partner Claire Parker (they married in 1941) invented an animation technique they called the “pinboard.” It consisted of a frame around a stretched fabric in which were embedded half a million doublepointed pins. By pushing pins in different areas of the board to various heights and lighting them from the side, Alexeieff and Parker could create images in shades of gray. Moving some of the pins between each frame generated images textured in ways that no other type of animation could duplicate.
They quickly achieved a masterpiece, Night on Bald Mountain (1934), which they set to a tone poem, Walpurgisnacht, by Modest Mussorgsky. In keeping with the subject matter of Mussorgsky's work, Alexe'i-eff and Parker animated a series of weird mutating images (14.39, 14.40) that fly toward and away from the camera with dizzying speed. The film was well received by critics and film-society audiences, but the pair had to turn to advertising films to make a living. These short films, made by animating objects one frame at a time, are today considered classics. Alexeieff and Parker made one other pinboard film during this period, a charming two-minute piece called En passant (“In Passing,” 1943), to illustrate a French-Canadian folk song. It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, after the two had fled the war in France and were living in the United States.
Abstract animation survived into the 1930s. In Germany, Oskar Fischinger attempted to link moving shapes to music. Supporting his small company primarily by doing advertising, Fischinger explored the possibilities of color in abstract animation. For example, Circles (1933) was made for an ad agency. The first color film made in Europe, the three-minute short delivered the brief message “Toliras reaches all [social] circles.” The bulk of the film consisted of complex patterns of circles rotating and pulsating to music (Color Plate 14.3). By 1935, Fischinger was making cigarette and toothpaste commercials while completing Composition in Blue, in which three-dimensional objects cavort in an abstract blue space.
Fischinger realized he could not remain in Nazi Germany and moved to Los Angeles. There he was able to make a few animated films, including one short produced by MGM, An Optical Poem (1937). It was fairly well received as a novelty, but the animation unit of MGM was not sympathetic to Fischinger’s approach. He worked briefly at the Disney studio, and a few touches in the design of Fantasia and Pinocchio have been attributed to him. Still, most of his work in America was carried on with little support. His most important film after his move to America, however, Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), was funded by the Guggenheim Foundation. It consists of a single lengthy “shot,” lasting roughly ten minutes, of the frame-by-frame brush strokes of a painting gone mad, building up to a whole composition, then
14.39, 14.40 Faces swirling in a void transmute into each other quickly and frighteningly in A Night on Bald Mountain.
Another composition on top of the first, and so on. Six layers of transparent Plexiglas were successively laid on top of the first to achieve the effect—which Fischinger created in the camera for months on end—without developing it to see if his technique was working. The result, timed to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, is a dazzling exercise in continuous extension of lines of color. After the late 1940s, Fischinger could find no financial support, and he turned to abstract painting.
The other major experimenter in abstract animation who had begun work during the silent era was Len Lye. After Tusalava in 1929 (p. 177), he tried to make similar films but found no backing. He began painting directly on film. Eventually Grierson’s GPO Film Unit assisted Lye by financing his projects or finding backers for him. Like Fischinger, he explored the possibilities of the new color processes that were becoming available in the mid-1930s. Colour Box (1935) animated jittery shapes to dance music. It was very popular and influenced the Disney animators who worked on Fantasia. In Rainbow Dance (1936), Lye took live-action images originally shot on black-and-white stock and manipulated the layers of the color film-stock emulsion to produce extraordinarily vibrant solid hues (Color Plate 14.4). The film’s only reference to the Post Office, its financial backer, came at the end with the slogan “A Post Office Savings Bank puts a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for you.” Beginning in the late 1930s, when sponsorship declined, Lye directed imaginative documentaries for the GPO Film Unit, such as When the Pie Was Opened (1941), a modest short film about making rationed food palatable.
In the United States, painter Mary Ellen Bute began making abstract animated films in the 1930s. Like Fischinger, she used familiar pieces of music and created moving shapes that synchronized to the changes in the tune. Her first films, like Synchrony No. 2 (1935) and Parabola (1937) were in black and white, but with Escape (1937), she introduced color (Color Plate 14.5) An astute businesswoman, Bute managed to distribute her films directly to ordinary commercial cinemas that ran them as cartoons before the feature. She continued to make occasional shorts until the 1960s.
Several West Coast filmmakers worked in abstract animation. John and James Whitney’s Five Film Exercises (completed 1944) employed sound tracks consisting of synthesized music (well before the advent of electronic music). The painter Harry Smith explored the batik technique, which applied layers of paint to 35mm film strips and controlled the pattern by means of tape or wax. In some of Smith’s early abstractions, textured patches
14.41 The animated skeletons of a bird and a fish try to take the hero’s hard-won orange in The Mascot.
Sketchily fill in the constantly changing shapes, while speckles of color overlay the design (Color Plate 14.6).
While others were exploring the resources of pictorial animation, the world’s foremost puppet animator, Ladislav Starevicz, who had begun in Russia (p. 53) and emigrated to Paris after the Russian Revolution, continued his unique animation style. One of his longest works, The Mascot (1934), mixes live action and puppets in a story of a poor seamstress who crafts stuffed toys to support her sick daughter. Some of these come to life, and the protagonist, a toy dog, sets off in search of an orange for the child. Among his many adventures, the dog encounters various grotesque figures at an inn (14.41). This scene displays Starevicz’s expertise at moving many characters at once and in giving them mobile, expressive faces. Starevicz continued making occasional animated films in Paris until his death in 1965.
The economic and political turmoil of the years from 1930 to 1945 helped foster the documentary cinema, especially that made by leftist filmmakers. After World War II ended, the cold war would create a less receptive atmosphere for such films, and leftists would often face an uphill struggle or outright censorship.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, experimental filmmakers had often worked in near isolation and with little financial support. Their situation improved somewhat, however, after 1945, with the spread of specialized art cinemas, the growth of international film festivals, and new grant support for filmmaking. We shall examine these trends in Chapter 21.
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Vlada Petrie, “Soviet Revolutionary Films in America (1926-1935)” (unpublished dissertation, New York University, 1973), p. 443.
2. Quoted in Paul Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 153.
3. Quoted in Francisco Aranda, Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography, tr. and ed. David Robinson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), pp. 90-91.
FURTHER READING
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Film and Radio. Trans. and ed. Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2000.
Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930-1942. Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1982.
Crunow, Wystan, and Roger Horerocks, eds. Figures of Motion: Len Lye’s Selected Writings. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984.
Evans, Gary. John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Hodgkinson, Anthony W., and Rodney E. Sheratsky. Humphrey Jennings: More Than a Maker of Films. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982.
Hogencamp, Bert. Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain 1929-39. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.
Kuhn, Annette. “Desert Victory and the People’s War” Screen 22, no. 2 (1981): 45-68.
Macpherson, Don, ed. Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties. London: British Film Institute, 1980.
Moritz, William. “The Films of Oskar Fischinger.” Film Culture 58/59/60 (1974): 37-188.
Sitney, P. Adams. “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell.” In Kynastan McShine, ed., Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.
Swann, Paul. The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
1945-1960
World War II created profound changes in many countries and in the balance of power internationally. Europe, Japan, the USSR, and the Far East suffered immense damage during the war, and rebuilding required will and money. The United States, however, had sustained no substantial damages within its own borders after the Pearl Harbor attack; and war spending had ended the Depression and generated a neW prosperity that lasted into the postwar years. These circumstances allowed the United States to assist many countries in their reconstruction efforts.
Great political shifts took place whose aftereffects would play out during the rest of the century. The USSR took control of several eastern European countries, dividing that continent with what Winston Churchill dubbed the Iron Curtain. The long struggle between the communist countries within the Soviet sphere and the American-European alliance, organized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, dominated international relations until the end of the 1980s. The conflict came to be known as the cold war, since it involved mutual deterrence through the stockpiling of nuclear weapons rather than actual combat.
Another change that would have great consequences involved Jewish refugees’ search for a homeland following the horrors of the Holocaust. They moved into Palestine and, in 1948, declared the formation of the state of Israel. After a short war, in 1949 the partition ofJerusalem led to the divided territory that is still being contested.
During the decades following the war, especially the 1950s, many Asian and African countries shed their status as colonies. The Philippines declared its independence from the United States in 1946. The following year, India and Pakistan became separate dominions within the British Commonwealth. And between 1957 and 1962, over two dozen sub-Saharan African countries gained their independence.
Elsewhere, the Chinese civil war resumed and resulted in the revolution of 1949, bringing to power the Communist regime that still rules the country. American occupation helped shape the recoveries of the defeated states of Germany and Japan. Such events could hardly fail to alter the international cinema scene in fundamental ways.
In many of the major film-producing countries, the years after the war saw attendance reach an all-time high. But eventually—soon in the United States, by the end of the 1950s in most European countries—patronage slackened disastrously. The United States pioneered new means of wooing audiences back with color, widescreen, and “bigger,” more distinctive pictures, but the golden age of the vertically integrated studio system came to an end (Chapter 15).
The United States was not alone in postwar prosperity. Most European economies recovered quickly, allowing many national cinemas’ rise to world prominence. Governments stepped up protection of domestic cinemas, arguing that film was a key representative of national culture. From Europe came a vastly influential film movement—Italian Neorealism—and a self-consciously artistic cinema that borrowed extensively from trends in modernism in the other arts (Chapters 16 and 17). Japanese cinema won international acclaim during the same years (Chapter 18).
The USSR and its eastern European satellites continued to sustain state-controlled production, although countries experimented with degrees of decentralization. Filmmakers from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary achieved fame in the postwar era. Intermittent thaws in official Soviet policy allowed directors greater latitude. A similar rhythm of freedom and constraint was found in Mao’s China (Chapter 18).
Elsewhere, Third World film industries were increasing in power. India led the way in output, while Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico were also major producers. All of these industries produced significant genres and directors (Chapter 18).
The new films of Europe, the Soviet bloc, Latin America and Asia were made more visible through international film trade and accompanying institutions such as coproduction arrangements and festivals. The circulation of these films, along with their roots in artistic traditions, encouraged critics and filmgoers to treat cinema as the art of the director. This new frame of reference, which took the filmmaker as auteur (“author”), had profound effects on how films were made and consumed in the postwar era (Chapter 19).
Near the end of the 1950s, a new generation of filmmakers surged to prominence all over the world. Energized by the auteur idea of personal expression, they created “new waves” and “young cinemas” that were formally experimental and thematically challenging (Chapter 20).
The art cinema and new waves operated within the commercial film industry, but marginal filmmaking practices continued to offer alternatives. Both documentary and experimental filmmakers sought to express their personal visions in their works, and they pioneered technologies and artistic strategies that influenced mainstream fictional cinema (Chapter 21).
As we saw in previous chapters, the cinema began as an international phenomenon, with films from the main early producing nations circulating freely. During the 1910s and 1920s, distinctive national styles and even movements within nations arose. The development of national cinemas was encouraged by the isolationism practiced by many countries during the Depression, by the rise of authoritarian states whose governments discouraged imports, and by the animosities of the war period.
In the half-century following World War II, however, we can see a move back to an international cinema. Many factors contributed to this phenomenon. Film production became more thoroughly worldwide as smaller nations expanded or commenced film production. This was particularly true in several former colonies. The growth of art cinema, sustained by film criticism and film festivals, allowed films with artistic or cultural interest to circulate more widely. And, resistance to the continued domination of world markets by Hollywood encouraged smaller countries to try coproducing as a competitive tactic. As we shall see in Part 5, these trends accelerated in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the formation of large multinational corporations, the rise of video formats, and the building of many more theaters further encouraged the globalization of the cinema.
World History
