As specialized art films became distinct from the popular entertainment cinema during the 1920s, an even more radical type of filmmaking appeared. This was experimental, or independent avant-garde, cinema. Experimental films were usually short, and they were produced outside the film industry. Indeed, they were often deliberate attempts to undercut the conventions of commercial narrative filmmaking.
To support their work, filmmakers might use their own money, find a rich patron, or work part-time within the mainstream industry. Moreover, the cine-clubs and specialized theaters that had arisen to promote and exhibit art cinema also provided venues for more experimental cinema (see box). As with other types of alternative filmmaking, experimental trends emerged soon after World War I as isolated phenomena in different countries before becoming more international.
During the early decades of the century, painters and writers innovated a wide variety of modernist styles, including Cubism, abstract art, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. In many cases, artists already established in these movements made one or two films. In other cases, young filmmakers became enchanted with the idea of creating an alternative, noncommercial cinema.
During the 1910s, a few experimental films resulted from these stylistic movements, but unfortunately none of these is known to survive. Even before 1910, Italian artists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna reportedly made short films using hand-colored abstract shapes. In 1914, a group of Russian Futurist painters made a parodic film called Drama in the Futurists’ Cabaret No. 13, but little is known about this intriguing work.
A few Futurist films were made in Italy. One was Vita futurista (“Futurist Life”), made by a group of Futurist artists during 1916 and 1917. The movement was concerned with celebrating the new “machine age.” Artists avoided conventional logic and were fascinated with capturing rapid actions, even portraying successive events as happening simultaneously. Vita futurista consisted of several unconnected, absurd segments, including the painter Giacomo Balla’s courting and marrying a chair. Surviving illustrations show that the film used distorting mirrors and superimpositions in ways that may have anticipated the French Impressionists and later avant-garde filmmakers. A commercial producer made two films directed by Anton Bragaglia, a Futurist photographer: II perfido canto and Thais (both 1916). The first, which Bragaglia claimed contained innovative techniques, is lost. Thais survives, but it is less radical than the others, using a continuing narrative and sets, blurred focus, and costume designs that lend it a mildly Futuristic look.
Lacking sufficient evidence about these early experimental films, we must start our account of the independent avant-garde cinema with the 1920s. There were six major trends in experimental filmmaking: abstract animation, Dada-related production, Surrealism, cinema pur, lyrical documentaries, and experimental narrative.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artists had moved toward works with increasingly nonobjective styles. Sometimes only the title enabled the viewer to tell what the shapes in a painting represented. In 1910, Wassily Kandinsky’s Abstract Watercolor made the final break: the painting contained shapes and colors, but it depicted nothing. Other artists quickly followed suit, and pictorial abstraction became one of the major trends of modern art.
The nonrepresentational style took some time to make its way into film. In the late 1910s in Germany, a few artists believed that since film was a visual art like painting, its purest form would be abstract.
World History
