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EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN FRANCE
newcomers laid emphasis on the extreme potence of cinematic images considered as poetic material, a quality doubtless inherent in the atmosphere of a film's projection in a dark theatre filled with men and women strangers to one another. However that may be, a quite new and unsuspected force came into being, owing even less to the poetry of words and images than a film drama owes to a stage play. A new claim was advanced now for the right of the film, as of poetry or painting, to break away from both realism and didacticism, from documentary and fiction, in order to refuse to tell a story, if and when it pleases, and even to create forms and movements instead of copying them from nature. Moreover, when elements of the visible world are used, objects, landscapes or living creatures, there is still no necessity to imprison them in conventions, whether logical, utilitarian, sentimental or rational. It was Rene Clair who wrote:
'As for me, I can easily reconcile myself today to admitting neither rules nor logic into the world of images. The marvellous barbarity of this art enchants me. Here at last is virgin soil . . . Dear optical illusion, you are mine. Mine this newborn world whose pliant features mould themselves to my will.'
A movement of ideas such as this was naturally connected to a great extent with the modern trends in poetry and painting as they were at their conception just before the war of 1914, and in full bloom just after it (cubism, dadaism, surrealism, orphism, futurism, abstract painting, and so on). The cinema appeared to people as a new provider of images, images that moved, that were gifted with a quite special character, and that could group themselves in time in accordance with a rhythm that no other medium could accomplish.
Unfortunately, discussions such as these never fail to open the floodgates to the worst type of intellectual tarradiddle, unjustifiable literary pretensions and a pseudo-philosophical vocabulary. In due course we learned from Messrs. Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, Abel Gance, Dr. Paul Ramain and others, that the cinema was epiphenomenal, paroxistic, oneiric, animistic, theogenistic, psycho-analytical, transcendental and godknowswhatelse. I fear such a deluge may have drowned many enthusiasms.
Irritating though it was at the time, this agitation has a series of positive results to its credit: problems were examined that had
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