We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
158 PROBLEMS OF STYLE IN THE FILM
determining the laws of the art. On this point it is to be said that the phenomena connected with the decadence of so-called decadent art very often throw a more penetrating light on the aesthetic and psychological laws governing artistic creation, than the inaccessibly smooth, unbroken surfaces of a perfect masterpiece might do. Metals and rocks are recognized most easily by the characteristics of their broken surfaces. The laws of chemistry remain valid in the processes of decomposition and putrefaction, and are indeed more easily discernible there than in a healthy organism. This is one of the reasons why, in searching for the deeper chemistry of art, we devote so much attention to certain phenomena described as decadent.
Finally it is well to remember what Alois Riegl found more than once in examining changes of style in the course of art history; that a certain phenomenon may be a symptom of decadence in the art of a certain age or class and at the same time be the first manifestation of the form-language of a new class or age. I myself believe that the method of idea-association developed by the avantgardiste film will not really play its fructifying part in film art until some future time, when the development of the sound film and talkie will have taken a new, genuinely filmic direction. The history of art may sometimes take a leaf out of the thrifty housewife's book and keep the left-overs to dish them up again in a new form.
The avantgardiste movement in the film began in France together with other movements tending to 'absolutize' other specific artistic forms. The other arts rebelled against the encroachment of literature on their sphere and in the end literature, too, followed suit. Everyone wanted to reproduce 'the phenomenon pure and simple' and no one was particularly interested in the reality that manifested itself in the phenomenon. This, too, was a hangover from the psychotic conditions following the first world war; it was one of the ways in which bourgeois consciousness sought to escape reality.
FILMS WITHOUT STORY OR HERO
Such escapism very often takes roundabout ways. The psychologists know this well enough. For instance the flight