Theory of the film : (character and growth of a new art) (1952)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN FORMALISM OF THE AVANT-GARDE The last chapter, which dealt with the attempts of the film to emancipate itself from literary content, from the story, began with the statement that this escape from the invented literary story developed in two opposite directions: towards the presentation of naked facts and the presentation of pure phenomena. On the one hand the intention was to show objects without form, on the other to show form without objects. This tendency led on the one hand to the cult of the documentary film and on the other to toying with objectless forms. Let us consider now the play of visual forms without literary content. This trend elected to make the mere phenomenon, the bare spectacle its sole content, even when in the beginning it screened moving still-lives, mere visual impressions which were not intended to signify anything beyond their own selves and which did not propose to convey any new reality to the spectator. We have already shown to what extent the most objective presentation of reality in documentary films is subjective and dependent on the individual mood, philosophy and ideological intentions of its maker. We have shown how the reality of the documentary film can be made a truth or a lie at will. But the avantgardistes in their films very often do not show even reality in such a way that some truth, some meaning or some law can be detected in it. Pictures of visual phenomena torn from all context no longer contain any reality at all. If we see clouds drifting and flowers nodding in the wind, does this tell us anything about the reality of wind? It tells us nothing. Hence this way of presenting reality, completely with 174