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CONCEPTUAL FILMS 179
matter. They must first be conceived by the maker of the film with sufficient clarity to enable him to set it up before the camera as a 'shootable' object.
The absolute film had, however, no intention of permitting itself to be used merely as a method enabling otherwise realistic feature films to reproduce images of the soul — it had the ambition of becoming an independent variety of film art. It wanted to reproduce, not the soul in the world, but the world in the soul. Not the soul as it appeared on the surface of bodily reality in the shape of gesture, grimace, word or action, in a foreign medium, as an imperfect translation as it were; on the contrary, it strove to show introspectively the images of the outer world as reflected in the soul. Not the soul in the face but the face of the soul. And if the documentary, realitybound films had no need for invented literary stories, neither had these mental documentaries of an internal reality.
Cavalcanti's Montmartre, the lovely floating landscapes of Man Ray, Renoir, Cocteau and the other avantgardistes were like visions seen with closed eyes. No reality, neither space nor time nor causality, were valid here any longer. The mental processes represented in the absolute film knew only one law : that of the association of ideas and it is these it cut and edited and linked together.
CONCEPTUAL FILMS
Hans Richter's Inflation is like a vision in a nightmare. Piles of banknotes, towers of cyphers, the empty shelves of shops, hungry and frightened faces, a panic on the stock exchange, a drunken debauch, a suicide, ticker-tape and money, money, money, are crammed topsy-turvy one on top of the other and in the turmoil of its montage there is no continuous happening, there are no scenes taking place in front of the camera, not even psychologically concrete states of mind. Internal images are here integrated into concepts, into thoughts.
Nevertheless even this film has a theme. It deals with something that exists outside the film : with the inflation in Berlin, even though the link between the shots is purely psychological, not anchored in space or time or causality.