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.
ABSTRACT FILM 181
The films of Man Ray bring to the surface the associated picture-series of a psycho-analytical examination. They not only depict the process involved in the association of ideas, but provoke it, touch it off. The film is continued in the mind of the spectator, receiving only an initial directional impulse from the pictures seen on the screen.
This kind of surrealism is a heightened form of subjectivism. The present fashionable trend of existentialism is merely a nuance of this. Artists frightened or weary of reality stick their heads into their own selves like a hunted ostrich into the sand. All these things are undoubtedly symptoms of decadence in a degenerating culture. This in itself is, however, again merely a statement of fact, not of aesthetic evaluation.
Such a classifying definition by no means circumscribes all the possibilities of a highly developed and subtle artistic method. For instance it was in vain that the aesthetes of musical theory said of atonal dissonances that they were symptoms of bourgeois decadence; they nevertheless served Bela Bartok as instruments of a new, vigorously youthful art. New palaces have often been built out of the stones of old ruins. The artistic sensibility and rich form-creating resourcefulness of the decadent French avantgardistes will in time serve well the new spirit and new soul of a new art. Now, in the third era of film art, in which the sound film will be enriched by the resurrected achievements of the once already so highly differentiated silent film, we shall be able to benefit much by the study of the absolute and surrealist films of the avantgardistes. This is why so much space was devoted to these problems here.
ABSTRACT FILM
The striving for a 'pure style' finally purged the film of every vestige of life, just as logic carried to its final conclusions makes nonsense of all human thinking. Eggeling, a Swedish painter invented the abstract film as long ago as 1917. Abstract shapes, circles, squares, waves, gratings, moving and changing outlines dissolved into each other, no longer depicting any object existing in reality and not resembling any natural object. They existed in themselves and for themselves and if