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EXPERIMENTAL FILM 177
the gesture before seeing it and, already anticipating its future, care little about its evolution."
And what does this imply for the cinematic narrative? It "enriches the eye less than it does the conceptualizing and verbalizing mind. Accordingly/' Seve continues, "the spectator is like a leader of novels and can be defined in terms of a similar activity— a quest for intentions rather than shapes, an intense desire for drama, not gestures. . . . Whether the film amounts to a drama, a detective story, a myth, an everyday incident [fait divers], or a tract, the result is invariably the same." It might be added that, exactly as Maurois, Seve points to the possibility of cinema pur— films which do not tell stories but are based on the shot instead of the sequence. He holds, however, that pure cinema remains more or less an ideal because it repudiates the aesthetics of literature and therefore has not been able to "solve the problem of establishing a work."2
ORIGINS
The avant-garde movement
Historically, experimental film originates in the European avantgarde movement of the 'twenties, which in turn took much of its inspiration from contemporary art. Over half of the avant-garde were writers and painters,* with the latter forming the main contingent. In 1921, Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, two painter-friends working in Germany, redeemed the geometrical compositions they had evolved on scrolls from their stationary existence. The former composed his Diagonal Symphony of spirals and comb-like shapes, while Richter in his Rhythm 21 coaxed black, gray, and white squares into charming rhythmical exercises.3 It was painting in motion, "drawings brought to life."** But Richter-Eggeling's abstractions initiated only one of the trends which make up the avant-garde. With headquarters in Paris, this very complex movement was also strongly influenced by surrealism in literature and painting; and of course, it let itself be stimulated by various fresh approaches within the national cinemas at large, such as the German expressionist film, American film comedy, the Swedish film with its dreams and superimpositions, and the ingenious "montage" methods of the Russians.
* This does not hold true of the modern experimenters, most of whom have chosen film directly as their art medium. **Seep. 39.