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180 III. COMPOSITION
felt the urge to build from the ingrained properties of their medium. They aimed at telling whatever they wanted to tell in a language peculiar to the cinema. This explains their intense preoccupation with cinematic techniques and devices, such as close-ups, tracking shots, unusual camera angles, quick cutting, slow motion, distortions, soft-focus photography, gauzes.8 Not all contents are equally fit to be conveyed by the same modes of expression. So the artists used the language they developed for the representation of specifically cinematic subjects; it was as if this language by itself alone attracted themes more or less inaccessible to the traditional arts. Thus the avant-garde screen did not confine itself to human interaction in the manner of the commercial cinema but abounded with closeups of inanimate objects; and it showed a marked preference for unfamiliar sights and for the very small.9
Physical reality
As might be expected, both the avant-gardes aversion to story-telling and its concomitant indulgence in cinematic devices and subjects benefited the realistic tendency up to a point. The film camera and the techniques at his disposal permitted the artist to get the most out of physical reality; and like the creative photographer he derived a certain satisfaction from detecting, in the given material, forms and movements which seemed to be completely unreal. There was a turn to documentary— pictorial accounts that would bring to the fore otherwise hidden aspects of nature. In his 1923 review of Gance's La Roue, this grandiose drama of the road whose foolish sentimentality is fortunately somewhat compensated for by marvelous cinematic penetrations of the railway world, Rene Clair exclaims: "Ah! If Mr. Abel Gance would give up having locomotives say 'yes' and 'no/ attributing to an engine-driver the thoughts of an ancient hero . . . ! If he would create a pure documentary, he who knows how to bring to life the detail of a machine, a hand, a branch, smoke."10 (Later on, Clair would renege his youthful rebellion against films with a story.) And Germaine Dulac observes in retrospect: "One could find the very subjects of pure cinema in certain scientific documentaries . . . dealing, for example, with the formation of crystals, the trajectory of a bullet . . . the evolution of microbes, of insects in their expressions and their life."11
More than one avant-garde documentary reveled in the expressions and the life of Paris streets, Paris people; Lacombe in his La Zone pictured states of "suburban sadness," to use, or rather misuse, a term of David Riesman's; Clair assembled impressions of the Eiffel Tower in La Tour; and Cavalcanti with his Rien que les heures initiated the series of city