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EXPERIMENTAL FILM 181
"symphonies," ranging from Ruttmann's Berlin to Sucksdorff's postwar film on Stockholm, People in the City. Or remember such imaginative readings as Ivens's Rain, which unfolds the magnificent spectrum of a drab rainfall; Vigo's brilliant, if immature, A propos de Nice, so expressive of revolutionary ardor and a constant awareness of death; and, of course, Bunuel's Land Without Bread, in which he reverted from his surrealist ventures to the monstrous core of reality itself. Released in the early 'thirties after the avant-garde movement had come to an end, this terrifying documentary bared the depths of human misery, prefiguring the near future with its unspeakable horrors and sufferings.
"The least realistic oi aits"
Yet the documentary was hardly less of a side line than the episode film. Associated with the Dadaists, cubists, and surrealists, the avantgarde film makers did not repudiate the hegemony of the story to exchange it for another restrictive imposition— that of the raw material of nature. Rather, they conceived of film as an art medium in the established sense and consequently rejected the jurisdiction of external reality as an unjustified limitation of the artist's creativity, his formative urges. True, they upheld the predominance of the imagery against those who subordinated it to the requirements of an intrigue, recognized visible movement as something essential to film, and indeed deigned incorporating existing physical phenomena, but all this did not prevent them from aspiring to complete independence of outer restraints and identifying pure cinema as a vehicle of autonomous artistic expression. Brunius, himself a onetime avant-garde artist, poignantly epitomizes their outlook in saying: "A new claim was advanced now for the right of film, as of poetry or painting, to break away from both realism and didacticism, from documentary and fiction, in order to refuse to tell a story . . . and even to create forms and movements instead of copying them from nature."12 Endorsing this claim, Brunius calls the cinema "the least realistic of arts."13
The avant-garde film maker, then, was guided by intentions which may be described as follows:
( 1 ) He wished to organize whatever material he chose to work on according to rhythms which were a product of his inner impulses, rather than an imitation of patterns found in nature.
(2) He wished to invent shapes rather than record or discover them.
(3) He wished to convey, through his images, contents which were an outward projection of his visions, rather than an implication of those images themselves.