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186 III. COMPOSITION
TENDENCY TOWARD ABSTRACTIONS
There is reason to assume that exclusive concern with rhythmical editing not only proves a drain on the real-life material rendered but entails a tendency to move still further away from it in the direction of the abstract. This assumption is borne out by the frequent use made in pertinent avant-garde films of shots which picture ''reality of another dimension" in such a manner that the real objects they represent change into abstract patterns. It has been pointed out in chapter 3 that images involving this border region are essentially ambiguous; depending on the contexts within which they appear, they may be identified as genuine abstractions or continue to impress us as real-life images.* And it has equally been drawn attention there to Deslav's 1928 experiment, La Marche des machines, in which big close-ups of machine parts indulge in rhythmical evolutions, thereby completely renouncing their original realistic character. If it is not machine parts which serve as a starting-point for unreal forms, it is light reflections or growing crystals. Wherever rhythm is the raison d'etre of films, one is justified in speaking of an irreversible movement from natural objects to nonobjective shapes. (Incidentally, this tendency seems to be on the increase: most rhythmic-minded contemporary experimenters in America— e.g., the Whitney brothers, Douglas Crockwell, Francis Lee, James E. Davis, etc.— try to steer clear of given nature altogether.24)
It appears, then, that the trend in favor of rhythm reaches its climax with films which, like Rhythm 21, the Fischinger studies, or to name a more modern example, Crockwell's Glens Falls Sequence, feature autonomous abstractions. Technically, they are not infrequently animated cartoons or at least resemble them by reproducing shapes and movements created in specially prepared materials. If they attain to "plastic beauty," these creations are certainly enjoyable in their own right. Some amount to gay and amusing statements; others, alas, are rather boring. (Yet boredom and purely formal beauty need not be mutually exclusive.)
AN EXTENSION OF CONTEMPORARY ART
The question is whether rhythmical "symphonies," fully abstract or not, should be considered cinema at all. To the extent that they are animated cartoons they constitute a genre outside the photographic film proper and can therefore be disregarded at once. As for the rest of them, it is fairly obvious that their creators resort to film not as a photographic medium but as a means of setting imaginative designs, preferably nonobjective ones, in motion. On the whole, these films are not even intended as
* See pp. 49-50.