Film and Poetry.

1930/40s

 The 1930s were

characterised by the effects of the worldwide Great Depression and by the related rise of fascism in Germany. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. Many artists, fearing for their lives, began to leave Europe for the US.

Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother' depicts Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, in Nipomo, California, March 1936.

 The depression hit Paris

The Cubist Garden at the home of Charles, Vicomte de Noailles who financed both LAge dOr and Cocteaus Blood of a Poet (with one million Francs) as birthday presents for his wife.

late. The activities of the Modernist Avant-Garde continued in all fields Dance, Theatre, Music, Ballet, Literature. In Film, Luis Bunuel made LAge dOr continuing themes of sexual repression from Le Chien Andalou. Jean Cocteau made Blood of a Poet

 Russian director Sergei

Eisenstein saw in the use of ideograms in the languages of China and Japan, the basic principles of montage. These hieroglyphics combined pictures of various objects to convey otherwise undepictable concepts. American poet Ezra Pound and others saw new possibilities for Western poetry in this principle

The Chinese ideogram for cha, or tea.

 For example, the Chinese

A lonely crow

combined a picture of a mouth and a picture of a bird to create the abstract concept "to sing". In the same way, Eisenstein would cement two seemingly unrelated film shots in an attempt to depict various intellectual and emotional concepts (i.e. via intellectual montage).

On leafless bough, One autumn eve. There are two shots, the crow and the leafless bough, combining to form a psychological, physically undepictable concept, the autumn eve. Eisenstein cites several more of these 'montage phrases' in 'The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.'

 Cocteau worked his way

into bohemian Paris society. He met Russian ballet-master Sergei Diaghilev who challenged him to write a scenario for a ballet. Astonish me he said. Apparently Cocteau did. He thought of himself as a poet, first and foremost.

 In 1918, Cocteau had met

In the film, a young artist is drawing faces. One of the mouths rubs off onto his hand. He smears it onto a statue and jumps into a mirror. The actress is Lee Miller, photographer from New York.

and fallen in love with Raymond Radiguet, who died in 1923. Cocteau became an opium addict. His saw the role of the Poet as travelling to other worlds and bringing back news. He presents artistic effort as a dark, dangerous act of suffering.

 Cocteau enjoyed the use of

trick photography, and uses it to create odd and anachronistic spaces. The film was delayed for a year by a rumour that it was anti-Christian. (It was tied in with Bunuels LAge DOr, which definitely was). He was threatened with excommunication by the Church. He made two sequels, in 1950 and 1960.

In the mirror world, the artist peers through keyholes of a series of doors and witnesses strange acts.

 Cocteau described its

disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux as "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body."

 During the second

International Congress on Independent Cinema, held in Brussels in December 1930, recognising the political developments in Europe, Hans Richter, German film-maker called for political activism rather than aesthetic and formal experiment. He wanted films about people and their lives...

Richters peace poster made in 1919, calling for demobilisation.

 In an essay First

Principles of Documentary written in 1934, Glasgow born filmmaker John Grierson first used the term Documentary to refer to a film, specifically the work of Robert Flaherty in the US, whose 1926 film Moana depicted life in the South Seas.

Grierson argued for the depiction of ordinary life rather than travelogs of exotic people and places.

 Grierson built-up a film

Scott Anthony writing about the film for the BFI claims it was partly made to keep up morale in the Post office, which was threatened with privatisation.

unit within the GPO and began to make ambitious films. Night Mail, made in 1936 describes the journey of the mail from London to Glasgow, and includes a section at the end by poet W.H. Auden, accompanied by Modernist music by Benjamin Britten. The film is a classic.

 Griersons GPO unit was

absorbed into the propaganda effort, as the Crown Film Unit, at the breakout of WW2. Humphrey Jennings, a Cambridge Surrealist, made a series of films documenting the whispering heroism that made the British appear stoical and dignified.

 Listen to Britain, made

in 1942, dispenses with commentary altogether. The subject is the sights and sounds of wartime Britain over a period of twenty-four hours. Jennings focuses on the emotions of the people involved. The theme of the film is the oneness of the British people

The film depends heavily on its editing. Jennings and his editor Stewart McAllister understood the lessons of the Soviet montage experts Eisenstein, Kuleshov and Vertov.

 ...blended together in one

great symphony is the music of Britain at war. The evening hymn of the lark, the roar of the Spitfires, the dancers in the great ballroom at Blackpool, the clank of machinery and shunting trains... The trumpet call of freedom, the war song of a great people. The first sure notes of the march of victory, as you, and I, listen to Britain.

 Marguerite "Peggy"

Guggenheim was an American art collector who lived in Paris from 1920. After WW2 broke out, she bought many pieces of avant-garde work and spirited them away to New York along with several of the artists. She married Max Ernst, after she forged documents to free him from a concentration camp.

The Angel of the Hearth or the Triumph of Surrealism, Max Ernst, 1937.

 New York City quickly

Group photograph of Artists in Exile, in Peggy Guggenheims New York apartment, 1942. Front Row: Stanley William Hayter, Leonara Carrington, Frederick Kiesler, Kurt Seligmann. Second Row: Max Ernst, Amedee Ozenfant, Andre Breton, Fernand Leger, Berenice Abbott. Third Row: Jimmy Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, John Ferren, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian.

became the new international headquarters for the arts and the orphaned artists spent much of their their summers in the Hamptons, on Long Island. A torch was passed here from the Surrealists to the Expressionists. Duchamp spent long afternoons playing chess with Robert Motherwell.

 Maya Deren, an exile from

Moscow, (Her father studied at the same institute as Dziga Vertov), was a New York film-maker who spent time with the group. She was fascinated by Cocteau and worked with Marcel Duchamp. Hans Richter encouraged her to make films. She made her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, ironically, in Hollywood

 This film is concerned

Sometimes the meaning of a certain point might be ambiguous. This ambiguity, as far as a good poet is concerned, is used to bring deeper, more personal meaning to the work. Ambiguity permits the reader to project their own meaning into the poem, elevating it to art. Claude Mathews, 1975.

with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret, and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience. Maya Deren

 I had been a poet up until then, and the reason that I

had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating images into words, and could work directly so that it was not like discovering a new medium so much as finally coming home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax, grammar, was my mothertongue; which I understood, and thought in, but, like a mute, had never spoken Maya Deren