Director: Various
Year: 1927
Country: Various
Language(s): Various
Length: 73 mins
Format: PAL | R0
Colour: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.33: 1
Certificate: E
Synopsis
"The cinematographic universe of Dada is a crossroads of iconographic subversion and abstraction, formal geometry and corporeal eroticism, bathed in a general indifference to 'making sense' - unless it is making sense of its own deconstruction."
Philippe-Alain Michaud, Centre Pompidou, 2004
In a late text, written in 1961, Hans Richter sketched a portrait of Dadaist cinema in which he included three of his own films: Rhythmus 21, Filmstudie & Vormittagsspuk as well as Viktor Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale , Man Ray's Retour A La Raison & Emak Bakia , Rene Clair & Francis Picabia's Entr'acte and Fernand Leger & Dudley Andrew's Ballet Mecanique but, curiously, not Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema. What was it that provoked Richter to unite these films (almost all completed after the disbanding of the Surrealist movement in 1922; all from different countries - Switzerland, France, Germany; all formally and stylistically different) under the Dadaist flag? What links the graphic essays of Eggeling & Richter to the photographic experiments of Man Ray, or Clair & Picabia's anarchic and iconographic provocations to the rhythmic poetry of Leger & Dudley Andrews? Given the absence of a unifying Dada stategy and the rejection of any possible general principle - theoretical or otherwise - there is nonetheless a thread that runs through Dada: the deconstruction of the subject or, more precisely (to use an expression coined by Richter in his 1961 text), the Hunting of the Subject; subject being understood as the logical subject of the action taking place, as well as the subject of the narrative.
Film Listing
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Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921, 2.10 mins)
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Symphonie Diagonale (Viking Eggeling, 1921, 7 mins)
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Le Retour A La Raison (Man Ray, 1923, 2 mins)
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Entr'acte (Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, 1924, 20 mins)
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Le Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Leger, Dudley Murphy, 1924, 14 mins)
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Filmstudie, (Hans Richter, 1926, 3.30 mins)
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Emak Bakia (Man Ray, 1926, 17 mins)
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Vormittagsspuk (Hans Richter, 1927, 6 mins)
Special Features
- Contains a 36-page booklet about the films and the Dada movement, with texts by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Hans Richter.
