P. Adams Sitney is the author of Film Culture Reader, Visionary Film, The Avant-Garde Film and The Essential Cinema. He teaches at Princeton University and is associated with The Anthology Film Archives in New York.
P. Adams Sitney will begin his reflection on the relationship of the avant-garde cinema to Cubism with a discussion of Gertrude Stein's two imaginary films and her claim that in her literary portraiture she was “doing what the cinema was doing.” If we are to think of Cubism in the rigorous terms of contemporary art historians, a Cubist cinema is unthinkable. However, a study of the intellectual and aesthetic milieu of Cubism opens up the field first to imaginary films, such as Stein's or Apollinaire's, and later to the entire avant-garde cinema of France in the 1920s.
Within the scope of this expanded notion of Cubism falls the poetic and philosophical investigation into the status of “things". Léger and his film Le Ballet Mecanique provide a focus for considering the influence of painterly Cubism on the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. It is also a work which reflects the phenomenological investigation of the relationship of things to consciousness. Sitney will trace the history of these issues through the various filmic avant-garde to the cinema of today.
Films included in tonight's program are: Le Ballet Mécanique, directed by Fernand Léger, photographed by Man Ray and Dudley Murphy (1924, 14 mins); Entr'Acte, directed and edited by René Clair, photographed by J. Berliet, music by Eric Satie, with Francis
Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp et al. (1924, 16
mins); La Fête Espagnole (excerpt), directed by Germaine Dulac, written by Louis Delluc, photographed by P. Parguel, with Gaston Modot et al. (1919, 8 mins, silent); La Glace à Trois Faces, directed and written by Jean Epstein based on a story by Paul Morand, photographed by Eywinger (1927, 30 mins, silent); Combat de Boxe, a film by Charles Dekeukeleire (1927, 10 mins, silent).