Ted Perry, ed. Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 344 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21858-2; $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34771-8.

Reviewed by Heike Polster (Department of Foreign Languages, University of Memphis)
Published on H-German (November, 2007)

Modernist Cinema: A Challenge to the Mind and Eye

Ted Perry's collection of thirteen essays will be helpful for scholars interested in film and cultural studies. This volume is focused on what Perry calls "emblems of filmmaking imagination," or films created under the influence of the various principles relating to and defined by what is referred to as modernism (p. 1). These diverse and disparate principles necessitate a flexible definition of modernism, and Perry makes an argument for the idea of modernist film by offering a wide range of examples with certain common characteristics. The essays included seek to show how particular films relate to filmmaking traditions, how they present "a reified statement about the nature of film," and how they create "a distinctive viewing experience" (p. 1). The image emerging from these articles of the interplay between representation and interpretation is nuanced and complex, and adds much to our understanding of modernist visual culture.

Perry's selection is based on films that provide the best example of the range of strategies used by modernist filmmakers. He groups The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), Lives of Performers (1972), Au hasard, Balthasar (1966), and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) together as they confront one of the central problems addressed by modernist film: how to connect to the viewer while simultaneously eschewing the "illusionary tactics of the kind of emotional identification so prevalent in the conventional entertainment film" (p. 3). Perry identifies two exceptions to the demand to identify modernist filmmaking tactics: Tom Gunning's essay on early cinema, and P. Adams Sitney's on Stan Brakhage. The editor found an excellent placement for an essay that traces the genesis of film art out of the emerging culture of spectacle, Gunning's contribution "The Birth of Film Out of the Spirit of Modernity." This essay opens the discussion on modernist film and argues that it originates from the kind of totalized experience "carefully orchestrated to fashion a new generation of citizens eager to consume the world visually" (pp. 14-15). Gunning comments at length on the emergence of the mobilization of the virtual gaze and a changing culture of consumption. He traces the origins of modernist film out of that "contradictory energy of modernity," which consists of "the desire to experience the shock of extreme motion, yet experience it somehow from a safe position" (p. 22). The sensual over-stimulation of the spectacle is achieved through dazzling displays of modern technology and produces ambiguous imagery as well as a scenario of "dizzying transformation and continuous motion" (p. 18). Gunning's particular focus is on the manner in which Loie Fuller's dance performance, Serpentine (1892-93), links the dominant avant-garde aesthetic of symbolism and art nouveau. He shows the reliance on light and movement that lies at the heart of Fuller's art, expanding it to film art: "The mammoth screen," he explains, "reflected these images and transformed them again into forms of light, image of movement, tutor-texts in a new way of seeing the world" (p. 37). But by what exactly is the way of seeing the world altered? Do modernist art movements retrain the viewer's perception?

Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema does more than align cinematic examples with art movements. A persistent subtext addresses issues of temporality, not merely the temporal architecture of the films in question despite the fact that repetition and simultaneity are recognized as popular editing devices. Rather, modern consciousness and its particular view of temporality is addressed in the majority of the essays. Sylviane Agasinski has argued that modern consciousness is one of continuous passage, and she questions whether passage can make an epoch or whether it compromises even any possibility of a present.[1] It is exactly this issue with which the authors of collection grapple. For Agasinski, it is modernity's unique view of temporality that creates what we could call an essential modern consciousness. Modernity, she claims, does not renounce eternity alone, but it also renounces a unique form of temporality and history. Filmmakers who address nostalgia and trauma visually explore their historical context, try out various cinematic techniques of repetition, and attempt to stage the present's relationship to history. Thus, they confront many aspects of modernity's conceptions of temporality. After all, film as the moving image offers an adequate medium to think about time and its genesis, as it perpetually re-creates a relationship of time to movement. Eight of the twelve contributions to the volume frame the present in particular ways.

Sitney detects one particular technique for such framing in "Brakhage and Modernism": visually imitating processes of perception and thought. Brakhage's modernism, the author claims, "grew out of a passionate reading of twentieth-century poetry," in particular that of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound (p. 161). Sitney traces lines of development in Brakhage's work, especially the evolution of his mastery of the moving camera. Underlying his emphasis on "interiority and subjectivity, there has always been a sense of art as mimesis, the imitation or representation of perceptual and mental processes in motion" (p. 169). Camera movement is thus seeking to emulate the movement of thought by creating a representation of the mind's present on the screen. In the introduction, Ted Perry notes that modernist films necessitate and initiate an unusual viewing experience. "The space between screen and viewer is animated by the viewer's consciousness of watching the film," explains Perry (p. 7). Thus, modernist film's motivation is to introduce a conscious process of perception, "celebrating the difficulty and duration of that experience" (p. 8). Perry explains further that the work on the screen is much less important than the work on the mind (p. 8).

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, 1934), which John Pruitt investigates in "Meshes of the Afternoon: A Model of Visual Thinking," creates a cinematic space for a theoretical reflection on temporality and its visualization. Pruitt explains that Deren's films generally exist in a "timeless meditative space" and are "visual meditations on the moment" indeed so carefully "mapped out they approach the status of theoretical argument about cinematic parameters for thought and expression" (p. 139). Likewise, Ernie Gehr critically explores temporality in his film Still (1969-71). Gilberto Perez re-characterizes this avant-garde film away from the labels of "minimal" and "structural" and instead determines the strategy Still has in common with minimalism: repetition. He investigates how the film intensifies our sense of the movement of time and determines that Gehr's stare "is transformative, quietly yet deeply transformative" (p. 280). The camera's steady gaze in Still, Perez notes, "registers the present yet couples it with another time, past or future, superimposed in double exposure" (p. 287). Thus, if we take the different layers as temporal layers, we "watch unfold on the screen an arresting representation of our temporal experience" (p. 292). The ultimate achievement of this strategy is a staking out a space for the personal, Perez claims, "not away from, but in the midst of society and history" (p. 295). Consequently, a particular challenge for modernist film is putting immediate visual experience into temporal context of modernity. An exceptional achievement of this compilation is frequent, thorough attention to the viewer's experience of the film as well as its historical and film-historical context. Thus, we find a discussion of specific problematic aspects relating to visual and temporal experiences, and particular visual methods that elicit a reaction such as nostalgia, or function as traumatic re-enactments.

As many of the films discussed here have been associated with various movements in twentieth-century modernism--Surrealism, Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism--Perry's project is to foster a better understanding of the films' artistic contexts and to trace their continuing impact, which further explores the nature of modernist film (p. 5). In his essay, "Entr'acte: Dada as Real Illusion," he explores how the influences of modernist films extend beyond filmmaking to painting, the performing arts, and music. He examines which aspects of René Clair's film, Entr'acte (1924) are influenced by Dada. Entr'acte, he explains, "was a frontal assault on this agreed-upon system of communicating meaning to its viewers. The film deliberately uses the codes of cinematic viewing in order to deconstruct those codes of seeing" (p. 67). It uses Dada's tendency to attack existing cultural concepts, while reenacting the film experience of a decade earlier, a gesture that provokes nostalgia.

In "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Expressionism and Cinema," Anton Kaes explores the event character of Robert Wiene's film. He provides a short case history of the film and explains how the film was contextualized within particular art movements of modernism. Kaes believes that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) "enacts in its very aesthetic rupture that the experience of war required" (p. 46). He links the film to post-World War I debates on shell shock and "war neurosis" and argues that it mirrors the content of psychoanalytic debates. Furthermore, Caligari is described as "an aggressive statement about war psychiatry, murder and deception" that effectively marks Weimar's beginning engagement with the trauma of war (pp. 53-55). In essence, Kaes shows that the "liminal experience of the front" gets preserved more authentically than in most existing naturalistic war movies: mocking perspective, the film undermines any realistic expectation and challenges representative practices (p. 55).

Yuri Tsivian's "Man with a Movie Camera--Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties" framing of Vertov's 1929 film seeks to juxtapose the artwork with the time of its creation rather than blending both into one picture. Tsivian claims that the relationship of the film to the 1920s is not one of time frame or context. Rather, the 1920s function as the film's "active environment, a set of 1920s-specific conditions, or, better, a system of period pressures--critical pressures, artistic or bureaucratic ones, production-caused, distribution-related" (p. 85). This explains the manner in which temporality is treated as a particular relationship towards the present: in the beginning of the film, we watch a projectionist open a can with the very reel of the film we are watching, "but of course the inner Man with a Movie Camera is only going to be shown" (p. 91). Tsivian alerts us to "note the fascinating sensation of being in and out at the same time" as it is one of the key aspects of the film (p. 91).

In "Andy Warhol's Sleep: The Play of Repetition," Branden Joseph explores the manner in which Sleep (1963) "proves thoroughly imbricated with Cagean problematics." Furthermore, he investigates to what extent repetition, in Warhol's film, like John Cage's minimalist music, is "in fact a form of difference" (p. 181). Joseph conceptualizes the repetitive structure of the film by two types of repetition explored by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. There is, on the one hand, "repetition understood as difference (what Deleuze calls 'covered' or 'clothed' repetition) and repetition that makes reference to a concept or ideal (a 'brute,' 'bare,' or 'mechanical' repetition)" (p. 195). These are not "diametrically or dialectically opposed," as Joseph explains (p. 195). The conceptual dimension of repetition allows for a transformation of the world, writing perpetual change into the cinematic matrix.

Marienbad is shown as the setting for two confrontations in T. Jefferson Kline's "Last Year at Marienbad: High Modern And Postmodern": Ernst Jones's high modernist defense and Jacques Lacan's postmodern challenge of Freudian psychoanalysis (at the 1936 International Psychoanalytic Association in Marienbad), as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais debate on their collaboration on Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Kline reads the film in light of these two radically opposed readings which "stage a tragicomic confrontation over the very possibility of the recovery of history in and through a responsible interpretation of the present" (p. 218). The idea of the (non)experience of time captures "Lacan's insistence on an interminable experience of lack rather than a historical event of loss." This implicitly delineates the past "as never having fully taken place--a refusal of history that Lyotard would also label as the fundamental temporal experience of the postmodern" (p. 215). The film addresses the disquieting ethical concerns associated with anti-historical stance; Kline demonstrates how Resnais reintroduces an ethical stance into a postmodern framework.

While this volume successfully explores many of the aesthetic strategies of modernist cinema, it simultaneously delivers many important insights into the manner in which modernist cinema conceptualizes and questions an ever-changing culture of representation.

Note

[1]. Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 11.

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Citation: Heike Polster. Review of Perry, Ted, ed., Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13906

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