Two Silents
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Two Silents
Maybe everything that approaches a representative act of either Dada or filmmaking becomes the best possible representaion of how they get confused. Dada is not the refutation of reason but the refutation of reasonable action: it shares its logic with that of the military and the sciences, which both have horrifying but socially acceptable cutting edges looming busily over the public sphere. Dada was the first instance of poeticizing that cutting edge. Viewed this way, nothing comes close to approaching the Dada program of forward motion except the movies. The only thing that sets movies apart from all this is their lack of purity (Dadaism had lots of that, and, tragically showed enough good taste to die an honorable death in museums): both Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Bruckheimer are able to produce an undifferentiated slurry of films in spite of having dead aesthetics, because they know--they have witnessed with their own eyes--the constant resucitation of the medium in which they work, along with its single moral lesson: burn everything down.
This means that dadaist filmaking is almost always good, but Rene Clair's Entr'acte is the best among equals as far as this goes. It has only a touch of the dumpy, naive (but great!) arbitrariness of Man Ray's machine-aesthetic films, as when the delicate ballet dancer turns to reveal a false beard, ba-dum-bump. The rest is pure pacing and rhythm in the service of a clarifyingly irrational destruction, as singular in its effect as one of Marcel Duchamp's hypnotically spinning disks. You can see it at the MOMA.
More destruction: Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box made just a few years after Entr'acte's 1924 premiere, but owing nothing to it. There is a clear one-to-one advantage in comparing the faces of blasted-out soldiers returning from the First World War to the Dadaist collage being done at the same time, but what to do with Brook's face? Her tight and vaguely malevolent angles slip off the screen into a sort of playworld where the sandbox is hers and she makes all the rules. She has her director to thank partially for this. Pabst seemed to understand how to sexualize his expressionist effects: he better defined what they were there for, and gave Sternberg something to shoot for and miss when he made The Blue Angel a year later. Fritz Kortner, having just engaged himself to Lulu, framed in a doorway with his eyes glittering, the dark devouring his face: "I've just signed my death warrant." Two days later and Pandora's Box is still rolling around in my mind.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:18 PM,
