DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

By R. Bruce Elder
Subjects Film & Media, Art
Series Film and Media Studies Hide Details

Hardcover : 9781554586257, 776 pages, August 2013
Paperback : 9781771121996, 776 pages, October 2015
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781554583805, 776 pages, August 2013

Table of Contents for DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect by R. Bruce Elder
Preface
1 The Fate of Reason in Modernity
The Modern Paradigm: Privileging Reason
Geometry and Geometries
Foundationalism Collapses
Logic and Paradox
Continuity and the Foundations of Physics
Cantor and the Strangeness of Infinity
Formalist Mathematics and the Limits of Reason
Consequences of Reason's Retreat
“Primitivism” as a Response to the Collapse of Reason
Notes
2 Dadism and the Disasters of War
The Zürich Coterie and Their Antics
The Dada Conspirators: Tristan Tzara
The Dada Conspirators: Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings
The Dada Conspirators: Francis Picabia
The Künstlerkneipe Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada
DADA: War and Politics
DADA against Burgeoning of Nationalism: What DADA Might Have Prevented
A Precursor of DADA: The Comic Grotesque
The Diffusion of DADA
The Conditions That Produced the State of Mind Known as DADA
Elementalism's Menacing Lure
DADA: Art and Anti-Art
DADA and the Life Principle
Constructive DADA
Hans Richter on the Six Forms of Use in Returning Art to Its Elementary Condition
Dada Forms: Collage
Further on Collage's New Notion of Form
DADA and Language
Parallels with the Russian Trans-Rationalists and Andrei Bely
Zaum and the Higher Consciousness of Trans-Sense
Picabia, Man Ray and the Dadaist Art of the Machine
Duchamp and DADA's Art of the Machine
Entr'acte (1924): Commentary
Man Ray's DADA Cinema
Emak Bakia: Introduction
Emak Bakia: Commentary
DADA: In conclusion
Notes
3 Surrealism and the Cinema
Beginnings
Psychoanalysis and the Occult: The Intrusion of Alien Forms into Consciousness and the Poetics of the Surrealist Literary Image
DADA and Surrealism
Hippolyte Taine, Hasard Objectif, the Poetic Image and the Cinema
The Cinema, Photography and “the Marvellous”
Photography, the Surrealist Object, and the Unheimlich
Ernst's Frottage as a Handmade Trace and Automatist Form
Surrealism, Apollinaire, and Reconciliatio
Surrealism and the Hegelian Dialectic
Surrealism and the Freudian Dialectic
Dalí, the Double Image, and Paranoiac-Critical Methods
Dalí Against Idealism
Dalí, Paranoia and Lacan: A New Phase of Surrealism Begins
Lacan's Theories and Surrealists' Conception of the Poetic Image
Un chien andalou: Commentary
An Anti-art Film
The Verbal Image
Surrealism's Fissures and Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan
Las Hurdes and the Documentary
Dialectical Structure in Las Hurdes
Las Hurdes and Bataille's Heterology
Las Hurdes and the Sacred
Las Hurdes as an Ethnographic Film
The Hurdanos in History
How Surrealism Has Been Passed Down into the Twenty-First Century: The Marvellous Correspondence between Max Ernst's Collage Novels and Lawrence Jordan's Films
Collage as a Pneumatic Device: Through Ernst to Jordan
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Dimanche” (Calcination)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Lundi” (Dissolution)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Mardi” (Separation)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Mercredi” (Conjunction)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Jeudi” (Putrefaction/Fermentation)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Vendredi” (Distillation)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Samedi” (Coagulation)
The Surrealist Collage Novel: Une semaine de bonté—“Samedi” (Coagulation)
Lawrence Jordan between Surrealism and Alchemy
Lawrence Jordan's Duo Concertantes: Commentary
Part One: The Centennial Exposition
Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway
Notes
In Lieu of a Conclusion
Appendix 1: How Reason Lost its Purchase on Reality
Notes
Appendix 2: Infinity Confounds Reason
Notes
Appendix 3: An Account of Gödel's Proof for Poets, Painters and Art Historians
Notes
Appendix 4: Emak Bakia: A Shot Analysis and Commentary
Notes
Appendix 5: Un chien andalou: A Shot Analysis and Commentary
Notes
Appendix 6: Land without Bread: An Shot Analysis and Commentary
Notes
Appendix 7: Analysis of Larry Jordan's Duo Concertantes
Part One: The Centennial Exposition
Part Two: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway
Duo Concertantes Musical Form: Tables
Duo Concertantes Part 1: The Centennial Exposition
Duo Concertantes Part 2: Patricia Gives Birth to a Dream by the Doorway
Index

Description

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.
This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.