Avant-Lard

Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s

Kino DVD

Are we still alive?" That's the unexpectedly avant-garde moment in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. It's when the film steps beyond the simple conventions of genre filmmaking (a sci-fi flick about an invasion from Mars) and expresses our very contemporary concern with survival. Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and his two children have retreated to a basement bunker in a suburban home to escape an unseen, explosive cataclysm come deafeningly close. Here's where Spielberg teases our sophistication about filmmaking-and film watching-to address the worries that people have in their heads, even as they tell themselves they're merely seeking "entertainment."

At that moment Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. The emergency lights in the theater are, momentarily, the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear that the movie has stopped-the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead oblivion. "Are we still alive?" whispered by Farrier's daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) inquires about our safety, our ability to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It parallels how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.

Movies used to be the avant-garde until Hollywood commercialism caused the art form to undergo cell division. Stories and stars then became the emphasis of a medium that began as a technical innovation that went beyond paintings, still photography and live theater. In KINO DVD's bountiful new release Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s, the collection of classic avant-garde films brings back experimentation in hand with communication. These 24 short films make you think about the movie experience even while enjoying it. Filmmakers from Man Ray, Hans Richter to Dmitri Kirsanoff and Fernand Leger made original films for open-minded, unspoiled viewers-an audience Spielberg can no longer rely on, lost to the dearth of rep houses-who still believed in the expressive potential of movies.

That's what is missing today. In the place of artistic optimism, and visual hunger, most filmgoers now expect all movies to be the same: formulaic, dialogue-ridden, pedestrian. (Include CGI and digital graphics in Batman Begins and Stealth among the most pedestrian.) With the idea of the avant-garde now relegated to the effete and obscure, it is impossible for some people to recognize the ingenuity in cinema like Spielberg's. Film culture no longer welcomes what is visionary or anything fascinated by nature, the human face (Dakota Fanning!), or the medium itself. KINO's silent-era avant-garde films are distinguished by the concentration on nature, physiognomy and the medium exploding out of itself.

Culled from the vintage collection of redoubtable film distributor Raymond Rohauer, Avant-Garde features a line-up so forgotten it's new again. These warhorses of Film 101 reintroduce the original idea of cinema, not in terms of nostalgia but through a playful-not commercial-approach to filmmaking. Such cinema came from artists who sought to appeal to and enrich every viewer's new-born esthetic instinct. The tough, surprising and unsettling look at sex in Ray's 1928 Etoile de Mer (introduced as a "cinepoem"), conjugates female sensuality into forms of marine life, artistic manufacturing, ardent reverie and jokes. It boldly creates a psychological common denominator for the medium. (That's why Orson Welles and William Vance's 1934 Hearts of Age remains such an uncanny, eerie evocation of slavery and lynching culture.)

All bets were off in 20s and 30s avant-garde cinema as indeed they are during Spielberg's "Are we still alive?" moment. Certainly a fair number of politically infatuated art radicals figure among the KINO DVD auteurs, but most important, these films confirm how closely entwined Surrealist doctrine is with the sheer originality of filmmaking. Not as a self-righteous reaction against the norm but as part of the creative freedom filmmakers could embrace. Jean Epstein's 1927 La Glace a Trois Faces was no more radical than the time shifts D.W. Griffith risked in Intolerance. The willingness to give popular cinema the rich audacity of experimental art has been lost in the current drive toward junk populism and elitist sophistication. The twain no longer expected to meet. The War of the Bores.

Where is the new avant-garde? Is it the Silence of Gus Trilogy, where Gus Van Sant uses Elephant, Gerry and Last Days to imitate Ingmar Bergman's famous "Silence of God" trilogy (an exploration of cinematic possibility and religious struggle), but actually bleeds life out of film and pop phenomena? Maybe it's Michael Bay's overhead shots of human clones in The Island traversing the lunar-looking landscape-a poetic image of liberty expressing the film's emancipation theme. Lack of avant-garde spirit may explain why both directors are misunderstood, why Michael Mann's visually and conceptually fuzzy Collateral wins acclaim while the sober, visionary War of the Worlds is excoriated.

KINO's box set celebrates the moment-the tradition-where moviemakers appreciated film for its ability to capture life and inspire dreaming. Avant-garde audiences were not afraid to look hard at a film's images, were unafraid to think. It was a period-before television-when audiences and directors alike never took image-making for granted. Proof can be found in KINO/Rohauer's goodies: Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler's Manhatta (1921), Eisenstein's Romance Sentimentale (1930) and Dmitri Kirsanoff's delirious 1926 Menilmontant. In less than 30 minutes, Kirsanoff creates a tragic family epic, focusing the intertwining of violence and sexuality in the story of two orphaned girls (Nadia Sibirskaya and Leoce Crouan), whose heartbreaking trajectory continues when they go to Paris. Sibirskaya (best known for Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange) matches Lillian Gish's fragile lyricism and anticipates Naomi Watt's crushing sadness in Mulholland Drive. Amidst Kirsanoff's rhythmic symbolism and voluptuous reveling in dissolves, cuts, superimpositions and camera movement, Sibirskaya's silent pantomime imprints a face, a distilled life experience. This mix of artifice and emotional purity was the avant-garde's genius.

Upon retirement, critic Pauline Kael answered an interviewer's question about her all-time favorite film. Citing the seldom-screened Menilmontant may just have been her moment of cupidity. But it recalls a now rare sensibility. Today, critics are so smart-ass about movies that pander to hipness that they worship the form's hi-tech degradation and crippling banality. Richter, Kirsanoff, Ray and Leger are still avant-garde. Their dated images survive as spectral witnessing and feats of imagination. Like War of the Worlds, they record how we live and feel. Almost a century later, Last Days, 9 Songs, Crash, Broken Flowers, Before Sunset and The Constant Gardener make you wonder: Is cinema still alive?