According to Michael O’Pray, the 1920s was a “complex decade, one of myriad interrelated art movements, fashions and artists.”(O’Pray 8) Movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Expressionism, and de Stijl existed during this time of dramatic change. The 1920s were filled with the combination of high art, which consisted of ballet, painting, poetry, music, sculpture, fashion, and literature and low arts, which consisted of circus, vaudeville, Hollywood silent comedies, and puppetry. The avant-garde in Western Europe during the 1920s was popular in Germany by animators such as Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman, Oskar Fischinger, and Viking Eggeling “who were inspired and motivated by painting, graphics, music and the period’s general air of experimentation. The French avant-garde came from the Dada and Surrealism. Surrealists Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Germaine Dulac, and other artists such as Leger, Duchamp, Man Ray were the popular avant-garde artists from France. Film techniques such as “soft-focus, dissolves, close-ups, slow-motion, and image distortion” were different and key to French expression (O’Pray 11). German based artists used graphic cinema and absolute cinema to focus on abstraction in their films. These innovations helped create new ideas and expressions that will help define and change the film industry.
In Hans Richter’s “The Badly Trained Sensibility”, Richter stated how the film of the 1920s was not able to fully express ones creative form and “visual rhythm and imaginative material” (Richter). He also states how one must control the process and create their own way to express their creativity. This shows how Richter, a German avant garde filmmaker, uses abstraction techniques to create “filmic illusion of space and depth” (O’ Pray 13). This also explains why Richter wants to develop his own form of film that was different from the film created in the 1920s.
The use of optical illusions and allowed for creativity in experimental film. The Bolex camera also let more filmmakers use experimental cinema because of the portability.
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