Marvellous Noise and Modest Recording Instruments: Dada, Surrealism, and Early Sound Cinema

Microsoft Word - Suzy Mangion Final Thesis final version post viva march 2018.docxMarvellous Noise and Modest Recording Instruments: Dada, Surrealism, and Early Sound Cinema
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Faculty of Humanities
2017
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Contents
2. Readymade Soundtracks p. 65
3. Cut and Paste Cinema p. 110
4. Spoken Words, Silent Mouths p. 156
Concluding Notes and Future Directions p. 193
Bibliography p. 199
Filmography p. 226
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Abstract
This thesis assesses the ways in which films related to Dada and Surrealism
used sound techniques during the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that their audio-visual
approaches were distinctive, and related to important concepts and strategies within
the movements such as collage, juxtaposition, and the Surrealist ‘marvellous.’
Historical research is combined with close analysis and theoretical interpretation to
examine the early sound film context in detail, while also bringing a new aural
perspective to Dada and Surrealist cinema studies. The project addresses an
important, yet neglected, part of film sound history, while also pushing art historical
interpretation of these works beyond a long-held visual bias.
Dada and Surrealist cinema's heyday coincided with the period of transition
from silent to sound film, and several filmmakers associated with these movements,
including Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Hans Richter, were at
the forefront of this change, producing some of the earliest sound films in their
countries of work. Audio-visual experimentation flourished during this period,
providing opportunities for these and other filmmakers to try a range of provocative,
idiosyncratic methods that prioritised irrationality and sensation.
Dada and Surrealist practices were inherently heterogeneous, and their
soundtrack approaches were too, mixing silent and sound film methods: from using
pre-existing gramophone accompaniments to creating composite sound and image
collages, from remixing dance music to silencing the leading lady. Informed by the
contemporary debates around asynchrony and counterpoint, I investigate these
experiments to establish what Dada or Surrealism audio-visuality actually was.
This thesis is essentially a historical corrective, which questions assumptions
about this film period, and reinterprets how Dada and Surrealist works fit into it.
Case studies of works by Buñuel and Dalí, Cocteau, Richter, Man Ray, Len Lye,
and Joseph Cornell illustrate discussions of pre-existing music use, audio collage
techniques, and the role of voices. Sound is demonstrated to have been fundamental
in creating the irrational, disorientating, or immersive experiences most valued in
Dada and Surrealism film.
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Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an
application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other
institute of learning.
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Acknowledgements
To reach the thank you stage feels incredible. So many have supported me on this long, sometimes difficult, journey. First I'd like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council who funded my project, without whose belief and support it would have been impossible. A special thank you goes to Professor Amelia Jones, for exceptional encouragement and mentoring throughout my MA and the early PhD stages. Your teaching and kind words gave me so much direction and confidence. Dr David Butler, my supervisor – thank you for everything. From the moment you stepped in you have never put a foot wrong, always patiently guiding me with wisdom, kindness, dedication, and much-needed humour. You encouraged me to take on challenges, see and hear new things, and become a real researcher in the process. Whether losing my way in the dark forest, or climbing Mount Purgatory, as a true teacher, mentor, and friend, you have always helped me onward. Thanks also to those who have given academic support and input over the years. To Professor David Lomas, who has shared his original ideas and insights in his role as secondary supervisor. To Dr Samantha Lackey, who first introduced the idea of Surrealist sound in her classes on Dada and Surrealist film. To Dr Joanna Pawlik and Professor Carol Mavor for their invaluable input on research panels, and Dr Felicia Chan for kind advice for an inexperienced graduate teaching assistant. I am also indebted to Senior Postgraduate Research Administrator Jo Marsh, who has steered me painlessly through many a maze-like administration procedure, and whose efficiency and tact are so appreciated. I am especially grateful to the eminent strangers who responded kindly to requests for information, unannounced interviews, and appalling French – Jean Michel-Bouhours, Cecile Starr, and Brigitte Berg. Thanks also to Alison Kapor at Alliance Française for her skilled translation help, John Klacsmann at Anthology Film Archives, and staff at Re:Voir and Umbrella DVD distribution. Throughout, the expertise and professional support of librarians has been invaluable. I want to thank staff at the University of Manchester library, in particular the Document Supply team, as well as those at Manchester Metropolitan University Library, and the BFI Reuben Library. I am also grateful to staff at the Bibliothèque nationale de France's Richelieu Library, the Cinémathèque Française, and the Bibliothèque Kandinksy at the Centre Pompidou, and to the University of Manchester for generously funding my research in Paris. Anna Strhan and Martin Block, Peter Philipson, Paul Taberham, Nicky Murdoch – thank you for wit and wisdom, in equal measures. Thanks also to Gabriella Santangelo for valuable help. To my parents-in-law, Pauline and Tony Braithwaite, thank you for always providing a welcome space for Arthur and myself. My brothers Francis and Philip, for our shared love of films, and especially Paul, who will always be the family's top soundtrack expert. Thank you to my parents, Pio and Brigid Mangion, for unfailing, unconditional love and support all the way. For encouraging my strange interests, and providing a wonderful cinema education. For being there for me, even when I could not be with you. Most of all, I thank my husband Anthony Braithwaite, who has patiently endured my PhD from start to finish, helping and advising above and beyond expectations, and our wonderful son Arthur, who has only ever known a Mummy who has to write a book. I could not have managed without you, and my love and gratitude is without bounds. And remember, as Inspector Japp would say – it's dogged as does it.
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For my husband Anthony and son Arthur, my rock and my sunshine.
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Introduction
It began with a mistake. Years ago, I attended a screening of the Surrealist classic
L’Âge d'or (The Golden Age, Buñuel and Dalí, 1930) at a prominent arthouse
cinema. During that pre-DVD and streaming era, I was excited about this
opportunity to see a seldom shown film. But about fifteen minutes in, I began to feel
bored and rather disappointed. The film was entirely silent, and without any musical
accompaniment it dragged tiresomely for its sixty-three minute duration.
Daydreaming through it, I mentally noted L’Âge d'or as an overrated film, to be
avoided unless accompanied by a live soundtrack.
Some ten years later, studying Dada and Surrealist film as part of a master’s
degree in art history, I stumbled across a reference to L’Âge d'or's sound effects.1
This discovery shocked and excited me. As a result of the earlier screening, I had
always assumed L’Âge d'or was a silent film, and that Surrealism hadn't participated
in the transition to sound. Only belatedly did I realise that I had seen the entire film
with the sound switched off, and despite the packed auditorium, nobody had
questioned this at the time. We had all deferred, that afternoon, to the presumed
wisdom of the cinema staff. The assumption that old Surrealist films were
completely silent had affected my understanding of Dada and Surrealism,
corroborated by the scant attention given to sound in substantial studies such as
Alain and Odette Virmaux's Les Surréalistes et le cinéma, Linda Williams's Figures
of Desire, or Robert Short's The Age of Gold.2
When I finally experienced L’Âge d'or with its full soundtrack it shimmered
into life with aggressive drum tattoos, a portmanteau of classical repertoire
orchestrations, yells, barks, bells, and toilet flushes. With the audio switched off, it
had been a tame and overlong sequence of disjointed images. Seen and heard in
audio-visual entirety it jolted viewing expectations, revealing the muscular,
1 Elisabeth H. Lyon, ‘Luis Buñuel: the Process of Dissociation in Three Films,’ Cinema Journal, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1973). 2 Alain Virmaux and Odette Virmaux, Les Surréalistes et le cinéma (Paris: Editions Seghers, 1976); Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Robert Short, The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema (London: Creation Books, 2003).
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confrontational streak that resulted in its long prohibition in France from 1930 until
1981.3
This thesis explores the use of sound in that film, and others associated with
Dada and Surrealism, during the early sound period. It assesses the important
contributions that music, speech and sound effects made to those films, identifying
and analysing audio-visual strategies and approaches, and situating these in their
cinematic and artistic contexts. The broad question I ask is whether such films
contain a demonstrable Dada/Surrealism-related audio-visuality. I argue that they
do, using various methods that, while related to transition era practices, differ in
their application, emphasising elements such as surprise, fragmentation, or
subversion.
My research takes a revisionist approach to Dada and Surrealist film history,
proposing that audio-visuals were an essential component. It approaches the material
in two new ways. Firstly, by a historical re-assessment of the period and its films,
addressing some of the elisions, assumptions and even errors concerning the films in
existing scholarship. Secondly, I have adopted close audio-visual analysis
techniques from modern film sound studies, providing a new, largely unexplored
perspective on these films, and gaining a deeper understanding of how image and
sound work together. This intervention shifts critical focus from the visual bias that
has dominated interpretation for decades, towards acknowledging audio as an
important creative element. In some cases, my research has uncovered audio-visual
innovation that still awaits due recognition. In other places I have discovered a
deeper level of audio-visual involvement from filmmakers than expected that
challenges preconceptions about the artistry, randomness or definitiveness of the
work. In every case, I have listened out for new ways to understand these films, and
Dada and Surrealism in general, and to bring a sidelined area of art and film sound
history centre stage.
Cinema was a major tool and inspiration within both Dada and Surrealism.
Dada-related artist-filmmakers produced abstract and kinetic works such as
Rhythmus 21 (Rhythm 21, Richter, 1921), Le Retour à la raison (The Return to
Reason, Man Ray, 1923), Symphonie diagonale (Diagonal Symphony, Eggeling,
3 Luis Buñuel, L'Âge d'or: correspondance Luis Buñuel-Charles de Noailles: Lettres et Documents (1929-1976), ed. Jean-Michel Bouhours and Natalie Schoeller (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), p. 178.
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1924), and Anémic cinéma (Anaemic Cinema, Duchamp, 1926). Such films explored
optical sensation and critiqued visual representation, and shared a common interest
with the contemporary avant-garde, in ‘capturing the sensation of physical
movement.’4 Other Dada-related films were less abstract, and introduced humour
through illogical mock narratives, combined with a desire to surprise and provoke
de-familiarisation. Films such as Entr'acte (Intermission, Clair, 1924) or
Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, Richter, 1928) displayed what Francis
Picabia, Entr'acte's co-creator, called ‘the pleasure of life... the desire to burst out
laughing.’5
According to Paul Hammond, the Surrealist response to cinema was
‘passionate, poetic, Romantic.’6 The challenge to perceptual and cultural norms
demonstrated in Dada-related cinema mixed with Surrealism's prime interests in
dreams and subconscious thought. Surrealism-related film continued to develop
Dada strategies of narrative disruption and defamiliarisation, but with an increased
use of recognisable film structures and representational imagery. The crossover from
Dada to Surrealist film practice is blurry, sometimes pitched on the release of Un
Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, Buñuel and Dalí, 1929), but which actually
built force before then through works such as Filmstudie (Film Study, Richter,
1926), La Coquille et le clergyman (The Shell and the Clergyman, Dulac, 1928),
written by Antonin Artaud, and L'Étoile de mer (The Starfish, Man Ray, 1928), co-
created with Robert Desnos. General Surrealist interest in cinema had developed
much earlier, growing from enthusiastic spectatorship into film criticism and
literature; as seen, for example, in articles such as Louis Aragon's 1918 ‘On Décor,’
or Philippe Soupault's 1924 ‘Cinema USA.’ 7 It is also apparent in the proliferation
of Surrealist-authored film scenarios during the mid-1920s, texts for imaginary
films, developed from the ‘films racontés’ (‘told films’) publishing format popular
during the period.8
4 Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ‘Introduction,’ in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996), p. 1. 5 Francis Picabia, quoted in Kuenzli, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5. 6 Paul Hammond, ‘Available Light,’ in The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, ed. and trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000), p. 1. 7 Louis Aragon, ‘On Decor’; Philippe Soupault, ‘Cinema U.S.A.,’ both in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow. 8 Richard Abel, ‘Exploring the Discursive Field of the Surrealist Scenario Text,’ in Kuenzli, Dada and Surrealist Film.
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Surrealism considered film to be the ideal medium for linking conscious and
unconscious modes of thought, a major Surrealist aspiration. The goal was to
combine dreamlike and naturalistic experiences, rather than to transcribe dreams
onto the screen. Jacques Brunius, filmmaker and avant-garde film chronicler,
claimed that cinema possessed ‘an incomparable facility for crossing the bridge in
both directions,’ allowing two-way exchanges between contradictory modes of
understanding such as ‘action and speculation, common sense and utopia,
psychology and the dream.’9 Whether it was the experimental challenges of Un
Chien andalou or mainstream Buster Keaton comedies or Hollywood musicals,
cinema was considered a valuable medium for bridging contradictory states, and
producing the subjective experiences considered most desirable by Surrealists.10
André Breton, leader of the Paris-based Surrealist group, and author of its
manifestos, described this cinematic power in his 1951 essay ‘As In A Wood,’ in
which he stated ‘I think that what we valued most in it, to the point of taking no
interest in anything else, was its power to disorient.’ 11 Breton praised film's
magnetism and exhilarating effects, especially when encountered by chance. He also
cited Jean Goudal's 1925 essay ‘Surrealism and Cinema,’ which suggested film
spectatorship ‘corresponds exactly to a conscious hallucination.’12 Goudal praised
film's potential to repudiate logic, and mentioned the important concept of ‘the
marvellous,’ an idealised transcendent surreal experience, usually precipitated by a
random encounter or juxtaposition.13 While Goudal and Breton were dismissive of
sound film in general, and nostalgic for the silent films of their own youth, casting
the net wider reveals more variety of responses.
Dada/Surrealism-related films shared an ambition of defamiliarising social
reality via various cinematic strategies. Rudolf Kuenzli identifies differences
between their approaches however, arguing that while Dada films constantly
defamiliarised through cinematic manipulation and resisting psychological
‘realism,’ Surrealist works exploited conventions of cinematic ‘realism’ with an aim
9 Jacques Brunius, ‘Crossing the Bridge,’ in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow, p. 102. Originally published in Jacques B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français (Lausanne: Editions L’âge d'homme, 1987). 10 See for example, Luis Buñuel, ‘Buster Keaton's College,’ in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow; Michel Leiris, ‘Fox Movietone Follies of 1929,’ Documents, vol. 1, no. 7 (1929). 11 André Breton, ‘As In A Wood,’ in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow, p. 73. 12 Jean Goudal, ‘Surrealism and Cinema,’ in Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow, p. 86. 13 Goudal, ‘Surrealism and Cinema,’ p. 93.
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of disrupting this representation.14 Surrealist film from Un Chien andalou onwards,
Ian Christie suggests, relied on ‘procedures of subversion, rupture and the
dysfunction of dominant narrative cinema.’15 In my opinion, the use of sound
contributed to, and enhanced, such procedures. The introduction of audio increased
the sensory impact of film, and provided more potential opportunities for
manipulation and narrative disruption. The various ways in which various
Dada/Surrealism-related filmmakers did this is the subject of my investigation.
As chapter one discusses, there exists a longstanding visual and literary bias
in Dada and Surrealist criticism, including film criticism. Art and film history have
traditionally ignored listening in favour of visual interpretation. Until relatively
recently, the soundtracks of the films studied here were largely ignored, and
certainly not considered systematically or in their own right. Ramona Fotiade's
summary of Surrealist film theory, for example, argues that it ‘concentrates on the
essentially visual nature of the medium and reflects the influence of avant-garde
painting and of early experiments in photography.’16 Surrealism in particular has
been positioned as a literary and visual arts movement, following Breton's lead,
whose Surrealism and Painting (1929) declared hearing to be far inferior to vision,
and music a confusing form which must be refused.17
Martin Jay has explained this ocularcentric bias within Breton-led Surrealism
as a way of distancing itself from preceding artistic and poetic movements that
stressed musicality or aural performance, particularly Dada, with the aim of
establishing a model of visionary revelation.18 Such bias has continued in the study
of Surrealism-related film through the lens of art history. Despite the emergence in
the late twentieth century of ‘new art histories’ which have widened contexts and
interpretation, the dominant readings of art and art movements remain primarily
visual. Art history, as Eric Fernie argues, is ‘a subject which has as its first defining
asset the expertise of the eye... and as its second the concrete character of its subject
14 Kuenzli, ‘Introduction,’ p. 10. 15 Ian Christie, ‘French Avant-garde Film in the Twenties: from “Specificity” to Surrealism,’ in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (London: Hayward Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), p. 44. 16 Ramona Fotiade, ‘The Untamed Eye: Surrealism and Film Theory,’ Screen, vol. 36, no. 4 (Winter 1995), p. 394. 17 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), p. 1. 18 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 237.
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matter.’19 Traditionally, the study of Dada/Surrealism-related film has paid little
attention to developing an expertise of the ear, or in considering non-concrete
subject matter such as sound. Assessing art…