Regarding the real

Cinema, documentary, and the visual arts

Des O'Rawe

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784996079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Regarding the real develops an original approach to documentary film, focusing on its aesthetic relations to visual arts such as animation, assemblage, photography, painting and architecture. Throughout, the book considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary is an endlessly open form; an unstable expressive phenomenon that cannot help but interrogate its own narratives and intentions. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern arts in subverting structures of realism typically associated with the documentary. In the course of its discussion, it charts a fascinating path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas and Raymond Depardon.

1

Suspended animation

I’m a film-thinker, otherwise uncultured. (Len Lye)¹

The GPO Film Unit is the most iconic of the various state-sponsored and independent organisations that comprised the British Documentary Movement of the inter-war period. Its outline history tends to go as follows: in the middle of economic recession, social unrest, and the spread of fascism, Stephen Tallents and John Grierson salvaged a dedicated public-service film unit from the recently defunct Empire Marketing Board (EMB). Funded through the General Post Office, the unit existed from 1933–39, with an ostensible brief to produce short films promoting the work of government departments, and informing the public about the condition of Britain. Throughout most of this period, Grierson nurtured a diverse group of filmmakers, and he came to regard his time there as the moment when documentary filmmaking entered ‘the field of social problems, and keyed it to the task of describing not only industrial and commercial spectacle but social truth as well’. Thereafter, classic GPO films, such as Post Haste (Humphrey Jennings, 1934, 26 min.), Weather Forecast (Evelyn Cherry, 1934, 20 min.), Housing Problems (Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, 1935, 13 min.), The King’s Stamp (William Coldstream, 1935, 20 min.), and Night Mail (Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936, 24 min.) became associated with the representation of this treatment of ‘social truth’, and with a notion of the documentary film as showing ‘the common man, not in the romance of his calling, but in the more complex and intimate drama of his citizenship’.²

In simplifying into sociology the artistic environment that produced the GPO (and EMB) films of the late 1920s and 1930s, however, Grierson also strategically distanced this body of work from the reactions against realism still being felt throughout the culture of modernism, especially in the fields of painting, design, sculpture, literature, and music: the films of Wright, Jennings, and Coldstream owe as much to the remnants of European surrealism as to the tenets of Griersonian realism. Len Lye, in particular, experimented across a wide range of art forms, conscientiously avoiding too direct an association with any given film genre, movement or manifesto, working from groups rather than for them. His involvement with Grierson and the GPO throughout the 1930s was an important chapter in a career characterised by a defiant – anarchic, even – attitude towards authorities and institutions. Not surprisingly, his GPO films – namely, A Colour Box (1935, 4 min.), Rainbow Dance (1936, 5 min.), Trade Tattoo (1937, 5 min.), and N. or N.W. (1937, 7 min.) – have been rendered incidental to histories of the Documentary Movement during the 1930s. Like the GPO films of Norman McLaren and Lotte Reiniger from this period, however, Lye’s work is integral to any comprehensive assessment of this movement and its relations to a wider visual culture, relations that contributed to its success in extending the scope of documentary film language.

Travels/doodles

Lye was born in Christchurch, New Zealand on 5 July 1901. His parents were poor first-generation immigrants: Irish Catholic on his mother’s side and English Protestant on his father’s. Like Stan Brakhage in the 1950s, Lye’s discovery of Ezra Pound’s 1916 essay-memoir of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska proved revelatory and he was soon attracted to the artworks of the European modernists, principally, those associated with Constructivism, Futurism, Vorticism, and Cubism. Lye’s engagement with surrealism emerged later and would become relevant to his work throughout the 1930s. His interest in tribal art and cultures, and the instinctual creativity of the body, intensified after he read more widely on aspects of comparative mythology, dance rituals, and fertility symbolism – reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) was a particularly illuminating experience for him. In 1922, he moved to Sydney where he secured some work with an advertising company specialising in the production of short commercial films. This direct contact with work-a-day filmmakers and the raw materials of their craft convinced him that film – especially the animated film – was an ideal medium to explore the practical applications of his own evolving kinaesthetic theories. (It may also have given him knowledge of early film advertising techniques and tricks that would prove useful when he started working at the GPO.) After spending nearly two years in western Samoa, Lye returned briefly to Australia before heading to England in 1926.

The cultural milieu in London at this time was receptive to Lye’s methods and outlook, and he immediately set to work producing new paintings, batiks, and small sculptures. Lye’s friend from Sydney, the Australian composer Jack Ellitt, also migrated to London at this time, and they began collaborating on what would be Lye’s first short film, Tusalava (1929, silent, 10 min.) – an animation based on Aboriginal myths of the witchetty grub. His work began to attract admirers and he struck up relations with numerous artists and writers, including Coldstream, Jennings, Eric Kennington, Norman Cameron, Ben Nicholson, Laurie Lee, Oswell Blakeston, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves. One of his first commissions involved designing title page symbols for Seizin Press, Graves’s and Riding’s small (Majorca-based) publishing company. He effectively became the artist-in-residence at Seizin, drawing the motifs and designing the covers for several books, including Riding’s Love as Death, Death as Death (1928), and a new edition of Gertrude Stein’s An Acquaintance with Description (1929). With Riding’s editorial assistance, he completed his first book, No Trouble (1930), a collection of letters also published by Seizin. These commissions were important, securing for Lye a creative home relatively free from the distractions of institutional pressures, and institutional personalities. At the same time, the formation of the London Film Society in 1925 also assisted Lye’s career. Although the Film Society was originally founded with the principal aim of exhibiting modernist cinema, its membership was intellectually diverse. This was reflected in its programmes, which included a variety of British as well as European and Soviet films. In addition to enjoying the active support of Fabians like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and J. M. Keynes, the society also comprised filmmakers and visual artists. Grierson and Thorold Dickinson were among those who endorsed its support for new exhibition quotas in Britain, while abstract artists such as Nicholson and Frank Dobson viewed the Society as a natural ally in their struggles against the academic predilections of the British art establishment. Lye joined the Society in 1928, and was given the opportunity to see important modern films, and meet visiting filmmakers, including Hans Richter (who impressed him) and Sergei Eisenstein (who didn’t). The Film Society, for its part, was excited by Lye’s novel approach to animation, and it agreed to provide him with sufficient funding to complete Tusalava, which was screened as part of the Film Society’s 33rd programme, in December 1929.

One of the Society’s co-founders, Sidney Bernstein, also went on to sponsor Lye’s next film – a three-minute puppet film entitled Experimental Animation (aka Peanut Vendor) (1934, 3 min.). During this period, Lye’s interest in ‘colour music’ and the free-hand soundtrack is similar to the audiovisual experiments of László Moholy-Nagy, and Viking Eggeling. Coincidentally, Moholy-Nagy lived and worked with other Bauhaus artists in London between 1935 and 1937, and the parallels between his career at this time and that of Lye are striking: while in England, Moholy-Nagy attended screenings of GPO films, began painting on transparent plastics, received a major advertising commission from Imperial Airways, and was involved in several documentary film projects; footage from his Play of Light Black–White–Grey/Ein Lichtspiel Schwarz–weiss–grau (1930, 6 min.), for example, was included at the beginning of Stuart Legg’s GPO film, The Coming of the Dial (1933, 14 min.).³ Meanwhile, Nicholson’s coup at the Seven and Five Society was another event that would – inadvertently – assist Lye’s career. The Seven and Five Society was originally formed in 1919 to exhibit non-modernist British art but by the late 1920s it had become the primary exhibitor of abstract art in Britain. Nicholson, who had joined the Society in 1924, spearheaded this fundamental change in the Society’s exhibition policy. In 1927, Nicholson invited Lye to be a guest exhibitor in the Society’s January exhibition, and this experience brought Lye into contact with artists associated with surrealism, including Jennings, who had just returned from Paris, and Alberto Cavalcanti, whose surrealist ‘city symphony’, Nothing But Time/Rien que les heures (1926, silent, 45 min.) was also screened by the Film Society in 1929, and who would subsequently introduce both Lye and Jennings (separately) to Grierson, and work with them at the GPO Film Unit. By the early 1930s, however, Lye had become disappointed at how Nicholson and the Seven and Five Society (renamed the Seven and Five Abstract Group in 1935) were developing their purer notion of abstract art, and he initially reacted against this by aligning himself more closely to surrealism: ‘Like Riding in her Histories, Lye produced much of his work in the 1930s in dialogue with surrealism – he admired Miró, and wrote prose pieces in an “automatic” style indebted to Breton and Stein … [he] exhibited paintings at the London Surrealist exhibitions of 1936 and 1937, and practised automatic doodling.’⁴

While Lye had made a name for himself as an abstract painter and print designer, his career as a filmmaker had faltered after the modest success of Tusalava. The Experimental Animation project had provided him with some useful technical experience but it was followed by a number of failures, and finding the financial and technical resources to make new animated films was proving impossible. It was at this point he decided to revive some of his Australian ‘scratch’ experiments: using discarded film leaders, he had started trying to synchronise the movement of scratches and marks on the celluloid with different musical sequences. Developing his handmade technique, he now began painting directly on transparent and processed film stock, using coloured lacquers and miscellaneous instruments (brushes, bones, combs, stencils, etc.). When projected, Lye’s (un-photographed) film images yielded up a vivid array of colours, textures, shapes, and rhythms.⁵ Crucially, he also quickly developed an effective printmaking technique for his footage and in so doing earned a place for himself alongside the other major contemporary innovators in the field of animation: namely, Oskar Fischinger, Berthold Bartosch, Alexandre Alexeïeff, Walt Disney, McLaren, and Reiniger – who made several short silhouette films at the GPO, including The Heavenly Post Office (1938, col. 4 min.) and The Tocher (1938, b&w, 5 min.). For Lye, meanwhile, this direct method of filmmaking had another attribute: it was cheap. No cameras were required and post-production editing was minimal. In freeing the artist from the responsibilities of concrete figuration and geometric precision, the images could be created automatically, flowing more readily from the primitive energies of the Old Brain (Lye’s preferred term for the unconscious), rather than from the logical (realist) processes of the ‘New Brain’.

Lye’s concept of an Old Brain (and its variants) remained central to his understanding of the relationship between primordial instincts and creative expression. Since his time in Australia and western Samoa in the 1920s, he had been trying to develop an artistic practice that circumvented rationality and responded directly to the rhythms of the body, and the images of the unconscious. While there are similarities between this approach and surrealism’s privileging of the body and the unconscious, Lye’s kinaesthetic attitude was much more anti-rational, anarchic, and a-political. Although, as Michel Remy has pointed out, Tusalava ‘shows affinities with surrealist qualities apparent in the works of Joan Miró, Paul Klee or Desmond Morris’ and his ‘exploration of “doodles” … links up with the surrealist theory of automatism’, Lye had become sceptical about surrealism, seeing too much ‘new brain’ ingenuity in its paintings, films, and manifestos.⁶ Writing in 1937, he remarked:

The surreals have yet to cotton that their good emphasis on the mind stuff is sifted through the old mind enemy living reality eye-check sieve. Hearts in the right place: minds hinged on polarities for mind catching interest: twisting the reality set-up. Showing the mind in whimsical dream ticktock. A Hi! Hi! and three ticks off the dead lamb’s tail with a living emphasis swish.⁷

Arguably, Lye’s appropriation of primitive forms and direct techniques is also more playful and sympathetic than that of painters such as Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Lye’s aesthetic ambitions were unsophisticated: motion, sounds, images, and sensations. As he later commented: ‘The whole business with any art is first, empathy; then a good aesthetic level of imagery; and finally, getting and keeping the vicarious evocations of the imagery going.’⁸ It was the principle of ‘keeping things going’, and gaining access to Old Brain energies that explains his initial engagement with – and subsequent estrangement from – surrealism in the 1930s, abstract expressionism in the 1950s, and the Kinetic Art Movement in the 1960s.

Actuality/whimsicality

Lye’s commitment to abstract imagery rather than social reality is not something normally associated with the film unit Grierson had inaugurated at the EMB, and which he then consolidated during his four-year stint as Film Officer at the GPO. Indeed, shortly before his first commission from the Unit, Lye (and Laura Riding) had declared that the cinema ‘cannot visualize meaning – meaning, or explanatory sense is not visualizable’.⁹ This notion (and the entire tenor of their 1935 statement on filmmaking) is – if anything – antithetical to Grierson’s description of the origins and aims of his school of film: ‘It is worth recalling that the British documentary group began not much in affection for film per se as in affection for national education. If I am to be counted as the founder and leader of the movement, its origins certainly lay in sociological rather than aesthetic aims.’¹⁰ While Grierson’s recollection is accurate in one sense, his attitude to ‘film per se’ and ‘aesthetic aims’ was more ambivalent than such pronouncements suggest. After he left the GPO in 1937, for example, Grierson continued to emphasise the educational achievements of the Unit, divorcing it from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Suspended animation
• 2 Somewhere in the city
• 3 Questioning the frame
• 4 Eclectic dialectics
• 5 One plus one (p.m.)
• 6 Journey to Central Park
• 7 Architectures of vision
• Bibliography
• Index