Art of Perception: Ethics of the French Avant-Garde

Surveying the historical background and aesthetic characteristics of the French avant-garde movement, It’s apparent that some key focuses, including emphasis on cinema’s essence and its connections with human consciousness and memories, constitute the European art cinema traditions that are still being explored on the continent today.

The 1920s marked a significant fusion of cinema with the evolving art world. Surrealism, the artistic movement aimed at dismantling the veneer of rationality to reveal the fundamental irrationality of human consciousness, left a imprint upon the avant-garde cinema of the period. Films like Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique place “human desires” as the center of social realities. Those norm-breaking and surrealist imagery — patricide, grotesque fetishes, torn limbs and severed eyeballs — were deliberately designed to offend, to shatter the collective defense mechanism constructed by the disciplining bourgeois establishment. These experimental works provide emerging filmmakers a “gesture” — a new and provocative approach to encode realities. While Federico Fellini took up the perspective for character study (8 1/2) and dissection of collective fantasies (Roma), Luis Bunũel, returning to France from Mexico, organized motifs into absurdist narratives that detail the confrontation between the real and the imaginary, sharply mocking bourgeois institutions (religion, marriage).

Nevertheless, the greatest contributions of the French avant-garde movement extend beyond mechanical techniques or content to cater (though they are certainly important). They lie in the tradition of theorizing, examining and creating cinema as an “art of phenomenon”. Techniques can easily become outdated, “abused” and even limiting, as Jean Epstein argued, claiming that the true spirit of avant-garde lies in the exploration of the mythical “cinematic telepathy”.

This concept is rooted in a phenomenological and ontological understanding of cinema. The magic of cinema arises from the close alignment between human consciousness and cinematic experience. The “realities” in our discourse do not refer to the constellation of entities beyond our bodies. Instead, we are all the chained prisoners in Plato’s Cave, actively “constructing” the world through perceptions grounded in temporality and kinetics, as agreed by cognitive scientists and phenomenologists. The uncertainty is whether there is an actual world beyond the cave. Human beings create cultural artifacts and arts to understand, encode and communicate their consciousness — both individual or collective. While Baroque paintings and Greek sculptures strive, albeit imperfectly, to capture kinetic flows, music and literature endeavour to reconstruct temporality through abstraction. Within this ontological framework, cinema, as a figurative medium, is potentially the ultimate form of expression.

The arrival of the train in the Parisian basement exemplifies the first union of these two perpetual aspects in human creations — an achievement so shocking and “telepathic” that, according to rumors, many audiences ran out of the site.  Dulac’s writing beautifully encapsulates her passion to harness the essence of cinema, “the expression of movement and rhythm”, “in search of emotions beyond the limits of the human”, the experience of experiencing instead of what is experienced, or the underlying human souls. This vision — a truly modern one — resonates with Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, highlighting the transformative power of cinema to transcend cause-effect narratives and engage views in a profound temporal experience. Upon this, Antonioni and Angelopoulos explore the materiality of time in urban and historical settings; Bergman and Bresson use human gestures and faces to create a symphony of spirituality; Tarchovsky’s works evoke the “moments” of poetry drawn from individual memories.