A History of British Avant-Garde Film - Part I: 1896-1930

Originally published in FILMWAVES magazine in 2005.

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‘Fifty odd years hasn’t done so badly in getting an art into the world that fifty more will probably turn into THE art, but now, after somewhat magnificent growth, one feels here is its critical age’ . So wrote Kenneth MacPherson in his first column in Close-Up, the journal launched in 1927 by himself, the Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) as an attempt to initiate a culture of avant-garde filmmaking and intellectual criticism in Great Britain.

Across the visual and literary arts, there were various international attempts to establish avant-garde movements, rooted in opposition to artistic traditions. For artists, figurative painting, so popular during the nineteenth century, became redundant after the invention of photography, while many writers believed that cinema would appropriate the exteriorised narratives central to ‘Realist’ literature and so became more interested in exploring internal consciousness, a possibility that believed beyond the reach of the camera.

Formal boundaries had often been challenged, but usually by artists who spontaneously produced single works of striking originality, or organically developed a unique personal style. What was specific to the fin-de-siècle was a heightened awareness of entrenched artistic convention, with numerous theories on aesthetics drafted by diverse writers, such as Tolstoy and Wilde. The radical philosophical questions to rational, post-Enlightenment philosophy asked by Freud, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, all interested in the relationship between art, the individual consciousness and society, often coloured these theories.

Such artists were not solely interested in recent philosophy. Rapid innovation between 1839 and 1903 – photography, electricity, automobiles, radio, flight and of course film – made them believe that their age was that of modernity. They strived to create art that reflected this ‘newness’, engaging with the complex ideological and technological realities of the early twentieth century world. Individuals who attempted to discover new forms were often labelled ‘Modernists’, but the term ‘avant-garde’ was applied for such organised Modernist groups that combined theoretical energy about the relationship between aesthetic and socio-political issues with deliberately unconventional creativity.

Although most European Modernists were fascinated by the possibilities of film, it was not until the 1920s that many became actively involved in film production. The only notable exception was the Italian Futurists. Italian film had already developed a strong literary flavour, producing epics like Quo Vadis and Cabiria, scripted by poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. The Futurists issued a manifesto concerning film in 1916, declaring ‘The Cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage …. ONE MUST FREE THE CINEMA AS AN EXPRESSIVE MEDIUM in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art’ . The Futurists were able to produce two radically anti-theatrical films, Vita Futurista and Perfidio Incanto (also known as Thais); the former, now lost, was first shown publicly at the Niccolini Theatre in Florence on 28 January 1917. Elsewhere, the ‘mainstream’ film conventions that an avant-garde would explore were still being determined: however, the Futurist idea that cinema had appropriated theatrical conventions to compensate for its lack of tradition (a lack which they believing liberating) became central to avant-garde theorising about cinema.

Oswell Blakeston, writing in Close-Up, bemoaned the ‘disagreeable fact … that Britain lacks film tradition’. Blakeston argued that ‘haphazard’ production techniques meant mainstream British film was unable to acquire ‘the slick polish that America spreads like treacle over her sentimental bread and butter plots’ . Consequently, there was no British Caligari or The Last Laugh, because the failure to establish any film culture meant that a prospective counter-culture had little to define themselves against, nowhere to conduct theoretical debates, and immense difficulty in obtaining support for original creative ideas. The disorganised British industry and the resultant lack of a strong film ‘tradition’ meant that British cineastes had to look abroad for both an institution to react against, and for an oppositional cinema to identify with.

The enemy was obvious: Hollywood. American production swamped the British market – by 1918, 60% of films shown in British cinemas were US imports . Whilst certain directors working within the Hollywood infrastructure earned (often grudging) admiration from British critics, Modernist film enthusiasts despised Hollywood’s narrative conventions and commercial mindset. Consequently, they became interested in European film production, either within a studio system (such as Germany’s UFA) or within independent frameworks of production and distributions. Fractious collaborations between European directors and Hollywood producers only solidified British sympathies: noted German directors such as F. W. Murnau and Erich von Stroheim, when asked to work in Hollywood, often found their films were butchered by Hollywood executives, most famously with Stroheim’s Greed (1925), the butchering of which by MGM outraged Britain’s cineastes.

The British intellectuals were, like von Stroheim, caught between mainland Europe and America. Geographically, they were closer to Europe; linguistically and culturally, their country shared much with the United States. Despite its inchoate nature, they did identify certain trends in British film production. Early filmmakers like R. W. Paul and James Williamson experimented, like Méliès, with stop-motion photography, or simply shot scenes of working-class factories, football matches or horse races; many critics dismissed these films, believing that their medium could never produce art. It was not just the content of these one-reel films that convicted such critics – the fact that they were exhibited at fairgrounds convinced them that they were no more than an amusing novelty.

In response, those who saw in film greater potential attempted to lend the new technology prestige by infusing their reels with British theatrical tradition. F. R. Benson, Percy Stow and others filmed short versions of Shakespeare plays, and many silent films were adaptations of popular Victorian literature and drama. These films often told stories of class transformation or, as in Maurice Elvey’s adaptation of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1927), criticised petit-bourgeois social morality. They were never, however, explicitly revolutionary films, and no prominent films tackled the General Strike or other contemporary political unrest.

This issue of exhibition context became extremely important. Hollywood cinema had not just incorporated dramatic conventions into its characteristic narrative style: D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (adapted from Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman) had been presented with an interval and a printed programme. The prestigious quality of Griffith’s productions meant that this theatricality became a model for mainstream US directors and producers, one imitated in Britain. Important to this illusion of prestige was where the films were shown, and if this prestige was to be derived from theatricality, then their exhibition space had to resemble the theatre.

The domination of Hollywood over British cinema, and the position Britain occupied between Europe and the United States, made the character of its 1920s avant-garde markedly different from its continental counterparts. One curiosity was that, with very few exceptions, British-based Modernist writers and artists failed to involve themselves in active film production. They may perhaps have been that the British Modernists in literature, drama and art were often more conservative, politically and aesthetically, than those in mainland Europe. The Futurists’ (somewhat less incendiary) British counterpart, Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist group, ignored film entirely, and it was more ‘traditional’ writers, such as H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, who became involved in cinematic production.

Bennett scripted Piccadilly for E. A. Dupont, a German director, whose film Variété (1925) was praised by British critics. Piccadilly was considered an ‘art’ film: its aesthetics were not representative of a desire to destroy entrenched aesthetic tradition or develop new forms. Rather, by involving a respected author and director, and utilising several imaginative camera devices and shots, it attempted to explore cinematographic possibilities within established narrative and formal convention. The avant-garde aim was similar to the artistic one, but was far more inflammatory – the difference was crucial.

Ivor Montagu – a personal friend (and translator) of Eisenstein – made Bluebottles in 1928, from H. G. Wells’ scenario. Elsa Lanchester starred as a woman who inadvertently foils a criminal gang by blowing a whistle. Like Adrian Brunel’s burlesque travelogues, Bluebottles was a comedy, satirically appropriating the class stereotypes that characterised mainstream British film for comic effect, and drawing much from popular culture. However, neither Brunel nor Montagu conducted major formal experiments, and the retrospective definition of their films as ‘avant-garde’ smacks of desperation to rediscover a vibrant ‘experimental’ film community operating during the silent era – these films barely captured the imagination of Britain’s avant-garde critics.

Instead, it was European ‘art’ and ‘avant-garde’ films that influenced criticism and production. For example, Sinclair Hill supervised COD – A Mellow Drama (1929), an affectionate parody of the German Expressionist films so beloved by Oswell Blakeston and H.D., both of whom were integral to Close-Up magazine.

Close-Up was not devoted to fierce experimentation so much as a demand for quality film, in any form. It endorsed the ‘art’ films produced in Germany by Wiene, Murnau, Lang and Close-Up’s favourite, Pabst, and both the avant-gardes described by Peter Wollen in his seminal essay The Two Avant-Gardes. These were the abstract films of Richter, Ruttmann and Eggeling (which influenced Len Lye’s British-made Tusalava), which attempted to avoid image-signification entirely, and their counterpart, the ideologically committed films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and other Soviet director-theoreticians.

The publication was not primarily a forum for the publication of manifestos; its editor, Kenneth MacPherson, was ambivalent about the idea of ‘theory’, although it did print Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Aleksandrov’s manifesto on sound film. More often, they offered detailed, intellectual analysis of individual films, and suggested what British filmmakers and audiences could learn from them.

This was perhaps a product of the tension between the stridently avant-garde MacPherson and the more conciliatory attitudes towards mainstream film (especially its literariness) of other contributors. It demanded a film culture informed by modern art and literature, hardly surprising given that H.D. and Bryher were part of its editorial staff. Another crucial contributor was novelist Dorothy Richardson, author of Pilgrimage, an epic stream-of-consciousness novel. The least anti-Hollywood, Richardson’s ‘Continuous Performance’ columns explored film technique and exhibition practices, as well as the gender connotations of cinematic sound and silence. MacPherson was able to persuade several other influential writers to contribute, including Gertrude Stein, Marc Allégret (André Gide’s adopted son, and later a director), Anita Loos and flamboyant Surrealist poet René Crevel.

Bryher was particularly concerned with the detrimental effect of censorship on British film culture. The BBFC, founded in 1912 amidst early debates about the potentially deleterious effect of film, had 43 laws restraining its sexual and political content. When the BBFC barred Battleship Potemkin from general release in 1926, amidst the General Strike, Bryher was outraged. Eisenstein had meant his film, however avant-garde, to reach a mass audience, to whom its ideological message was undoubtedly addressed, and he wanted it to do so through the ‘mainstream’ system of distribution. A loophole in the censorship laws, however, meant that it could be shown at private Film Society screenings; that is, to a selected bourgeois enclave. A short-term attempt to prevent this loophole from stopping proletarian audiences from seeing revolutionary Russian films, the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies, was launched in 1929.

The Potemkin controversy highlighted the necessity, felt by the (largely) socialist-inclined avant-garde, of analysing the ideological nature of the industry’s infrastructure, which they felt essentially conservative, and whether this infrastructure should be subversively utilised, or completely bypassed. Where, Close-Up asked, should ‘experimental’ films be exhibited, and to what extent should they attempt to capture the commercial market?

This question also highlighted the (artificial) divide between the two avant-gardes that Peter Wollen later identified – those primarily demanding formal innovation, implicitly linked to revolutionary politics in so far as their aesthetics challenged ‘bourgeois’ thought, and those who made explicitly ideological works. The former, often consisting of artists wishing to test the new medium, preferred to show their films in galleries or at soirées, alongside experimental poetry or dramatic pieces. The more political filmmakers dreamed of capturing the international commercial market – it was the ideological frustration of this dream of achieving this that so upset Bryher. As importantly, they were split geographically: the abstract, Dadaist and Surrealist filmmakers constituting the first group were based in Western Europe, whilst the latter consisted mostly of Soviet filmmakers.

The English avant-garde sought to unite these groups, realising that it was not their political or aesthetic positions that fundamentally differed, but merely the emphasis placed upon them. In 1929 Ivor Montagu invited Hans Richter, at that time the most prominent abstract filmmaker (whose films were becoming increasingly political) and Sergei Eisenstein (who, aware that he was obliged to tackle revolutionary themes, began focusing on form) to make a film together in London. The result, Everyday, a frantic, repetitive critique on modern urban lifestyles, was not completed until 1969, but it did represent an effort to form a dialogue between avant-garde strands which, although they mutually respected each other, had thus far been unable to co-operate on actual productions or even exchange ideas.

Anticipating the Cahiers du cinéma critic-directors of the nouvelle vague, Close-Up’s editorial staff produced their own films. The Pool group, comprising of MacPherson, H.D. and Bryher, created Wing Beat in 1927, which they described as cinema’s first ‘free verse poem’ . It is unclear whether Wing Beat or their subsequent shorts, Foothills and Monkey’s Moon were ever shown publicly, but their most ambitious project, Borderline (1930) most definitely was.

Borderline represented an attempt to take the critical debates conducted in Close-Up’s pages and use them to inform experimental film production, creating a dialectical relationship between film theory and practice like that in Russia. MacPherson called Borderline ‘the only really ‘avant-garde’ film ever made’: certainly, it was the most deliberately avant-garde film ever made in Britain at the time . Paradoxically, it was silent, made three years after the onset of sound, a possibility that excited many European experimentalists – Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov wrote about sound in Close-Up, and its French correspondent, Jean Lenauer, also expressed enthusiasm about its potentialities. The journal’s British contributors, particularly Dorothy Richardson, were less keen, believing that the silent film transcended linguistic and, therefore, national barriers, and that the internationalist basis of their attitude to cinema would be irrevocably undermined.

If Borderline’s attempted praxis was influenced by Kuleshov and the Soviet avant-garde, its over-arching aesthetic style was closer German ‘art’ film, particularly those of Pabst. However, much besides in Borderline remains of interest, notably the presence of Paul Robeson in the lead role, another major coup for MacPherson, who also persuaded H.D. (under the name Helga Doorn) to perform. Thematically, the film confronted racial prejudice, being set in a nameless, ‘borderline’ European town. Bryher and H.D., besides steadfastly opposing the racist statements of films like Birth of a Nation, possessed fluid sexualities, and the film also tackled issues regarding sexual diversity, in an understated, subtle fashion.

Borderline was central to MacPherson’s (paradoxical) dream of inaugurating a British avant-garde tradition, and its poor critical reception distressed him greatly. MacPherson commented that ‘They [the English] reject Borderline not because it is complex … but because it is a film of sub-conscious reasoning’ . The defensive nature of his response hinted at fundamental pessimism about the possibility of constructing a domestic avant-garde film culture: the arrival of sound and the changing nature of international relations that followed the Wall Street Crash were blows to Close-Up’s ideological and theoretical basis that the magazine was never quite able to overcome; the magazine folded in January 1933.

In terms of production, there was very little genuinely avant-garde activity in 1920s Britain. The film parodies of Brunel, Montagu and Sinclair Hill hardly seem avant-garde to contemporary audiences, and Lye’s Tusalava appeared several years after Viking Eggeling’s pioneering exploration of painterly, abstract film. Artists’ films were sparse: Duncan Grant’s Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound was an inventive use of the image-processing technology that preceded film, but not committed to celluloid until 1974; Dr. Turner’s Mental Home, by Dora Carrington and Beacus Penrose (Roland Penrose’s brother), was probably only shown once, at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s home in London. Neither film signalled a large-scale involvement of Modernist painters in British film.

Before the Great War, virtually all production was experimental, in that filmmakers were always exploring the technical possibilities of the medium. However, the simple fact that they were always doing so meant that this project was not avant-garde: they simply tested the potentialities of cinematography without regarding to the aesthetic or ideological connotations of their experimentation. The consciously avant-garde film did not become possible until after the war ended; the conflict’s nature meant that when it did, British mainstream production lagged so far behind America that a national cinema struggled to assert itself, consequently hampering avant-garde productivity.

Close-Up remains more significant than any avant-garde film produced in Twenties Britain. Its fiercely internationalist attitude to film became hugely influential, encouraging subsequent British cineastes to closely follow developments in experimental film across the world. Its effort to centre an avant-garde, combining criticism, theory and production in one place, with one set of people, anticipated the attempt of the London Film-Makers Co-operative to do the same during the Sixties.

The debates conducted during the 1920s about whether film should ally itself with theatre and art, whether it should place emphasis on radical aesthetics or politics, and (crucially) whether it should welcome the onset of sound led to the initiation of several discourses within British avant-garde film practice, traditions which continue to the present day. These issues, not concluded before the arrival of sound, did not make the jump from theoretical debate to film content until the 1930s, but the flowering of a very different, politically engaged British avant-garde during that decade owed much to the critical framework established during the 1920s.