PART FOUR 1925-1929
lem is posed, there is a serious psychological error: it is in the nature ofmen
and workers, even the revolutionary worker, to love the machine and detest
only their fellow men. The beginning of Metropolis is a prodigious spectacle,
but the conception of this barbarous universe comes from the mind of
a false artist, who refuses to understand what he is seeing, and concludes
that industry is to be damned simply because it makes too much noise.
Once again, the beginning images are quite lovely and almost cause us
to forget the scenario's ineptitude, but I find it odd that Fritz Lang has put
so much genius into producing the migraine fantasy ofa four-year-old.
I also believe that spectators are realizing how much this work seeks to
overwhelm them rather than to please them, which is curtailing their admiration.
It was lovely, yes, but to what end? ...
JEAN PREVOST (1901-1944) was a brilliant essayist and populist novelist who occasionally
wrote articles on the cinema as well as film reviews in Les Nouvel/es litterairn, La Nouvelle
Revuefranfaise, and Le Crapouillot, in the later 1920s.
' The scenario for Metropolis was written by Thea Von Harbou and Fritz Lang.
• The cinematography in Metropolis was done by Karl Freund and Gunther Rittau.
' The special effects for Metropolis were done by Eugen Schiifftan.
4 The reference is to Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923).
' The cast of Metropolis included Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang), Alfred Abel (Fredersen),
Gustav Frohlich (Freder), and Brigitte Helm (Maria).
ANTONIN ARTAUD, "Cinema and Reality"
From Selected Writings by Antonin Artaud. Translation copyright© 1976 by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Translated by
Helen Weaver. The original French text first appeared as "Cinema et realite," in La Nouvelle
Revuefranfaise 170 (1 November 1927) and was reprinted in Arcaud, Oeuvres completes, vol.
3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 22-25.
Two PATHS SEEM to be open to the cinema right now, neither of
which, undoubtedly, is the right one.
On the one hand there is pure or absolute cinema, and on the other there
is that kind of venial hybrid art which insists on translating into more or
less suitable images psychological situations that would be perfectly at
home on the stage or in the pages of a book but not on the screen, since
they are merely the reflection ofa world that depends on another source for
its raw material and its meaning.
It is clear that everything we have seen up to now that passes for abstract
or pure cinema is very far from meeting what seems to be one of the essential
requirements ofcinema. For although the mind of man may be able to
conceive and accept abstraction, no one can respond to purely geometric
lines which possess no significative value in themselves and which are not
related to any sensation that the eye of the screen can recognize or classify.
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No matter how deeply we dig into the mind, we find at the bottom ofevery
emotion, even an intellectual one, an affective sensation ofa nervous order.
This sensation involves the recognition, perhaps on an elementary level,
but at least on a tangible one, ofsomething substantial, ofa certain vibration
that always recalls states, either known or imagined, that are clothed
in one of the myriad forms of real or imagined nature. Thus the meaning
of pure cinema would lie in the re-creation ofa certain number offorms of
this kind, it would lie in a movement and follow a rhythm which is the
specific contribution of this art.
Between a purely linear visual abstraction (and the play of light and
shadow is similar to the play of lines) and the fundamentally psychological
film which relates the development ofa story that may or may not be dramatic,
there is room for an attempt at true cinema, of whose substance or
meaning nothing in the films that have been presented to date gives any
suggestion.
In heavily plotted films, all the emotion and all the humor depend solely
on the text, to the exclusion of the images; with a few rare exceptions, all
the thought in a film is in the subtitles {intertitles}, and even in films without
subtitles the emotion is verbal, it requires the clarification or support
of words, for the situations, the images, the actions all turn on a clear
meaning. We have yet to achieve a film with purely visual situations whose
drama would come from a shock designed for the eyes, a shock drawn, so
to speak, from the very substance ofour vision and not from psychological
circumlocutions ofa discursive nature which are merely the visual equivalent
ofa text. It is not a question offinding in visual language an equivalent
for written language, of which the visual language would merely be a bad
translation, but rather of revealing the very essence of language and ofcarrying
the action onto a level where all translation would be unnecessary and
where this action would operate almost intuitively on the brain.
In the screenplay {ofLa Coquille et le clergyman] that follows, I have tried
to carry out this idea of a visual cinema in which even psychology is engulfed
by actions. No doubt this screenplay does not achieve the absolute
image ofall that can be done in this direction; but at least it points the way.
Not that the cinema must renounce all human psychology: that is not its
principle--on the contrary-but it must give psychology a form that is
much more vital and active, and without those connections that try to reveal
the motives for our actions in an absolutely stupid light instead of
spreading them before us in their original and profound barbarity.
This screenplay is not the re-creation ofa dream and should not be considered
as such. I shall not attempt to excuse its apparent incoherence by
the facile subterfuge of dreams. Dreams have more than their logic. They
have their life, in which there appears an intelligent and somber truth.
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PART FOUR 1925-1929
This screenplay seeks the somber truth of the mind in images which have
issued solely from themselves and which do not derive their meaning from
the situation in which they develop, but from a kind ofpowerful inner necessity
that casts them in a light of inescapable clarity.
The human skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this is the primary
raw material ofcinema. Cinema exalts matter and reveals it to us in its profound
spirituality, in its relations with the spirit from which it has
emerged. Images are born, are derived from one another purely as images,
impose an objective synthesis more penetrating than any abstraction, create
worlds which ask nothing of anyone or anything. But out of this pure
play of appearances, out of this so to speak transubstantiation of elements
is born an inorganic language that moves the mind by osmosis and without
any kind of transposition in words. And because it works with matter itself,
cinema creates situations that arise from the mere collision ofobjects,
forms, repulsions, attractions. It does not detach itselffrom life but rediscovers
the original order ofthings. The films that are most successful in this
sense are those dominated by a certain kind ofhumor, like the early Buster
Keatons or the less human Chaplins. A cinema which is studded with
dreams, and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its
triumph in the most excessive sort of humor. A certain excitement of objects,
forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions
and surprises ofa reality that seems to destroy itselfwith an irony in which
you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD (1896-1948) was an actor in Charles Dullin's Atelier Theatre as well
as a poet, playwright, and dramatic theorist. He was a member ofthe Surrealist group from
1925 to 1927 and again briefly in 1928, around the time of the release of La Coquille et le
clergyman. Artaud performed in a number of important late 1920s French films-for instance,
Gance's Napoleon (1927), Dreyer's La Passion deJeanne D'Arc (1928), Poiriers's Verdun,
vision d'histoire (1928), and L'Herbier's L'Argent (1929).
JEAN EPSTEIN, "Art of Incidence"
Translated by Tom Milne in Afterimage 10 (Autumn 1981), !)-16. Reprinted by permission.
The original French text first appeared as "Arr d'evenement," Comoedia (18 November
1927), 4.
IGNORING three analogous assignations made with or by three different
women, a young man, happy to be on holiday as it were, alone and free,
takes his sports car out of the garage and speeds away . . . until he smashes
himself up on the road to Deauville. With a little stab ofits beak between
his eyes, a swallow flying even faster than the speeding car had killed this
refugee from love.
The fifteen pages of Paul Morand's short story' ..La Glace atrois faces, "I
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