bauhaus & film (4)

Eighty years ago, in September 1929, the first meeting of the international film avant-garde took place in Swiss La Sarraz near Lausanne. Many of the avant-garde films that were shown there are closely associated with the cinematic ideas of the Bauhaus. This "Congress of Independent Film" was deliberately international, and for this reason, La Sarraz counts as a milestone among film historians. "Precursor of all film festival" (Montagu), "the probably most important cinematographic event ever in Switzerland" (Dumont). This "summit" of the avant-garde took place in a remote castle in the mountains, with a female lord of the castle (Madame de Mandrot), a Knight’s Hall and a Round Table of select guests, including Hans Richter, Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrow, Walter Ruttmann, Béla Balázs, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Léon Moussinac. A year earlier, at the same location, the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne had taken place, attended by Maholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier and others. On the occasion of the anniversary, we will present a selection of shorts that were shown there: Len Lye's first film Tusalava (GB 1929), a pioneering work of experimental animation film, seeks to create creatures never seen before, the “beginning of all organic life” in the form of microscopic scavenger cells and tine antibodies. The classic of Surrealism, Un Chien Andalou (F 1928) by Luis Buñuel and Salvator Dali, with unforgettable enigmatic pictures: cutting an eyeball, the mules tied to a piano and pulled by young priests, the powerless hand lying severed on the street, the hand jammed between door and frame covered by the ants of guilt. Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer (F 1928) is the film adaptation, partially shot in deliberately unfocussed, blurry images, of a poem full of erotic fantasies by Desnos, with the starfish as the symbol of oceanic love: It dies and dries up when thrown on the sand of the outside world. James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher (USA 1928,) is a purely visual interpretation of Poe’s short story, composed of multiply superimposed image layers and Expressionist décor: Objects float through the black room, actors walk through the scene on different levels giving rise to the feeling of being pursued. Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (F 1926) is an unsparing attack against the church using Freudian ammunition: A cleric is haunted by sexual impulses which his religion forbids.