4 A Metaphysical Theater:

Abstract Painting, Color Music,

and Futurist Experiments in
Avantgarde Film
Christopher Townsend

Introduction
Even as early avant-garde film directors looked to a future of utopian
possibility and technological innovation, they looked back to the era
these possibilities and innovations supposedly wished away and to older
mediums such as film and painting. The new medium of film offered a
framework through which the culture’s existing, dominant material prac-
tices—painting, writing, and performance—might be re-imagined beyond
existing levels of experiment, hence Modernist Studies’ evaluation of the
“cinematicity” of, inter alia, Virginia Woolf and Picasso. Yet, in its early
exploration of film’s capacities, the avant-garde’s project was not to make
movies as they might be understood within the structuring technologies,
institutions, discourses, and practices of the nascent film industry but
within the context of earlier utopian conceptions of subjective experience
that emerged in formal experimentations and technical innovations from
the mid-nineteenth century. These experiments and inventions often
drew upon the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the idea
of transference between (or commonality within) media central to wider
notions of melomania and synesthesia.
In their recourse to earlier traditions to ground their experiments with
film, artists often imitated their peers working in other disciplines. Inno-
vation for early avant-garde painters was something enacted through a
conscious connection to—rather than rupture from—earlier scientific
theorists and experimenters. Kandinsky regularly referred to Goethe’s
writings, citing the Theory of Colors and the Conversations, among other
works (Vergo 45). Orphism painters such as Frank Kupka and Sonia and
Robert Delaunay relied heavily upon the color theories of the industrial
chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul and continued a tradition of reference
to scientific theory established by Impressionism. Non-representational
painting critiqued bourgeois realism, but it rested conceptually upon the
twin poles of romantic thought and scientific investigation that defined
the Victorian era. Early-twentieth-century avant-garde writers and art-
ists theorized and developed film in the same vein; they rejected realist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003191629-6
64 Christopher Townsend
theater and photography but drew upon earlier experiments in painting
and music to forge alternative forms of cinema. Indeed, cinema itself was
already “painterly”: the technology that enabled advances in the camera
may have been constantly evolving, but the camera embodied the theory
of single-point perspective that had dominated painting since the Euro-
pean early-modern era.
In scrutinizing theorizations of cinema and filmmaking practice within
the European avant-garde in the first decades of the twentieth century,
I develop two arguments: first, that its imagination of film’s possibilities
are best considered within the histories of painting and musical perfor-
mance, rather than of early commercial cinema, and second, that the
intellectual roots of this theorization are grounded in philosophical and
esthetic challenges to dominant models of rationality and organization
that emerged in the nineteenth century. The avant-garde’s early concep-
tion and practice of film consciously extended experiments in painting
and theater, undertaken since the mid-nineteenth century, while breach-
ing the epistemic, ontological, and discursive conventions that struc-
tured film during its evolution. Only one of these conventions—temporal
sequence—survives in early avant-garde theory and practice. Time,
through the internal rhythm of mobilized abstract forms, is rendered
malleable and separated from its role of systematizing the movement of
concrete subjects in pictorial space. Instead, sequence is co-opted to pro-
duce repetition and displacement and extend the aspirations of abstract
painting in creating sublimatory, subjective affect. The space and time
of the picture plane in abstract film is fundamentally that of the painted
canvas, rather than that of cinema. Its temporality, expressed as rhythm,
is produced by the relation of abstract forms to each other within the
work, not in the relation of concrete forms to an autonomous observer.
The evidence for this challenges the long-established and widely
accepted argument of Tom Gunning that modernist cinema shares with
early industrial film production a commitment to a “cinema of attrac-
tion” by attending to observed phenomena and rendering them spectacu-
larly affective (63). According to Gunning, avant-garde filmmakers of the
1920s—notably Eisenstein and Léger—reprised both the exhibition of
reality for its own sake and the exhibitionism, the acknowledgment of
its being mediated, that characterized “primitive” cinema in film’s first
decade. Gunning did not discuss any films made, or conceived, within
the avant-garde before the early 1920s, and neglected the abstract films
made in the 1920s by Walther Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Viking Egg-
eling. Gunning undertook a very limited analysis of modernist writing on
film and assumed improbable conceptual unities: for example, between
Marinetti’s thought in 1913 and that of Léger in the early 1920s. A closer
reading of early modernist texts about film, attending to writers who fully
imbricated within the European avant-garde—Ricciotto Canudo within
Orphism, and in Futurism, the Ginnani-Corradini brothers, along with
 A Metaphysical Theater 65
Marinetti and those painters who contribute to manifestos concerning
both painting and film, notably Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà—reveals
certain unities: however, these are often antithetical to those posited
by Gunning. Thought in these circles was conditioned by variations of
romantic and idealist thought, notably that of Friedrich Nietzsche, Got-
thold Lessing, and Henri Bergson. These intellectual models were widely
used within the avant-garde to unsettle the positivist program that under-
pinned European modernity. Such dissidence included challenges to “the
unities of time and place” (Carrà 156); to perspective as merely an instru-
mental system of description, such as that used in an “engineer’s design”
(Balla et al. 106), and the refusal to consider “man as the center of uni-
versal life” (Boccioni et al. 65).
Film derived from the Enlightenment’s privileging of the external per-
ception and organization of material forms through perspective and
the systematizing of time and space: it was “afflicted with objectivity”
(Macrae 137). Even as it helped precipitate changes in experiencing and
understanding time and space that were contingent upon industrial-
administrative modernity, film endorsed a model of time and space that
modernist modes of thought came to reject. Even those modernists most
eager to endorse technology displayed a considerable skepticism toward
the epistemic conventions governing film. Where those conventions were
deployed in older media, for example, in realist literature or painting, they
had been widely challenged within nineteenth-century culture, for exam-
ple, in Symbolism, before they were assailed by later modernist practices.
Gunning’s argument for the convergence of avant-garde and early com-
mercial practices relies upon the wishful assumption that having disposed
of the conventions of object-focused realism, temporal and spatial coher-
ence, and subjective autonomy in older media, the avant-garde would
happily redeploy them simply because they presented themselves within a
new format. Modernist artists did not reject film: indeed, the avant-garde
would be the site for the first theorization of that medium’s possibilities
as an art form, rather than entertaining novelty. However, for that to
happen, film had to be separated from conventions of realism, continu-
ity, and autonomy that were antithetical to existing, nineteenth-century
traditions of romantic and idealist thought. Such separation demanded
a reduction of film to an eidos of temporality rather than materialist
objectivity.

Futurist Innovations
Given their enthusiasm for modernity’s technological revolution, it is
not surprising that the Futurists undertook much of the early theori-
zation of film and filmmaking. When Marinetti announced Futurism’s
foundation “on the complete renewal of human sensibility induced by
great scientific discoveries” he included “the cinematograph” in a long
66 Christopher Townsend
list of innovations that had affected the human psyche (“Destruction of
Syntax” 143). However, that capacity to record the world, whether on
film or through the gramophone, had descended already into mundan-
ity: “Having become commonplace, such possibilities fail to arouse the
curiosity of superficial minds” (143). The challenge for Futurism was to
recognize modernity’s modifications of human sensibility and to reflect
these modifications. While Futurist poetry and painting succeeded in this
regard, its use of film was a failure. If Futurist poetics, in its elimination
of synthesizing terms within analogies, anticipates cinematic montage by
a decade, we should also agree with Wanda Strauven that the movement
largely fails to similarly exploit cinema as a weapon of speed and dehu-
manization to be deployed against passéism (Strauven 203).
A very different practice, however, preceded Marinetti’s theorization.
In Ravenna, Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini had by 1911 made
four short abstract films: Accordo di colore, Studio di effetti tra quattro
colore, Canto di Primavera, and Les Fleurs (Color Harmony, Study of
Effects Between Three Colors, Spring Canto, and The Flowers). In a 1965
interview, Arnaldo described how the pair worked directly by painting on
untreated filmstrip, rather than with stop-motion animation.1

Since 1907 I had been thinking about the possibility of creating mov-
ing pictures. But in 1908/1909 there was no camera for taking time-
lapse photography, frame by frame. So I  decided to paint directly
onto blank film stock—celluloid without silver nitrate. The optical
firm Magini sent me the stock from outside town.
(Verdone and Berghaus 402)

The Ginanni-Corradinis belonged to circles frequented by Futurists such

as Oscar Mara and Diego Valeri. Their project was inextricably associated
with music, and these experiments were preceded by others that sought
different means of creating a synthetic, dynamic relation between color
and sound within space. By 1910, the brothers had installed projectors
in an orchestra pit to create a play of colored lights during performances,
built a “chromatic piano”, and theorized a concept of “colored music”
(musica cromatica) (B. Ginanni-Corradini 156–182). Subsequently, there
were plans to accompany with film music by the Futurist composer Bal-
lila Pratella, and by 1912, the two were fully integrated into Futurism,
under the pseudonyms Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra.
In 1916, Ginna and Corra collaborated with another member of the
Florentine literary vanguard, Emilio Settimelli, to produce Vita Futurista.
Before the censor went to work, the film consisted of a sequence of 12
scenes “quite different in format and content” (Verdone and Berghaus
410). None of those scenes, however, presented “reality”: they were the-
atrical performances—for example, Balla’s contrived “Futurist stroll”
or the provocation of an Englishman eating breakfast on the Piazzale
 A Metaphysical Theater 67
Michelangelo—that were often anticipated by, or actually reconstructed
from, earlier Futurist serate. As Verdone and Berghaus comment,

Vita futurista was an extremely heterogeneous product and com-

bined elements of painting, sculpture, theater, music, and poetry. As
such, it was an expression of the plurisensibilità futurista (Futurist
Multisensibility), of which the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema had
spoken. Its visual nature links it to other important developments in
avant-garde painting: the play of colors in Impressionism, the inter-
penetration of forms and lines in Cubism, the distortions of Expres-
sionism, the abstractionism of Kandinsky.
(415)

In the July–August  1914 edition of Les Soirées de Paris, the expatri-

ate Russian artist Léopold Survage proposed a wholly abstract film: Le
Rhythme coloré (Colored Rhythm). The sketches show that Survage
planned a work in which brightly colored abstract forms, on a black
background, were transformed over time. Survage was working within
the framework of Orphism, but he had previously been part of the
“Golden Fleece” circle of symbolists in Russia and, in Paris, was perhaps
influenced by the writing of Louis Favre on music and color. The “Golden
Fleece” group included the writer Andrei Bely, whose ideas on musi-
cal structure as a universal artistic form are claimed to have influenced
the composer Alexander Scriabin’s color-music project Prometheus: The
Poem of Fire (1909–10), a work scored for orchestra with projections of
colored light. Survage’s project is thus part of a wider discourse around
color music and the creation of sublimatory and transformative envi-
ronments. He conceived his project in the terms of an explicitly musical
rhetoric, realized it as painting, but wanted it to be film. The temporal
and spatial properties of film would have made uniquely possible the
synthesis of music’s temporality with the imaginary, formal rhythms of
abstract painting.

Color Music and Abstract Art

Survage was not alone in this desire: for more than a decade, composers
had been searching for visual equivalents to abstract sounds and artists
trying to endow abstract signs with the temporality inherent to musical
composition. The impetus derived from Wagner’s concept of “absolute
music”, profoundly affected by his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach. The
interest in spiritual experience that characterizes many of modernism’s
synthesizing projects suggests some investment in Feuerbach’s notion that
the spiritual is only the outward projection of an interior human nature.
Canudo’s concept of music as a synthesizing, and spiritually transforma-
tive art—which would inform his theorization of film—had its roots in
68 Christopher Townsend
the French reception of Wagner, filtered through the Symbolist poet and
critic, Paul Adam.
Many abstract painters attempted to replicate musical elements such
as rhythm and translate formal musical structures such as fugue and
canon. Temporality was crucial to the achieving of visual effects that mir-
rored musical progression; furthermore, since fugue and canon signs are
inverted, their visual equivalents were necessarily abstract. Kandinsky
ultimately formalized this relation in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Bei-
trag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Point and Line to Surface:
A Contribution to the Analysis of the Elements of Painting 1926). James
Leggio argues that this volume, which the painter began writing in 1914,
represented the extension and modulation of ideas first formed earlier in
the decade (102). Given the exchanges between Orphism and the “Blue
Rider” group, there can be no doubt that Survage would have known of
Kandinsky’s ideas. Both men were, in any case, drawing some of their
inspiration from the same fount. Kandinsky’s ideas were shaped by cor-
respondence and meetings with the “mystically inclined second-genera-
tion Russian Symbolists, notably Blok, Bely, and Ivanov” of the “Golden
Fleece” group (Sheppard 153).
Like the Ginnani-Corradini’s “play of colors” in Vita futurista, Sur-
vage’s project belonged to a tradition of innovative ideas about color-
music and the creation of sublimatory spatial environments that can be
traced back to the nineteenth century. In 1850, the German physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz had rationalized than a century of speculative
experiment in the arts and theorization in science into his work on color
perception. The rationalization of this discourse, as seen in his essay
“On the Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music” (1863), seemingly precipitated a new investment in synesthetic
color-music technologies, starting with Alexander Wallace Rimington’s
“Clavier à lumières” (Color Organ) demonstrated in 1895. Rimington
equated the light spectrum with the musical octave but assigned all 12
notes within it an equal value. A  keyboard activated a series of con-
tact switches that split an electrically produced white light into different
colors at diatonic intervals in the spectrum, with the wavelength of each
color close to that of a specific note. By 1912, Rimington’s organ was
capable of artificially creating higher and lower registers through the use
of separate keyboards to produce paler and deeper tones, though each
color’s wavelength necessarily remained the same, unlike that of higher
and lower octaves.
The color music phenomenon inevitably impacted the development
of abstract art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
Czech painter Frantisek Kupka’s “Piano/Keyboard Lake” (1909) offers
one of the earliest artistic renderings of color music in its surreal merg-
ing of the vivid colors of a busy canal scene with piano keys, each of
which corresponds to a different tone from the painting’s rich palette.
 A Metaphysical Theater 69
The British artist Duncan Grant’s “Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting
with Sound” (1914) offered a similar interpretation of color music in its
form as a canvas scroll on which were collaged blocks of six rectangles
in various colors. The experimental, multisensory possibilities of color
music held an inevitable draw for filmmakers as well as painters. It is sig-
nificant that Grant would later describe his “scroll” as a piece intended to
operate almost as an early version of Edison’s Kinetoscope: the “scroll”
was to be moved horizontally past an illuminated, rectangular viewing
window, with a mechanical drive, to the accompaniment of music from
gramophone records.
Synchromism, which emerged among expatriate American painters
who exhibited widely between 1912 and 1914, emerged as more artists
turned inventors in their quest to create color organs, as evidenced in
Nicolas Schöffer’s “Musikop” of 1912 and the American pianist Mary
Hallock-Greenewalt’s color organ “Sarabet” (1916–19). The “Synchrom-
ist” painter Morgan Russell sketched a projector for colored light, the
“Kinetic Light Machine”, extending the principles of the group’s paint-
ing to three-dimensional environments and introducing temporal transi-
tions between colors. To further contextualize these seemingly eccentric
devices and inventors, we might note that in 1920, the Ukrainian art-
ist Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné designed the “Optofonium”, continuing
the sound-painting synthesis. Baranoff-Rossiné had been a member of
Orphism circles in Paris before 1914, experimenting with kinetic sculp-
tures—one of which he entitled Symphony Number 1 (1913). By the
early 1920s, he was a tutor in the VKhUTEMAS workshops—one of the
crucibles of materialist, rational Soviet modernism.
A crucial element of all these machines was the equivalence of abstract-
colored forms to musical forms, with a variable tempo as one of its char-
acteristics. Film was one way to achieve this, but it was by no means
unique: the color organ was one method, the use of scores for projection
from sophisticated lighting rigs another. What all three media achieved
was the transformation of a static, plastic abstract art into light and
motion and potentially the displacement of forms from two-dimensional
planes into three-dimensional environments. Bruno Ginnani-Corradini
recorded that his experiments with abstract film involved the creation
of a three-dimensional space, painted entirely in white, and foresaw a
future where the spectator would be incorporated in this environment as
surface: “the well-dressed spectator will go to the theater of color dressed
in white” (68).
As Marinetti’s “The Variety Theater” (1913) attests, the synthesis of
different media within the variety theater, or music-hall, fascinated the
Futurists. Music halls, or vaudeville theaters, were one of the principal
environments in which early film was exhibited, on mixed bills. It was
accommodated there as a visual novelty, much as magic-lantern and slide
shows had been in the mid-Victorian era. Marinetti wrote “The Variety
70 Christopher Townsend
Theater” during the progressive transition from this mode of exhibition
to dedicated cinemas. Film brought the Futurist fascination for speed
and motion to the theater, Marinetti contended, enriching it “with an
incalculable number of visions and spectacles that couldn’t otherwise be
performed (battles, riots, horse races, automobile and airplane meets,
travels, transatlantic steamers, the recesses of the city, of the countryside,
of the oceans and the skies)” (“The Variety Theater” 159).

Rejecting Invention: Futurism and the Cinematograph

However, while the Futurists were intrigued by color music and synes-
thesia, their relationship with film was not straightforward. The French
critic Roger Allard wrote in 1911 that Futurist painters must have “a
cinematograph in their bellies” and a year later—in no less a forum than
The Blue Rider—would define the movement as “cinematism” (134). In
a belated attack, perhaps not unrelated to the publication of “The Futur-
ist Cinema”, Apollinaire would add that the Futurists were “cinématolâ-
tres” (758). That Allard could make such a critique of cinema in the same
volume as Kandinsky published his synesthetic play Der Gelbe Klang
(The Yellow Noise), which depended upon theatrical lighting, suggests
that the avant-garde drew subtle and important distinctions between the
cinematograph, as a medium deriving from and promulgating photo-
graphic realism, and what it was attempting in various media with the
projection and movement of color.
A close reading of the early Futurist manifestos reveals the extent to
which Futurists, especially Boccioni and Severini, were actually opposed
to any direct association between dynamism and the cinematic. While
pursuing dynamism, the Futurist painters’ manifesto explicitly rejected
its cinematic reproduction: “The gesture that we want to reproduce
will no longer be a moment in the universal dynamism which has been
stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself” (Boccioni et al 64; emphasis
added). This comparison between a concept of continuous flow that is at
one with subjective experience and a derogated mechanism that separates
flow into static fragments in order to represent it carries strong echoes
of Bergson’s ideas in Creative Evolution (1907). Bergson comments on
Muybridge’s chrono-photography as the serial freezing of the instant and
privileges against it a notion of continual change of form: “in reality
the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form,
since form is immobile and reality is movement. What is real is the con-
tinual change of form: form is only an instant view of transition” (319).
Both Orphism and Futurism were indebted to Bergson’s ideas as concep-
tual bases for their world view; their conceptions of “simultaneité” and
“simultaneità” shared aspects of his ideas of individual, malleable, and
internalized time—and thus his critique of cinema as universal systemati-
zation, and fixing, of subjective experience.
 A Metaphysical Theater 71
As early as the first collective manifesto, Futurism rejected the filmic
principle of freezing a moment of time in space and recreating move-
ment through the sequential presentation of a series of such moments.
To this, we should add, in the same text, a dismissal of the photographic
dependence on, and confirmation of, subjective materiality: “Who can
still believe in the opacity of bodies . . . ?” (Boccioni et al. 65). By 1913,
in distancing itself from the chrono-photography of the Bragaglia broth-
ers, Futurism would also abjure lens-based practices: “We have always
rejected with disgust and contempt even the most distant relationship
with photography because it is outside the boundaries of art” (Boccioni
et  al. 64). As Andrew Uroskie observes, chrono-photography and cin-
ematography both separated the fluid, continuous motion of the world
into discrete segments which film then reconstituted into the illusion
of motion through a “physiological trick” (150–151). At the heart of
Futurism’s rebuttal of Apollinaire’s accusation of cinephilia, and central
to their refutation of the principles of coherent and conterminous time
and space and the materiality of objects, was the movement’s investment
in Bergsonian ideas and their Kantian roots. Bergson’s critique of the cin-
ematic could only be countered by proposing a kind of film “sufficiently
‘abstract’ to be seen to renounce its claims to photographic indexicality”
(152). Such filmmaking, as practiced and theorized by the Ginanni-Cor-
radini brothers, not only eschewed indexicality: it had the added advan-
tage of rejecting temporal–spatial unity, perspectival ontologies of space,
and theatrical narrative modes.

Film Theory: Ricciotto Canudo, Lessing, and Nietzsche

When Canudo published “The Birth of a Sixth Art” in October 1911, it
was not his first address to the question of film’s status as an art form.
Three years before he had written “The Triumph of the Cinematograph”
for a Florentine journal: an essay that could hardly have escaped the
attention of the Ginanni-Corradini brothers. Canudo was a central figure
in the Parisian avant-garde, an intimate member of Apollinaire’s circle.
While Canudo saw film as arbitrating between the rhythms of space (the
plastic arts) and the rhythms of time (music and poetry), this “superb
conciliation” should not be thought of as the experiential unity of time
and space that so troubled the Futurist painters (“La Naissance” 59).
Rather, Canudo was concerned with Lessing’s distinction between poetry
as a temporal art and painting as a spatial one and with finding a means
by which the two might be synthesized (Lessing 25–129).
By 1911, several publications reflected Canudo’s preoccupation with
temporal and spatial division and reconciliation. The most notable was
The Book of Man’s Evolution, where he predicted that there would be
a synthesis of all the arts and philosophy in a “Metaphysical Theater”
(Livre d’evolution 325). Canudo now forecasts that the cinematograph
72 Christopher Townsend
would not only synthesize the separate terms of temporality and spatial-
ity into which Lessing divided fine art but—through a reversion to col-
lective experience—create a new theater that unified its disparate genres.
For Canudo, this most modern invention pointed back to the archaic
and classical worlds, invoking both Dionysiac experience and Apollon-
ian “representation”, and it is notable that where Lessing initially con-
flated painting and sculpture in order, ultimately, to privilege the latter,
Canudo separated them (Lessing 29). Indeed, we might see “a Painting
and a Sculpture developing in Time, in the manner of Music and Poetry”
as reflecting the temporality implicit in Cubist painting’s “movement”
around its subjects within the picture plane and anticipating Futurism’s
similar moves in sculpture (Canudo, “La Naissance” 59).
Two things are clear from Canudo’s 1911 essay: first that the cinemat-
ograph was still a medium in which artistic capacity was wholly latent
and second that his conception of film fitted it into a broader art of the
public spectacle, in which individual subjectivity was suborned to the col-
lective. Film was “not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom of choice
peculiar to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it is to being the copy
of a subject, the condition that prevents photography from becoming an
art” (61). So, as for the Futurists, one of the apparently eidetic param-
eters of film, its lens-refracted chemical-mechanical registration of the
object in space, precluded it from becoming art, since it denied the pos-
sibility of agency. Canudo reflected on the way in which a photographic
attention to detail informed contemporary, realist theater: concluding
with an observation that the cinema was similarly concerned only with
the external appearances of everyday life. He contrasted this with devel-
opments in modernist painting that sought to move beyond appearances:
“But the cinematograph never fails to exalt the principle of representing
life in all its totality and its exterior “Truth”. . . . It is the triumph of this
artistic eye that Cézanne called, with a holy contempt: the photographic
eye” (“La Naissance” 175).2 Canudo’s ideas about cinema were also
informed by Neitzsche’s thoughts. He was concerned with the division of
the theater into genres of the comedic and the tragic: in Nietzsche’s influ-
ential, if problematic, account of Attic tragedy as the high point of Greek
theater, the two “drives” that were presented side-by-side in that mode
were “the Apolline art of the image-maker or sculptor and the imageless
art of music, which is that of Dionysus” (Nietzsche 14).
Canudo’s “new theater” was formulated in terms of public participa-
tion in what he variously terms “the Festival” (Fête) and “Pantomime”.
He thus used the common modernist strategy, profoundly influenced by
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, of connecting the absolutely
new to the archaic, in order to elide the Christian moral tradition and nine-
teenth-century bourgeois rationalism. One model for this union seems to
have been the open-air performances that Canudo witnessed in the well-
preserved Roman amphitheater at Orange during the summer of 1911
 A Metaphysical Theater 73
(“Réflexions sur Orange” 1127–31). He wrote that “there is a movement
towards a theater of new, profoundly modern Poets; the rebirth of Trag-
edy is heralded in numerous confused open-air spectacles representing dis-
ordered, incoherent but intensely willed effort” (“La Naissance” 60). It is
within this context, and with a practice that, if it is cinematographic, is far
from “photographic”, that Canudo saw the emergence of cinema.
Canudo provided a commentary that absolutely distinguished the
utopian possibility of cinema from both the contemporary “cinema of
attraction” and cinema’s emerging narrative forms.

The great fables of the past are retold, mimed by ad hoc actors chosen
from the most important stars. What is shown above all is the appear-
ance rather than the essence of contemporary life, from sardine fishing
in the Mediterranean to the marvel of flying steel and the indomitable
human courage of the car races at Dieppe or the aviation week at Reims.
(“La Naissance” 62)3

He critiqued here both the spectacle of modernity and the miming of the
theatrical canon and contrasted them with contemporary experiments,
noting that Gabriel d’Annunzio “has dreamed of a great Italian heroic
pantomime for the cinematograph” (“La Naissance” 62).
For Canudo, the modernity of the cinematograph and its potential to
challenge the conventions of the realist drama were linked to the classical
Greek tradition. The articulating figure here is that of the comic—under-
stood primarily in terms that seem to derive from Bergson’s 1900 essays
on laughter, yet anticipating how critics in the French avant-garde after
World War One would appraise Chaplin. For Canudo, the contempo-
rary bourgeois theater—including its “photographic” realism—was an
impoverished degeneration of the classical model. Early-twentieth-cen-
tury conceptions of the social role of the Greek theater, often inaccurate,
and derived largely from Nietzsche, were crucial to Canudo’s imagina-
tion of film’s possibilities as an art form. The “speed” [rapidité] of the
cinematograph was vital in connecting any new theater with its classical
antecedents. And for speed we should not read temporality: what inter-
ested Canudo was cinema’s capacity to move quickly between the twin
poles of the Attic drama, the tragic and the comic, and thus unite them
to create “the first new theater” (“La Naissance” 64; emphasis added).
That theater, however, was not the cinema as it existed in 1911, nor
one that showed films of spectacles to audiences; rather, it was one that
was, in itself, spectacular, and in which the audience was itself a partici-
pant—just as, within Nietzsche’s understanding of the Dionysiac, “man”
was no longer spectator or artist but through collective engagement
became “a work of art” (18). Nietzsche introduced to nineteenth-century
modernity the imagined social projects of the classical and pre-classical
theater as means of resolving the tension between the individual and
74 Christopher Townsend
collective will that, starting from Hegel (359–60), was understood as an
intractable dichotomy within liberal democracy. Canudo’s invocation
of a new theater of sublimation and participation to create intersubjec-
tive harmony was not unique within the Parisian avant-garde of 1911.
Henri-Martin Barzun’s theatrical project La Terrestre Tragédie, which
combined choric chanting of poetry with changing projections of colored
light, sought similar effects. Canudo wrote:

The cinematograph as it is today will evoke for the historians of the

future the image of the first extremely rudimentary wooden theaters,
the ‘primitive tragedies’, where goats had their throats slashed and
the primitive ‘goat song’ was danced, before the apotheosis of stone
in which Lycurgus consecrated the Dionysian theater, and also before
the birth of Aeschylus.
(“La Naissance” 65)

In other words, if the contemporary cinema was the “primitive” drama,

then its mature form was the equivalent of the Attic. Nietzsche’s invoca-
tion of the Dionysiac as an ecstatic, sublimatory experience in which
individual identity was annihilated was crucial to Canudo here. “Now,
hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be
not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite
literally one with him” (Nietzsche 18).

Conclusions
The avant-garde wanted to make films rejecting the photographic truth of
appearances on which the medium was predicated, along with the unity
of time and space that it assumed. Early experiments with film largely
eschewed the objectivity of lens-based cinematography—whether in the
works of the Ginanni-Corradini brothers or Survage’s Colored Rhythm.
This was not simply a matter of expediency or expense: Marinetti and the
Ginanni-Corradinis had substantial personal fortunes, so the consider-
able costs involved in buying or renting equipment were unlikely to have
acted as a deterrent.
Indeed, one might say that these artists were less concerned with “cin-
ema” than with the creation of kinetic, abstract environments that were
associated with musical experiment—for example in Kandinsky’s influ-
ential color plays, but also in projects such as the Cubo-Futurist opera
Pobeda nad solntsem (The Victory over the Sun) (1913) where the painter
Mikhail Matyushin applied his theories of color to architectural space,
using one of the most sophisticated lighting rigs in a western theater.
These projects are variously conceived of as sublimatory (Ginanni-Cor-
radini, Survage, and Barzun) or participatory (Canudo). The proposed
and actual modes of exhibition were such that they were, unlike cinema
 A Metaphysical Theater 75
in either its “attraction” or its narrative modes, not really modes of
“exhibition” at all. These projects were theorized and achieved through
projection, but film was far from essential. For the Ginnani-Corradini’s,
hand-painted film realized temporal changes between complex, colored
abstract forms, as could a carefully placed lighting rig for Kandinsky or
Matyushin, or a color organ or similar device. In the limited examples
where conventional cinematography was deployed, the output was radi-
cally theatrical in both content and context: indeed, from the evidence
of Vita Futurista, it was hyperbolically performative without adhering
to the melodramatic narrative forms that, in the later 1910s, began to
dominate commercial cinema.
What is clear from this activity is that the theory and practice of film
within the early modernist avant-garde have little relationship to the cin-
ema of attraction as a paradigm. Gunning’s model for the exploration
of space and presentation of phenomena is wholly apposite to the pre-
narrative, pre-cinematic forms of exhibition for film as popular entertain-
ment. However, to apply it to the output and ideas of avant-garde artists
is to overlook their fundamentally different and well-defined conceptions
of time and space, and indeed of reality, compared to those epistemic
foundations on which film rests.
When it came to the technological possibilities for film, the avant-
garde’s embrace of nineteenth-century concepts and inventions like color
music and the color organ shows how it looked backward in order to
find ways of developing the medium. At a moment of gestation more
than nascence, the avant-garde’s understanding and tentative exploration
of the possibilities of film challenged the structural conventions of the
medium. These challenges were less a matter of naivete concerning film’s
technical possibilities on the part of artists and theorists within the avant-
garde, and more a matter of trying to fit film to a fundamentally different
conceptual matrix—one largely determined by metaphysical and roman-
tic philosophy of figures like Lessing, Nietzsche, and Bergson, rather than
empiricism or pragmatism.
As the avant-garde’s complicated relationship with the cinematograph
recalls, this was above all a challenge posed to photographic conceptions
of objective reality and to the assumed unity of time and space. In other
words, the avant-garde’s filmic project was to undermine the epistemic
bases of naturalism upon which film was later seen to depend. Even as
film moved beyond abstraction, in the 1920s, with the evolution of mon-
tage and the use of temporal alienation in surrealism, the avant-garde
continued to find ways to subvert the spectacle of reality.

Notes
1 These films were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Milan in 1944.
2 This is from a section of the essay omitted in the English translation.
76 Christopher Townsend
3 The ‘races’ [courses du circuit de Dieppe] to which Canudo refers were the
French Grands Prix held at Dieppe in 1907–08, rather than the horse races
regularly staged there. There were no car races at Dieppe between 1909 and
1912. The ‘Grand Semaine d’aviation de la Champagne’ was staged at Reims
in 1909 and 1910 but not again until 1913. Canudo’s references to these spec-
tacles of modernity, neither especially current by autumn 1911, suggest that
he had been working on the essay for some time. By contrast, his references to
theatrical developments are to open-air performances that he had only recently
seen and reported on.

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