Patrick de HaasCinéma Absolu Avant-Garde 1920-1930

It was during the Roaring Twenties that many artists such as Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Luis Buñuel, Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Len Lye, Man Ray, Walter Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov and many others revolted. Cinema can no longer be limited to capturing reality for documentary purposes or to telling pretty stories subject to the constraints of the Hollywood industry. Artist-filmmakers then seize the camera to make cinema a site of experimentation, a space to explore all the possibilities offered by this medium in order to produce new ways of seeing and thinking about images. This work, directed by Patrick Haas, professor of contemporary art history and experimental cinema, analyzes the singular trajectories that led these artists to cinema around the dimensions that characterize it while minimizing the narrative pretext: movement, light and the machine.