Calendars:Networked Media Calendar/Networked Media Calendar/22-01-2018 -Event 3
LB1TP3: 10:30 - 18:00: ‘A brief survey of history of Avantgarde Cinema and its relevance for your artistic practice’, lead by Anna Abrahams [Day 2 of 3 -in the large seminar space]===
Monday 22 Jan: Cinema as the road to the irrational (dada and surrealism)
On Friday 5 February 2016 it is a 101 years ago to the day that Cabaret Voltaire first opened its doors on Zürich’s Spiegelgasse, an event that marked the beginning of Dadaism and changed our view of art significantly. When the penniless poet and philosopher Hugo Ball opened Cabaret Voltaire with his companion Emmy Hennings in a café on 1, Spiegelgasse in Zürich, the First World War was at a tragic height. Together with Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber Arp, Ball and Hennings protested against the insanity of the war by presenting ‘alogic’, absurd imagination and magic on stage under the name of Dada. The performances left the audiences stunned as they were confronted with bruitist sound effects, modern dance, sound poetry, collages of word and image, negro masks or angular modernist improvisations on the piano. The shows provoked both indignation and rage among the audience and the air was often filled with hoots and catcalls.
In Paris Dada evolved into a new avantgarde: surrealism.The exposing of the subconscious, the portraying of a dreamworld: for the Surrealists the 'seventh art' offered great potential. One of them was Luis Buñuel, director of classics like Un Chien Andalou and, L'âge d'or.. What interested the surrealists was the developing of methods to liberate imagination from false rationality, restrictive customs and structures, and to understand the actual functioning of thought, first through the “pure psychic automatism” of writing and later through other media such as painting, film, theatre. This “unrational” approach allowed the artist to express unconventional ideas and to critique the current, unbearable conditions and habits of society.