Dada Film

I have been reading up about dada film, here is a quote from the internet:

Dada-related films have several characteristics in common: they disrupt viewer expectations of a conventional narrative, use cinematic defamiliarization of social reality to undermine the norms and code of social convention, and are constantly pointing to the film apparatus as an illusion-producing machine. The difference between Dada and Surrealist films lies in their different strategies of defamiliarizing social reality. Surrealist filmmakers largely rely on conventional cinematography as a means to draw the viewer into the reality produced by the film. However, Dada films work to keep the viewer at a distance, which accounts for the viewer not being deeply disturbed by the film.

La Coquille Et Le Clergyman with music by Swans

the screenplay is by Antonin Artaud



Also David Lynch has done some pretty amazing short films, one of my favourite being The Grandmother, a film where a kid who has a hard time from his parents grows himself a grandmother.



there is also this by Marcel Duchamp, displaying his foray in ANEMIC CINEMA

Dada Etc

Tristan Tzara was one of the main men of the dada movement. I think there is a lot of truth in the DADA movement, i think that it strikes a chord in the core of humanity, that inherent absurdity i was getting at earlier. There are elements of this approach which i am sure were studied by future playwrites like Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard, people that thrived off that humour. It's kind of sad how boring the way that DADA art is taught, often its humour is forgotten. I guess it was never really a suited to analysis or teaching, it's more in the action and the act.



Antonin Artaud is another very interesting figure, he was part of the surrealist movement for a while, completely drug fucked most of the time, addicted to heroin and opiates, also naturally inclined to "depression" . What i find most interesting about Artaud was his view towards reality, which naturally influenced everything he did thereafter. to quote his wikipedia page:

Imagination, to Artaud, was reality; he considered dreams, thoughts and delusions as no less real than the "outside" world. To him, reality appeared to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.

Tom Waits liked him, if that means anything...i think it does. he is as much a performer as he is a musician - which is really saying something. I really like Waits's aesthetic approach too, he's a pretty awesome dude.



I think a lot of what i consider to be good art always deals with one's approach towards reality, in an emotive sense as well as physical, i think it's for this reason that a lot of conceptual art sort of goes over my head, i don't mean that i don't get it, I just don't see the point of it. So that is something that i want to avoid in my work - too much conceptual thought, which might sound ironic, but there is a difference between knowing that you're thinking and thinking that you're knowing.