Visual and Anti-Visual Films

Germaine Dulac, The Seashell and the Clergyman (still), 1928.

The early decades of cinema produced a vibrant wave of writing from film thinkers who were not yet bound by disciplinary constraints. Figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Rudolf Arnheim and others approached cinema from diverse perspectives—psychology, filmmaking, science, and cultural criticism—generating an interdisciplinary discourse that openly explored film’s artistic, ethical, and political dimensions. Today, this body of work is often referred to as early film theory. Aligning with this summer’s Art and Theory focus across e-flux publications, in upcoming weeks Film Notes will revisit some of these writings to highlight their open-ended and interdisciplinary approach to what was then a young art form and technology. We hope that republishing these texts would not merely remind historical debates on film, but also encourage contemporary reflection on how artistic practice and theoretical discussion might engage broader imaginative and social contexts beyond academic and disciplinary departmentalization.

This week, we present Germaine Dulac’s seminal 1928 essay, "Visual and Anti-Visual Films," which exemplifies the creative energy of early film thought. Dulac, a pioneer of the feminist cinema and a leading surrealist filmmaker of her time, passionately argues that cinema, fundamentally a visual medium, should derive its expressive and emotional power primarily from optical qualities and can evoke psychological states and subjective perceptions through experimental techniques—rather than narratives borrowed from literature or theater.1

The great pity, as far as film is concerned, is that, though a uniquely visual art, it does not at present seek its emotion in the pure optic sense. Every cinematic drama, whether created by forms of movement or by human beings in a state of crisis, must be visual and not literary, and the impression retained, the essence of the creative idea or the driving feeling must emerge uniquely from the optical harmonies. 

There was a time, not long ago, when the cinema was not madly seeking, as it is today, for its own meaning beyond the errors of interpretation in which the industry had enveloped it. It was happy with a traditional sort of form, letting its technique evolve to a high level of perfection without concern for its higher aesthetic.

By its technique, I mean the scientific side of its material expression: photography. By its aesthetic, I mean the inspiration utilized by the technique to produce expression on the level of the spirit.

And if the great masters in the evolution of film admitted that the ideas of lighting, optics and chemistry with which it was surrounded could be transformed, being at the mercy of progress, they decidedly rejected the idea of a parallel spiritual evolution.

Thanks to the combination of ribbons of sensitive film and the right machine, we had in our hands the means of photographing life and recording its various manifestations and movements. To photograph was to aim the lens at tangible forms, with a specific intention or to a specific end, and a fool would he have seemed who, beyond these precise forms, had spoken of photographing visual harmonies.

Every new technical discovery was modifying, is still modifying and becoming part of the conditions of the possibilities of vision. One discovery changes proportions by means of new lenses or prisms, digging through the visual] planes to make an impression upon our sight; another, in improving the sensitivity of the film, makes it possible to capture the nuances and subtleties of color and to render their contrasts in a white, a black and a gray capable of caressing the eye. Others, perfecting the lighting, make it possible to send out to the eye radiations which touch it more powerfully. If machines decompose movement and set out to explore of the infinitely small in nature, it is in order to visually reveal to us beauties and dramas that our eye, a feeble lens, does not perceive. 

A horse, for instance, leaps a barrier. With our eye we judge his effort synthetically. A grain of wheat sprouts; it is synthetically, again, that we judge its growth. Cinema, by decomposing movement, makes us see, analytically, the beauty of the leap in a series of minor rhythms which accomplish the major rhythm, and, if we look at the sprouting grain, thanks to film we will no longer have only the synthesis of the movement of growth, but the psychology of this movement. We feel, visually, the painful effort a stalk expends in coming out of the ground and blooming. The cinema makes us spectators of its bursts toward light and air, by capturing its unconscious, instinctive and mechanical movements.

Visually, movement, with its rhythms, its right angles and its curves, brings us into contact with a complex life.

And so, as we see, every technical cinematographic discovery has a very clear meaning: it improves the visual impression. Cinema tries to make us see this, to make us see that. Constantly, in its technical evolution, it appeals to our eye in order to impress our understanding and our sensitivity. It seems then, from its scientific basis, that cinema must address itself uniquely to sight as music addresses itself uniquely to hearing.

I am constantly repeating these words: visual, visually, sight, eye. Now, there is a huge contradiction here. If, in its technique, cinema is uniquely visual, it has nevertheless come about that in its moral aesthetic it scorns the purely visual, the image, in favor of merely reproducing forms of expression where the image may perhaps have a role, but not the most important.

For example, the cinema records photographic shots, not to move visually, but to tell or to embellish plots which were not essentially created to be seen, but to be read or heard.

Instead of focusing on the value of the image and its rhythms, today’s films focus on the dramatic action. There is a world of difference between mute dialogue and the music of silence.

Up until now the cinema has tended more to be a mute dialogue than to be music. Take a scene where two actors are talking to each other. The silent expressiveness of their faces will be the only visual element. But alas, in the dramatic cinema, events count for more than expressions.

The cinematographic instrument, then, in its scientific possibilities, is conceived for one purpose, but cinematic inspiration is pursuing a different one. Where is the truth? I believe it is in the instrument that has created the seventh art.

But why, you ask me, this duality of goals? Because of the fundamental error which dominated the first scenarios, which were imbued with the preconception that a dramatic action could not develop otherwise than in the manner of a novel or a play, that is, by means of specific events rather than by means of suggestiveness of expression.

Human action, since that was what they wanted to bring to life, consisted of gestures, of catching comings and goings, races, battles and since it was necessary to find a pretext to support this external action, they said to themselves, “Let’s adapt literary and dramatic works to the cinema, perfectly safe works which have already earned their popularity.” From this came the contemporary cinema.

When they come to us, the directors, and ask us to do a film, the producers don't say to us, “Do you have a visual idea? Do you have a visual theme, according to which your scene can develop visually?” What they say to us is, “Adapt such and such a play that’s full of action, or such and such a novel that’s had a big printing, and put that on the screen,” and they look for the story, turning away from the visual and falling into the literary.

And from this comes the stagnation of the cinema. From this comes the fact that the seventh art, an ample, magnificent and new mode of expression, seems in most of its productions to be stricken with sterility, and fills us with disillusionment and sometimes with bitterness. It’s that the screen, far from capturing on the whiteness of its canvas visual tones, is content to reflect only forms which I would call anti-visual.

To be visual, to reach the feelings through harmonies, chords, of shadow, of light, of rhythm, of movement, of facial expressions, is to address oneself to the feelings and to the intelligence by means of the eye.

A deaf creature could never hear anything but the internal music which sings inside him, and can in no case perceive the sound waves which come from outside, or find joy in them. 

In the same way, a blind man could not logically be struck by visual forms which are not part of his previous experience. Now I’m perfectly willing to argue that, as cinema stands today, a blind man could take pleasure in a filmed work. It would only require that someone sit beside him and explain to him the active sense of the images. Here’s the young male lead, he’s tall and blond, he’s sitting in a garden in the moonlight, he’s alone and seems to be waiting for someone. Here comes the young female lead running in. She comes up to him. Embrace. Nearby, in the garden, the traitor is watching. I can assure you that the blind man, as he listens to this narrative, will get the sense of the film; that is, he'll follow the story and get from the show at least 50% of what he would have gotten by seeing it. Now a real film can’t be able to be told, since it must draw its active and emotive principle from images formed of unique visual tones. Can you tell a painting? Can you tell a sculpture? Of course not. One can only evoke the impression and the emotion they inspire. Works for the screen, in order to be worthy of the profound meaning of cinema, should not consist of a story, either—the power of the image alone should be the active principle and take precedence over every other quality.

In making a film, they push the story first and place the image in the background, which is to say they give theater precedence over cinema. When the relationship is reversed, then cinema will begin to live according to its own meaning. It is the struggle of the image, taken in the profound sense of its orchestration, against literature. 

The whole problem of cinema is in this word: visualization.

I will not seem paradoxical, then, when I say to you:

The future belongs to the film that cannot be told.

I'll explain what I mean. 

Visual impact is ephemeral, it’s an impression you receive and which suggests a thousand thoughts. An impact similar to that created by a musical chord.

The cinema can certainly tell a story, but you have to remember that the story is nothing. The story is a surface.

The seventh art, that of the screen, is depth rendered perceptible, the depth that lies beneath that surface; it is the musical ungraspable. 

Whether it’s a matter of a face, a geometrical form, an evolving line, it is movement, in all its richness, rendered by the rhythm of its curves, of its right angles, that creates the drama. A body that stretches out or contracts in a total movement. A grain of wheat that sprouts, the horse’s leap, visual and silent movements of the same bearing, the same general lines. So it’s not the extravagance of literary imagination that makes the film. The film is something much more simple. The expressiveness of a face, to have its full value, must not be divided between one shot and the next.

A grain of wheat that sprouts does not change place, it rises up; a horse’s leap is accomplished in a very limited space, and all the same, in all three situations, there is movement, more movement, believe me, than in a chase . . . let’s not confuse agitation and movement. 

This idea necessarily leads certain filmmakers to envision for some of their works unity of action and unity of place; they feel that in this concentration and in this continuity the visual dramatic movement will have more power, more value. An aestheticism utterly opposed to the American theory of combined actions and fragmented visions.

The more we get rid of the plot to go in the direction of visual cinema, the more we will work for the seventh art.

This conception entails a necessary revision of cinematic themes.

Plot film or abstract film, the problem is the same. To touch the feelings through the sight and to give, as I have already said, predominance to the image, pushing aside that which cannot be expressed by it alone. The image can be as complex as an orchestration since it may be composed of combined movements of expression and light. 

Visual cinema: these two words coupled together seem a redundancy. In the future, perhaps, but not now . . .  At this moment cinema is anti-visual. Let us make it visual and sincere. This is the very first great reform to attempt.

1928