Chance was vital to both Dada and surrealism, and it was something of a happy accident that each movement’s flirtation with film happened in France in the 1920s. Paris had long been the world’s artistic capital, but ‘les années folles’ witnessed a cross-pollination across the artforms and a greater willingness to experiment. In the case of film, this meant an eagerness to challenge the conventions of the classical narrative style.
Filmmaking was expensive, but equipment was in ready supply, as French cinema recovered from the wartime abeyance that had allowed Hollywood to assume predominance. The fact that cinema was still silent abetted the efforts of those seeking to create ‘cinéma pur’, while Louis Delluc and Ricciotto Canudo ensured there would be a ready audience at their ciné-clubs. Yet the first attempts to launch a Dadaist cinema came in Zurich, where Swede Viking Eggeling and German Hans Richter sought to forge a universal pictorial language from abstract geometric shapes in Rhythmus 21 (1921) and Symphonie diagonale (1924), which were feted when they were screened at Dadaist soirées in Paris…