ABSTRACT

This article aims to illustrate the possible connections between the emerging science of advertising and a selection of French avant-garde films made during the 1920s. The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provides an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and black and white in the visual culture of the 1920s. Indeed, advertising reinforces a subjective and non-indexical understanding of colour, establishing an alternative spectatorship model to the realistic ideology that emerged during the same period. The article attempts to demonstrate that avant-garde films follow the same model of spectatorship, despite making only an occasional use of colour.

KEYWORDS

advertising, avant-garde, colour, embodied spectator, modernity

Several recent studies have highlighted the diverse and heterogeneous experiences that shaped avant-garde cinema in the period between the two World Wars. One of the most noteworthy aspects in this regard is its connection with advertising. Immediately after the end of World War I, avant-garde cinema and advertising were part of a broader process of developing new spectatorship techniques. Both experiences were part of the same development insofar as they were primarily targeted towards an embodied spectator. Indeed, they had the common goal to use modes of perception that were in tune with the developments of urban modernity, made up of fluctuating vision, distracted attention, and increasing visual stimuli.

These new spectatorship techniques emerge through a series of experiences, including the new science of advertising, advertising imagery, and avant-garde films, which were more closely associated with a distinctly modernist and functionalist trend. In this regard, cinema and advertising are part of a larger process that includes modernism, modernization, and modernity, in which there is a complex network of new technologies, experiences, and forms of spectatorship. As illustrated by Michael Cowan in his monograph on Walter Ruttmann (2014), by studying both advertising books and avant-garde films, it is possible to understand and express one of the connections within this network. Cowan studied the avant-garde films by the German director as part of an approach that included advertising films as well as other commissioned works. In the case of Ruttmann, this area of study ties in with the need to use cinema as a tool to control multiplicity, as part of a process of questioning the separation between aesthetics and applied arts.