Dada Between Heaven and Hell: Abstraction and Universal Language in the Rhythm Films of Hans Richter* MALCOLM TURVEY Since its demise, Dada has functioned as an inspirational precursor to, and rich resource for, a variety of different critiques of modernity, as any regular reader of this publication will know. Does Dada have anything to say to those of us today who, while acknowledging modernity’s problems, continue to believe in the basic ideals and aspirations of modernity, in part because modernity allows for self-critique; and who also believe that advanced art could continue to play a crucial role in that self-critique, as did Dada in the early twentieth century? For Dada is often identified with extreme, uncompromising condemnations of modernity, and with good reason. On the one hand, there is the strain of nihilism in Dada, the view—associated with figures such as Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia—that modernity has robbed human existence of any meaning, and that the correct (anti-)artistic strategy is to constantly reveal the meaninglessness beneath any pretensions (usually defined as bourgeois) to meaning. As John Erickson has put it, “Despite its varied origin, centers of artistic activity, and personalities, Dada has usually been classified bag and baggage under the rubric of artistic, or anti- artistic, anarchy, which is generally taken to mean unswerving dedication to nihilism and disorder.”1 On the other, there is the strain of mysticism in Dada, the search through art—often associated with figures such as Hans Arp and Hugo Ball, who were influenced by Wassily Kandinsky—for a spiritually satisfying alternative to the putative meaninglessness of modernity.2 Yet, as scholars have increasingly sought to show, there are more complex, nuanced positions within Dada, ones which do not condemn modernity whole- sale, but which criticize one or more aspects of modernity, while embracing, even celebrating others. Here, I will attempt to contribute to this scholarship by exam- *I thank Leah Dickerman, Lisa Pasquariello, and Judith Rodenbeck for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper; and, for her research, my assistant Diana A. Beechener. 1. John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984), p. 117. 2. See Richard Sheppard, Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), chap. 10. On Ball and mysticism, see Erdmute Wenzel White, The Magic Bishop: Hugo Ball, Dada Poet (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998); on Arp and mysticism, see the essays by Harriett Watts, such as “Periods and Commas: Hans Arp’s Seminal Punctuation,” in Dada/Dimensions, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985). OCTOBER 105, Summer 2003, pp. 13–36. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684146 by guest on 27 September 2021 14 OCTOBER ining why Hans Richter believed the films he made in the early 1920s, Rhythm 21 (1921), Rhythm 23 (1923), and Rhythm 25 (1924), to be Dadaist.3 The status of these films as Dadaist has always been somewhat uncertain, because they are very different from the canonical Dadaist film, René Clair and Picabia’s Entr’acte (1923). Entr’acte is considered by most commentators to be the quintessential Dadaist film due to its parodic subversion of narrative structure, its mocking of high art forms such as ballet and other “bourgeois” phenomena (funerals), and its mimicking of irrational mental processes.4 Certainly, it is the film most often privileged in commentaries on Dadaist film. By contrast, the Rhythm films are purely abstract—indeed, they are often credited as being the first abstract films in the history of cinema—and they employ elementary geometrical figures in motion organized into patterns. Furthermore, Richter conceived of his abstract work as a search for a “universal language.” Yet, Richter insisted that “The nucleus of the artistic endeavor of Dada as it appeared in Zurich 1916–19 was abstract art,” and that his abstract films, in their patterned use of elementary forms to search for a universal language, were Dadaist.5 Hence, while commentators have acknowledged that these films might be Dadaist—due to the fact that Richter himself was a member of Zurich Dada, that he saw his films as Dadaist, and that versions of the films were shown at the infamous Dada “Soirée du Coeur à Barbe” in July 1923—there has been little attempt to demonstrate, at least in Anglo-American scholarship of recent years, why they might count as Dadaist. Nor has there been much of an attempt to understand them in terms of Richter’s search for a universal language. Standish Lawder, in his chapter on Richter and Viking Eggeling’s abstract films in his seminal The Cubist Cinema (1975), remarks in passing that it is a “paradox” that Richter turned to abstraction during his Dadaist period, without attempting to resolve this apparent paradox. And while his formal analysis of the films is very valuable, he has little to say about why Richter conceived of his abstract work in terms of a search for a universal language. Meanwhile, there is almost no mention of the films in Steven Kovacs’s From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema (1980), which includes a chapter on Dadaist film, and Inez Hedges’s Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (1983). At the beginning of his influential anthology on Dada and Surrealist film (1987), Rudolf Kuenzli asks: “But in what ways are [Richter’s abstract] films related to Dada?” without offering an answer. Nor do any of the essays in his anthology attempt one. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, in proposing his performance-based definition of Dadaist film, also asks: “Should Hans Richter’s Rhythm 21 and Rhythm 23 be discussed as Dada films because Richter makes a case for Dada as abstract art?” 3. Rhythm 25, which Richter reportedly hand-colored frame by frame is, sadly, lost. Richter’s next film, Filmstudie (1926), initiates his departure from pure abstraction. 4. See Noël Carroll, “Entr’acte, Paris and Dada” (1977), reprinted in Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 26–33. 5. Richter, “Dada and the Film,” in Dada: Monograph of a Movement, ed. Willy Verkauf (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 39. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684146 by guest on 27 September 2021 Dada Between Heaven and Hell 15 again without suggesting an answer. More recently, there is the analysis of the films by Justin Hoffmann in Stephen Foster’s important anthology on Richter (1998). But Hoffmann ignores Richter’s own claims about the centrality of abstraction to Dada, arguing that “Richter’s . efforts to develop an abstract language of forms cannot be explained by Dada,” and locating these efforts instead within the context of De Stijl and international Constructivism. And he fails to show why Richter conceived of his abstract work in terms of a search for a universal language.6 By clarifying Richter’s definition of Dada, we can, I think, see why he believed his search for a universal language through his abstract films and other work to be Dadaist. More than this though, Richter’s films, I want to suggest, speak to us today as a model for a sophisticated artistic critique of modernity. They demonstrate that there were different types of critiques of modernity within Dada, not just the nihilistic revelation of the meaninglessness of modernity associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with Tzara and Picabia; or the search for a mystical, meaningful alternative to modernity associated, again whether rightly or wrongly, with Arp and Ball. They show that a nuanced, complex position in relation to modernity is possible even in the direct aftermath of a catastrophic world war; that one can reject some aspects of modernity while accepting, even celebrating others; that one does not have to criticize modernity in extreme, uncompromising terms by damning it as a “hell,” or by searching for an alternative “heaven,” to use words Richter borrowed from Arp. I According to his retrospective accounts of Dada and his personal involvement in the movement, written for the most part in the 1950s and ’60s, Richter, who in his first years as a modernist painter (1912–17) had oscillated between Cubism and Expressionism, was during 1917 painting what he called “visionary portraits,” after moving to Zurich in late August/early September 1916, and falling under the influence of the burgeoning Dada movement there. These explosive, colorful, semiabstract and abstract paintings were executed using a relatively spontaneous, free-associative method designed to incorporate a degree of chance into the painting process. For my own part, I remember that I developed a preference for painting my [“visionary portraits”] in the twilight, when the colors on my palette were almost indistinguishable. However, as every color had its own position on the palette my hand could find the color it wanted 6. Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 37; Rudolf Kuenzli, Introduction to Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 1; Thomas Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, p. 14; Justin Hoffmann, “Hans Richter: Constructivist Filmmaker,” in Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 74. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703769684146 by guest on 27 September 2021 16 OCTOBER even in the dark. And it got darker and darker . until the spots of color were going on to the canvas in a sort of auto-hypnotic trance, just as they presented themselves to my groping hand.