AVANCA | CINEMA 2020 Discourse, Figure, d’après Lyotard Noni Geiger ESDI/UERJ, Brazil Abstract reality of nature is replaced by the reality of art. The autonomy of art will demand independence from nature. The presence of the written element in cinema The eye and the mind – this conflict, contemporarily, goes back to the early silent movies era, to express must favor the mind; which means the absorption of meanings that were not enough comprehensible just language in the artwork. The eye, by itself, is unable through images. The use of text charts as means to to penetrate into an intellectual system that today support and to implement narrative almost invariable distinguishes objects that are and are not works of art. consisted of black cards with centered white type If, therefore, the perceptual experience of the eye is no (rarely the opposite, i.e., black type on white boards), longer reliable, then the work of art can no longer just occasionally utilizing graphic features as ornaments. be described as an object (restricted to dimensional, These letterings inserted between scenes, either material and compositional characteristics), causing a before or after to which they referred, sometimes had displacement of the ‘art object’ to the ‘idea of art’. a deranged narrative effect because of interrupting In a chronological approach, Braque and Picasso’s the action flow. But words, when added to the inaugural Cubism represents the founding 20th century cinematographic image, can indeed communicate art movement of interest to these issues. On the one certain abstract concepts such as date time lapse, hand, it is still through the ‘traditional’ techniques local; evince characters speeches; describe some of art, such as the pencil and the brush, that the action not performed in the movie. elements of the art world will be constituted. On the This paper aims to investigate the change of status other hand, through collage, which emphasizes the of the written element as an accessory apparatus to a two-dimensional reality of the surface, there will be central and structural element of the movie, specifically an enrichment of the paradoxes involved in the cubist in the experimental and avant-garde cinema, dialectic between art and reality, false and true. considering Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926) its inaugural example. The incorporation of textual elements can be understood within the very process of the visual arts in the first decades of the twentieth century since Braque’s Gueridon (1913) and Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913) through the Cubist and the Dada conceptual and formal strategies. The Conceptual art of the sixties and seventies permeates expressions of film experimentalism that will be analyzed for its use of text condition, where Michael Snow’s So this is, already in early 80ies (1982) is to be highlighted. Keywords: Avant-garde, Conceptual Art, Dada, Experimental Film, Text and Typography. Figure 1 - Pablo Picasso, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar Image and text and Newspaper, 1913. Collage and pen and ink on blue paper, 46.7 x 62.5 cm. Tate Modern, London The intentional merge by the vanguards, from the beginning of the 20th century, between media and art In the post-war period, from the mid forties on, institutions, will incorporate the ‘other’ of the press, the discussion about the ‘artistic potential’ of design of advertising and of design – not yet fully defined changes: instead of the art x design dichotomy, much in its principles, which will happen at the Bauhaus of the conscious art of the media will incorporate (1919-1933). Therein, the boundaries between visual advertising and mass communication strategies. and literary expressions will be broken. A non-linear process is observed, in which the letter, The definitive rejection of one of the foundations an element imported from a universe foreign to art, of Western painting since the Renaissance of the meaning idea, thought, information, communication, quattrocento – in which the flat surface of the canvas becomes the protagonist, elementary matter of art. is an imaginary transparency, through which we see, Thus, this article seeks to point out the direction and therefore the painting presents an illusion of the from which this research originates – in the analysis perceived reality – will be performed by Braque and of experimental films in which verbal expression, Picasso. In its place we will almost have a reversion to figured by typography, is a constitutive and a medieval point of view, in which a pictorial image is intrinsically fundamental element to confer the very a symbol, and its relation to reality is conceptual. The status of work of art itself. 108 Capítulo I – Cinema – Arte And this analysis seeks to recognize meanings in imposition of the notion we want to deal with: the use of the choices of use of the typographic element within the letter whose design is part of a system1. the paradigm of the two poles of modern creation: ‘expressionism’ (understood as expression and Anémic Cinéma, a foundation stone authorship in art, as subjectivity, and not as artistic movement) and depersonalization. In 1926, Marcel Duchamp2 produced Anémic In principle, we do not aim to impose a restriction on Cinéma which title contains an anagram, almost the scope of the objects of analysis that is determined a palindrome3, visually stressed in the opening of by the technical nature of the means of their production. this 6 minutes short. The visual symmetry between It is precisely interesting to develop a critical analysis the words anémic and cinéma is emphasized in the of what we will consider ‘artist’s project strategies’, chart, where white capital letters form a perspective adopted in each of the selected works. It is investigated with one vanishing point on a black background, for the meanings contained in the specificity and criteria of the two words converge on an imaginary vertex with the artists’ formal choices – in what are favored aspects their corresponding respectively last and first letter of typographic ‘drawing’, ‘origin’ and ‘medium’ – on (C), and the following letters to compound each word account of endowing them with intentional meanings. are slightly progressively enlarged downwards on a However, according to Panofsky (p. 32), the widening angle to form the shape of a virtual triangle. artist intention cannot be determined absolutely. It is impossible to define intentions per se with scientific precision, as these are conditioned by the standards of the time and the environment in which they are created: a cosmos of culture, a space-time structure. Nevertheless, it is possible to define an ‘optics for evaluating these intentions’ through the commitment to a mental process, of a synthetic and subjective character, remaking the actions and recreating the creations. Hence, it is not a matter of assembling a rational superstructure, but an interpenetration between the recreational synthesis and the archaeological investigation, which qualify and rectify mutually. Text and Typography Yet, the object of the recreational experience Figure 2 - Opening of Anémic Cinéma, 1926 requires – to be described – terms that imply generic theoretical concepts. In this sense, for this analysis, Duchamp starts his word gaming already from the our approach will also employ the constitution of titling, since “anemic” in French is anémique, which particular classes that belong to the typographic written expression would not typographically function culture and repertoire: design, origin and medium, and towards the desired symmetry. This sort of maneuver the theoretical foundation of the parameters that define will be further used within some of the textual film charts. them and their history. This reconstructive terminology will describe Vertigo and Hypnosis peculiarities like what bears witness to artistic In Anémic Cinéma – the only experiment Duchamp ‘intentions’, and intentions can only be formulated made with film as an author –, abstract optical whirling in terms of alternatives. Then, the peculiarities of graphic circles and spirals – entitled Rotoreliefs4 – the works will be interpreted as specific solutions to alternate with spinning texts in French, Duchamp’s ‘artistic problems’. mother language. Understanding the process of inserting typography These texts are a sort of spoonerisms; single into art, and the search for identities that differentiate interplays of homophone words making up nonsense meanings requires a historical and anthropological sentences that convey alliterations5 and rhyme, within approach to the production of material culture. In this the dada and surrealist tradition poetry. The humor perspective, the advent of the press is our cornerstone, comes from the confusion of meanings, since we have marking in the West, in the middle of the 15th century, to deal with both: difficulty in following the significant in the transition from manuscript to print, a revolution itself, for the frequent cacophony, and understanding in communication. At the intersection of technical the very semantics of the sentence. restrictions and aesthetics, letterpress printing will We are lead to an immersion that bears hypnosis create its own values of excellence. Whether in the through the phenomenological effect of different strategy at the service of legibility, and of beauty, in the centrifugal and centripetal whirlpools – the two full sense of the term in art, with its masters, their styles dimensional black and white