Birkbeck Cinema, Friday 7th December 2018: 18:00 – 21:00
Free entrance, book your tickets here.
Avant-Garde Film Night: Entr’acte + other shorts
The Avant-Garde Study Group presents a series of short avant-garde films in this collaboration with BIMI that explore the intersection between a high point of avant-garde experimentation and the emergence of a new artistic medium.
The programme will begin with a screening of René Clair’s Entr’acte [Between the Acts] (1924), a short film that premiered as an entr’acte for the Ballets Suédois production Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Co-written by Francis Picabia and with music by Erik Satie, this masterpiece of Dada cinema features cameos by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a slow-motion funeral procession led by a camel, and a high-speed roller coaster ride.
Entr’acte will be followed by four segments of short films under the headings ‘Abstract’, ‘Material’, ‘Sound’, and ‘Movement’. This arrangement is intended to isolate key elements of the filmic medium, such as sound and movement, and to explore its inherent tensions, such as the abstract and the material.
The Avant-Garde Study Group, based at Birkbeck’s School of Arts, is a forum for discussing the historical avant-garde, e.g. Expressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, Cubism, Vorticism, and Constructivism, as well as other forms of experimentation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, art, film, music, and performance.