'Antigonish' - 1889 - Hughes Mearnes

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

From discovering this poem my group and I came up with the idea of following a character that suffers from heavy mental issues such as an extreme case of paranoid schizophrenia. In doing this we are able to use all of our ideas from the last meeting to interesting use. We still want to keep the film as elusive and confusing as possible so the audience gets a sense of what it is like for this character that is also as troubled and confused as to what is happening to him as much as the audience is. We do not however, and have fully agreed that this film shall not be about drug use or the dark side of illegal drugs as we all thought it would be too clichéd and a weak, predictable story.

I have just finished writing the script and have written down fully how the transitions of settings and how certain shots should look. I have also included a lot of hallucination scenes that work well with the characters state of mind and the mood of the film.

Experimental Film Project Idea

During a meeting with my group project partners Amy & Connor we came up with the idea of confusion & a sense of unease. We want to create a film thats extremely elusive, confusing and also the events to be shown in a non linear technique. From watching a number of sources we like the idea of bizarre transitions for example; a character sits down in a bar, as the character sits down they are in a new location etc. We also like the technique of using p.o.v. camera shots and using grips to get really eerie shots of settings and characters. We would like to have a narrative but not so much a narrative that will make much sense or in a way even help the story. Just placing a narrative there as a starting point then playing around with it to see what we can do to create the sense of extreme paranoia and confusion with time and space.

Experimental Film Influences

Enter The Void - Gaspar Noe - 2010

From watching this film I really found the p.o.v. shots extremely interesting and effective. I like the details they also put in with this camera work such as blinks in the editing stage. The colours and flashes used throughout also work great to create mood and atmosphere.

Inland Empire - David Lynch - 2006

From watching this story I really liked the elusiveness of the story, how the mystery of the story is never explained. Also, the transitions from one scene to another is elusive, as throughout you are never entirely sure if the film is linear or non linear or even if the actors are playing the same characters. Very obscure and confusing, which I like for my experimental film. I also liked the use of light in this film, for some scenes the use of lighting is very experimental using just flash lights or natural lighting etc.

Pi - Darren Aronofsky - 1998

Watching this film I really enjoyed the way that the film allowed you to get into the characters confused and troubled mind. The camera was very interesting in this film using grips, hand held shots and p.o.v. shots. I also enjoyed the grainy black & white colour and the scenes that are sped up to confuse the audience even more. 

Chris Cunningham

‘Come to Daddy’- Aphex Twin – 1997 – Music Video

The music video for 'Come to Daddy' was filmed on the same council estate where Stanley Kubrick shot many scenes in 'A Clockwork Orange'. The music video is shot around Tavy Bridge Shopping centre, Thamesmead which was demolished in 2007. Part music video, part short film, this music video experiments with the surreal but also blends in genre of horror making the video very sinister and dark.

The music video opens with an elderly woman walking her dog in a grimy, industrial estate. The dog urinates on an abandoned television left lying on a pavement, which causes it to unexpectedly come to life. A sinister morphed face or evil spirit in the television keeps singing 'I want your soul'. The elderly lady is then terrorized by a group of young children, all of whom bear the face of Richard d. James. (Aphex Twin, the masks was made my silicone from a mould of Richard D. James). The young children create havoc in the estate and appear to inhabit the abandoned buildings.

Towards the end of the video the creature or evil spirit grows out of the television and screams at the old woman's face, all the children then are gathered around the creature (which also now bears the face of Richard D. James) almost looking as though they worship this creature, the creature is wrapping his arms around the children as if looking to hug them.

The mood of the music video is very dark and shocking; at one point it was banned in the UK. Although at first it may seem experimental, frightening and slightly vague to the point of the video, from watching the video a second time I believe director Chris Cunningham had some brilliant hidden messages in the video.

I believe Chris Cunningham is trying to send a message about the media and what children watch in the media such as violence, sex etc. For example, the children all bear the face of the creature and are running around creating havoc, are they copying what they see on the television?

Also, as the creature grows out of the television the children stand around in a worshipping way and the creature is wrapping his arms around the children resembling that the creature has successfully brainwashed and gained control of the children's minds. The lyrics in the song also go with the music video as the creature in the television is screaming throughout "I want your soul…I'll eat your soul…Come to daddy" this is repeated over and over which could resemble the brainwashing of the children.

'Rubber Johnny' - Chris Cunningham - 2005

'Rubber Johnny' is a six minute experimental short film and music video using music composed by Aphex Twin. The name 'Rubber Johnny' is a British slang word for condom, as well as a description of the main character, which explains the title sequence.

The concept for 'Rubber Johnny' came from Cunningham imagining a raver morphing as he danced. The idea evolved to the present film, in which Johnny (played by Cunningham) is an isolated deformed (possibly hydrocephalic) teenager kept on a wheelchair and locked in a dark basement with his Chihuahua. The film was shot in infrared night vision on digital video.

Still from 'Rubber Johnny'

The video starts out with a blinking fluorescent light, then shows a mouse crawling over a press-sticker credit followed by the title, 'Rubber Johnny' which written on a condom is played backwards being pulled of a penis. Johnny is first seen leaning backwards in his wheelchair with his oversized head hanging over the back of it. Johnny mutters distortedly which begins the Aphex Twin track and Johnny begins to rhythmically follow it, while his dog watches. His dancing involves him performing balancing tricks with his wheelchair and deflecting light beams with his hands as he dances. During his dancing the editing jump cuts between many numbers of shots making Johnny quickly change distance to the camera and position etc., creating a very manic scene full of movement and energy.

Concept art for 'Rubber Johnny' created by Chris Cunningham

A door then opens and Johnny is interrupted by someone who appears to be his father. During this, Johnny is out of his delusion and is shown sitting upright in the wheelchair, turning to look, his father yells and swears at him unintelligibly and then slams the door again.

Johnny is then seen inhaling a large line of white powder and with this the video then becomes even more erratic and delusional along with Johnny's morphing becoming more extreme and graphic. The music becomes more spasmodic remix of the previous tune and Johnny now hides behind a door, avoiding the white light beam that he previously was deflecting with his hands. Towards the end of the video we see what appears to be Johnny getting his face smashed at high speed into a piece of glass a number of times, with the camera filming from the other side so that the elastic-like skin and even some innards can be seen flattening out onto the glass every time. This was created using prosthetic-based special effects rather than digital morphing which became a more popular and easier technique during the time of video release.

Still taken from 'Rubber Johnny'

After a while Johnny is interrupted a second time by his yelling father, after which the video ends with Johnny, once again, reclining back in his wheelchair and babbling at his Chihuahua.

Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry Music Videos

Come Into My World – Music Video – Kylie Minogue

This video features pop singer Kylie Minogue strolling around a city block in the suburb of Paris, France. Each time she completes a circuit of the area, a new Kylie emerges from one of the stores (who is in fact the ‘old’ or original Minogue that did the circuit the first time around), also each people in the background are duplicated in slightly different positions. The video concludes with four unperturbed Minogue’s amidst an extremely chaotic scene with each background extra also depicted four times, the video ends as a fifth Minogue emerges from the shop.
Fifty extras were used and it took over fifteen takes to create the desired effect. Fifteen days were required for the video’s special effects.

The music video reminds me of an animation film created by Zbigniew Rybczynski called ‘Tango’. The setting is in a living room with a dining table where actions from a number of different characters work around each other and a repeated over and over.

Let Forever Be – Music Video – The Chemical Brothers

This video utilized ground-breaking video and film effects in its depiction of a young woman’s nightmare shot with grainy hand-held camera.

Michel Gondry successfully and cleverly used invisible transitions to actual real built sets to show effects of this woman’s nightmare, building different objects such as different sized frames and objects to create the impression of a duplicated nightmarish, tormenting, subconscious world. For the effect of the duplicates for the woman he used real life extras and created a choreographed dance so that the duplicates could mirror the woman’s dance to give an added effect of a confused grasp of reality.

Around the world – Music Video - Daft Punk

This video features robots walking around in a circle on a platform (which represents a vinyl record), tall athletes wearing tracksuits with prosthetic heads walk up and down the stairs, women dressed as synchronized swimmers move up and down another set of stairs, skeletons dance in the center of the ‘record’ and mummies dance in time with the song’s drum pattern.

Gondry is portraying a visual representation of the song; each element in the video represents a different instrument. The androids represent the singing robot voice; the physicality and small-minded rapidity of the athlete’s symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the synchronized swimmers represent the high-pitched keyboard; the skeletons serve for the guitars and the mummies represent the drum machine.

‘Around the World’ is Gondry’s first attempt at bringing organized dancing to his music videos.



Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou – Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali - 1928
The surrealists were interested in releasing the power of the unconscious through procedures that followed the logic of dreams. Directors Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel used bizarre imagery and incongruous juxtapositions to recreate their own dreams.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

From its startling opening sequence, in which a man slices through and woman’s eyeball with a cut-throat razor, to the grotesque corpses of its closing scene, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ is a deliberate attack on the artistic and social convention of its time, Luis Bunuel himself described it as ‘a desperate and passionate appeal to murder’.
The sequence with the cut-throat razor cutting the female’s eyeball sets up the violent tone of the film and its underlying link between sex and aggression; a sort of sadistic impulse runs throughout. The films key meaning is also implied during the shot of the thin cloud cuts across the full moon and then cutting to the cut-throat razor slicing the eyeball open. It implies identity between nature and consciousness and action.
However in the film much of the editing is conventional, using much of the shot/reverse shot format. Bunuel was never to pander in the arty shot; there is always a rather simple straightforwardness to his framing, composition and editing.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

Un Chien Andalou’s structure is that of a dramatic one rather than a narrative one. The film is a blend of both ordinary and surreal events whose dramatic and shock qualities derive from their realist interpretation but which have no narrative cause or a sense of logic. However it is not an anti-narrative film but one that plays with narrative with many of its concerns – abstraction, free-flowing image-making, image and text, social analysis and dreams are similar to many of the European avant-garde films of the 1920’s.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

Some of the images in the film such as the rotting donkeys on pianos and the severed hand, were staged before the camera, the most instinctive sequences are those where editing is used to imitate the patterns of unconscious thought, such as the sequence of puns that cuts between:
A moth, mouth, a smile that is wiped off a man’s face, an outraged woman frantically applying lipstick, a beard of pubic hair and an armpit.
Many of the films imagery has been related to the Freudian terms, although Bunuel however once stated ‘Nothing in the film symbolises anything’.

Avant-garde & Experimental Filmmaking

Avant-garde filmmakers had a desire to prise film from the grip of conventional and popular theatrical traditions, being wilfully nonconformist and challenged the traditional conventions of cinema. Coming mostly from backgrounds in the fine and plastic arts, which were revolutionised in the first two decades of the century by Futurism, Cubism and Dada, the earliest avant-garde filmmakers wanted express and redefine moving image as an art.
Experimental films are made for many reasons. The filmmaker may wish to express personal experiences or viewpoints in ways that would seem eccentric in rather than the usual, convention perspectives of the mainstream audiences and filmmakers.

 Scorpio Rising - Kenneth Anger – 1964

Still from 'Scorpio Rising'

The subject in this Experimental Film from director Kenneth Anger is the motorcycle culture of the 1960's, and he includes scenes of bikers working on their machines, dressing, revelling and racing. Anger cuts in still photos, comic strips, old movies and Nazi posters.   There is also no dialogue throughout the film, a style in which Anger uses throughout most of his films. Both these techniques alone show experimental techniques and practices. Each segment of the film is accompanied by a rock-and-roll song that adds an ironic or ominous tone to the images. For example, there is a scene in which a young man is tuning up his motorcycle, in which throughout Anger shows the figure of death looming over him. The sequence links biking to a death wish, an idea that returns in cartoons and other imagery throughout the film.
The techniques used in Scorpio Rising creates an elusive but powerful statement, evoking the possibility that people often model their behaviour on images supplied by mass media with the use of cut in imagery of film, photos etc. the genre of rock-and-roll music also reflects the negative biker culture.   

Still from 'Scorpio Rising'

The experimental filmmaker may tell no story, creating poetic reveries or visual collages full of energy such as Ballet Mecanique. The filmmaker may also create a fictional story but is revealed in such a way that challenges the viewer.

Through a series of transitions, Experimental Film can create ideas that might not have any sudden logical connection however, through the juxtaposition of the images, sounds, settings etc. We are encouraged to look for a possible connection between them.

Ballet mecanique (Mechanical Ballet) – Dudley Murphy & Fernard Leger - 1924

Ballet Mecanique one of the earliest abstract films also one of the most influential, remains highly enjoyable avant-garde film and a classic example of how mundane objects can be transformed when their abstract qualities are used as the basis for a films form.
Leger had an interest in machine parts which he often stylized in his distinctive developed versions of his cubism paintings.
Through the focus of obscure objects and human beings and creating a visual and temporal rhythms, the film changes the expectations about the about the nature of movement. Making objects dance and turn human action into mechanical gestures and the repetition of the shots connects humans to machines without actually using them. For example, there is a scene where a woman is swinging back and forth on a swing and turning her head to the side and back again. Another repetitive shot of a close of a woman’s lips smiling and unsmiling. Obscure and quick cut images are repeated throughout the film.

Salvador Dali

Surrealist Art

Surrealism started out as an artistic movement that was launched by the French poet Andre Breton in 1924 and it began as a revolutionary response to the devastations of the First World War Also, was inspired by the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud.

Freud believed that all of us have got an inner unconscious world and which our emotional and sexual feelings are repressed and that the only way to express ourselves is to release these emotions but without censoring what comes out. Surrealist's were fascinated by the bizarre and quickly decided that they needed to explore this new forbidden landscape of the unconscious mind.

'The Enigma of Desire: My Mother, My Mother, Mother' - Salvador Dali - 1929

Salvador Dali 

Dali really homed our understanding of the absurd showing us that anything is possible and brought to life extraordinary dream worlds in his vivid surrealist paintings.

Surrealism is something that conjures a sense of the bizarre and the unexpected or the irrational. The fact that we do is entirely thanks to Dali who brought surrealism into the mainstream.

 'The Great Masturbator - Salvador Dali - 1929

Dali paints impossible worlds but in an incredibly realistic way, this may be because most of Dali's paintings are based on the dramatic coast line of the north east corner of Spain, a place Dali grew up and loved.

Through Surrealism Dali could express himself with impunity and put onto the canvas all of his inner desires, fears, obsessions and anxieties.

'Swans Reflecting Elephants' - Salvador Dali - 1937

To extract these strange visions from his deepest psyche, Dali developed a technique that he called the 'Paranoiac Critical Method' based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories. 'Paranoiac Critical Method' is the notion of paranoia which Dali saw as a mechanism in the construction of reality.

'Portrait of Picasso' - Salvador Dali - 1947

For example, when we see a natural object such as rocks or a tree, we can see the human form or something looking at us which would be classified as a paranoid delusion. Dali explored and developed this idea in his paintings putting double images and meanings into them.

Dali's paintings all feature similar elements of desolate landscapes, stark light, sharp shadows, mutating/mutated displaced objects, and optical illusions for example in one painting a half kneeling figure can also look like a giant hand holding an egg, or a group of villagers sat next a hut and some trees turned to its side becomes a woman's face.

'Metamorphosis of Narcissus' - Salvador Dali - 1937

'Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey - One of Dali's earliest paintings where a shore is scattered with strange objects that represent his childhood and adult anxieties. Inspired by Freud's ideas he's liberating his unconscious obsessions through his art, death and sex (the dead deer and the naked female body with a decapitated head).

'Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey' - Salvador Dali - 1926

'Persistence of Memory' - Probably Dali's most popular painting and has been reproduced and parodied everywhere from kids shows Sesame Street to animation television series The Simpsons.

It features melting clocks, ants on a stopwatch and another melting clock on an object what looks like a face if turned to its side (this hidden face features in many of Dali's paintings).

With this paining Dali is exploring ideas of time and dreams and even fantasies and fears. There is something very strange about the painting; it has a strange, airless quality of a dream but one that is quite unsettling. It's as if Dali has taken our intangible anxieties about time passing and mortality and crystallised them in paint. The title also gives clue to the meaning behind the painting. For me personally I get the impression that Dali is showing his fear of time and how with time comes ages and with age comes the diminishing of memory as the brain & body becomes frail and old.

'Persistence of Memory' - Salvador Dali - 1931

'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' - Salvador Dali - 1946

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik participated in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music.

Neo-Dada - is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau realisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery and absurdist contrast. It also obviously denies traditional concepts of aesthetics.

'TV Buddha/A Sentimental Diary' - Nam June Paik - 1995

Fluxus - a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, and design. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia.

The work of Nam June Paik is renowned for transforming video into an artist’s medium and demonstrates the dramatic technological change that has shaped our society in recent years. He is a pioneer of video and media art which helped these genres attain recognition through his innovative, neo-Dadaist use of technology, experimentation and performance.

'Video Fish' - Nam June Paik - 1979

Paik was an inquisitive artist; he employed art as a projection screen for the constant questioning of social, political, technological and economic processes & manipulated television images became the foundation for his video art. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, in which he scattered televisions everywhere and used magnets to alter or distort their images.

'Aunt & Uncle - Nam June Paik - 1986

What makes Paik’s art so relevant and appropriate to our time is the spirit and ideal of Paik’s art that have brought the language of avant-gardism to the ambivalent landscape of contemporary culture. Truly experimental, yet embracing the pinnacles of everyday life, Paik embodied the paradoxical nature of artistic creation in the postindustrial, consumerist and information-based society.

'Route 66' - Nam June Paik - 1993

'One Candle' - Nam June Paik - 1989

Paik’s art served as an alternative technology closely bound to nature and its principles. Paik appears to have concentrated on the effect of electronic and digital manipulations that resembled the attributes of nature ‘my experimental TV is not always interesting but not always uninteresting. Like nature, which is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes’ - Nam June Paik.

Works such as Zen for TV and TV Chair, which show how Paik's interest in manipulating the physical and electronic nature of television sets developed and changed. With several TV Buddha works, we are showing how Paik juxtaposed the contrasting ideas like West and East, the spiritual and the technological in such a simply yet strong format.

'Zen for TV' - 1963 & 'TV Cello' - 1971 - Nam June Paik

Works like Zen for TV demonstrated his interest in the television as a physical medium for making art, rather than simply as a means for presenting art. The television had originally been damaged on the way to the exhibition and, when switched on, displayed only a thin horizontal line. Paik presented it turned on its side, declaring the title an 'artistic interaction' with the element of chance, chance being central to Zen Buddhism and increasingly to Paik's practice.

'Mercury' - Nam June Paik - 1991

Larger scale works like Video Fish and TV Garden represent his interest in the harmony between the technological and the natural, using real fish and live plants alongside video imagery. His humanist approach to technology is also evident in the series of Family of Robot. Made of vintage TV casings and old monitors, these robot sculptures look humorous and friendly rather than cyborg-like or mechanical.

The collection of eighteen televisions is called TV Clock. Paik used the eighteen television sets to show the hours of the day. Each television has hands that show the division of the clock face into twelve daytime hours and twelve nighttime hours. Paik's message is the fact of measuring time with a static measurement tool. The ability to measure time is a great accomplishment because time is a natural phenomenon. By using the televisions to show time, it shows the worlds changing ways of measuring this phenomenon.

Man Ray

Despite his association with Dada and Surrealism, Man Ray retained a degree of independence.

Solarized photograph by Man Ray

Man Ray had a fascination with objects and with ‘magical tinkering’s’.  Man Ray usually constructed images from everyday objects, which were then deliberately transformed by photography. Man Ray believed that ‘it is not the object itself which is given a title, but its representation. It is the fact of being reproduced and relabelled which gives life to the objects’.

Solarized photograph by Man Ray

Man Ray went beyond the use of the camera, any way of employing photographic processes to bring surprises was necessary. In 1917 he revived the cliché-verre, a process used in which a drawing is made on a glass negative with a needle-point and is then printed on sensitized paper; in later years, his Rayographs and solarizations added new method to the photographers art.

Rayograph by Man Ray

Man Ray also used his Rayographs to promote the domestic virtues of electricity, with females as his model he successfully combined the elegance of a naked torso with superimposed abstract shapes, with this he united sex and industry by his skill.

'Untitled' - Man Ray - 1931

Solarization occurs as a result of an error, by switching on the light in the dark room while a plate is being developed. Yet in his dark room Man Ray was able to make use of the mistake to give his work a new and unique quality. Examining the results of this error he discovered that the dark unexposed background in the negative had been exposed by the light which, at the same time, had been insufficient to affect the already exposed areas. A dark, narrow gulf remained between the differently exposed areas, giving the form in the areas originally exposed a sensitive outline. Man Ray believed this offered a new sense of three-dimensional reality into his work.

Rayograph by Man Ray

Any method Man Ray could devise might be used as a means of poetic expression. May Ray argued that he uses ‘photography for those things he does not wish to paint and paintings for what cannot be photographed’.

In most of Man Ray’s paintings he focused on the subjects in his dreams and therefore impossible to photograph, Man Ray also has always claimed his paintings as images are disconcerting, he explains that ‘logic assassinates’, and the irrational haunts the paintings.

Le Beau Temps - 1939

Its bright colours at first appear warm and welcoming. The two figures in the foreground, male and female, are dressed in festive costumes and are separated by a door. If we concentrate on individual components of the composition, we discover that in each one lurks a sinister content. The head of the male figure is hollow like a lantern, reminiscent of the lampshades Man Ray had designed in his youth; the body, is disjointed like a ghost and the left hand holds a knob on the door which blood is trickling from to the ground. The female figure, with black feet below her carnival skirt, is a grotesque manikin.

Le Beau Temps - Man Ray

In the background we find still more disturbing events and signs of violence. Against a darkening sky, to the left, is a ruined wall with sinister tridents growing out of the soil; to the right further back behind the female figure, is a colonnade lit from within and silhouette of an embracing couple who are oblivious of the ferocious battle between two beasts taking place on the roof over their heads. These monsters appeared to Man Ray one night as he slept in the house he had taken in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the war had awakened him by distant gunfire. With these images from his subconscious Man Ray made this great painting, which is unique in his work in that his inner hopes and fears of the war are symbolically affirmed in vivid contrast.

The Lovers or Observatory Time - 1936

The Lover or Observatory Time - Man Ray - 1936

Man Ray told a story of an evening when he was obliged to leave one of his female models (Kiki) to attend a dinner party in a small restaurant. She gave him a loving farewell kiss and on his arrival to the restaurant he failed to understand his hostess’s critical look; shortly afterwards however he saw in a mirror that a lipstick smear of Kiki’s lips stood out boldly on the whiteness of his collar.

This set Man Ray dreaming of lips detached and floating with the breeze. Here in the painting we see the back of a naked, laying woman and above is a pair of detached, giant floating lips which to me represents the naked body of the female below or the back of any naked human being. However some critics and Man himself have described the lips as two closely joined bodies.

The lips from 'The Lover or Observatory Time - Man Ray - 1936

‘Like an open window into space. The red lips floated in a bluish-grey sky over a twilit landscape, with an observatory and its two domes like breasts dimly indicate the horizon – an impression of my daily walks through the Luxembourg Gardens. The lips, because of their scale, no doubt, suggested two closely joined bodies’.  – Man Ray

Dada Art

Dada is said to be a catalyst which helped poets, artists and disaffected intellectuals in a dozen countries during the Great War to focus their hatred and ideals into a programme of cultural action. Dada stands for exacerbated individualism, universal doubt and aggressive iconoclasm.

Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature.

Tatlin At Home - Raoul Hausmann - 1920

Exposing the norms and rules of hierarchy, of order and discipline in society, of rationally controlled inspiration in imaginative expression, Dada resorted to chance, the unconscious and the primitive, where man is at the command of nature and gives up pretending to be its master. Dada relished in the shock effect of its profanities among the right thinking.

Through Birds, Through Fire, But Not Through Glass - Yves Yanguy - 1943

The Dadas mocked Western confidences for their ego of their beliefs of the sensible and worth of reason. They criticized the Renaissance movement for their anthropocentrism ways and their ideas of reality which they assumed the world was organized according to humanly intelligible laws. For the Dadas, nature was a state of constant flux. It was energy and motion in a simultaneous process of becoming and disintegration, alien and indifferent to the affairs of men.

'Rape' - Rene Magritte - 1934

The war showed how the radical forces in nature which men acknowledge and respect had become murderously destructive through neglect by an excessive intellectual, mechanistic civilization. The Dadas believed that the War was a ‘direct product of the competitive urge of industrial capitalism, with its mechanized trench warfare as a grotesque and monstrous version of the productive process itself’.

'Perpetual Motion' - Rene Magritte - 1935

Dadas behaved as if they had come through the experience of life as a tragedy and emerged on the other side. Their most fatalistic statements were always punctured by self-irony. They accepted the confusion of things, playfully mimicking in their work the ebullient anarchism of the life-force.

Dada, like Surrealism, imagined the artist as a spiritual adventurer for whom productivity was of secondary importance. Dadas stylistic originality derived from early Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. For example, collage from Cubism, typographical acrobats and noise music from Futurism and the unconstrained use of colour from Expressionism.

'The Spirit of our Time' - Raoul Hausmann - 1920
(The dummy or mannequin was a recurring image in Dada and Surrealist art. This head expresses the brutal determination which Hausmann saw operating on the minds of contemporary city dwellers: "An everyday man only has the capacities chance has glued to his cranium; his brain is empty").