Jennifer J. Wild (University of Southern California)
To his embarrassment, Louis Delluc found himself using a sheet of paper saved from a provincial military hospital when he wrote to Guillaume Apollinaire in June of 1914, just weeks before France entered World War I. Had Apollinaire written a poem about the cinema, he asked? Did it exist, and if so, could he see it, and might he publish it in the new journal called Le Film? I use this document to open a query into the development of Delluc’s critical language for film and cinema at a time when he had been working as a young theater critic for the high-profile, mass illustrated magazine, Comoedia Illustré, where he covered the heyday of Les Ballets Russes between 1910-1914. How did Delluc’s language for aesthetic or sensory experience—at theater, ballet, cinema, or before a painting— compare to that of his editorial and artistic collaborators, friends, and acquaintances, such as Apollinaire, Fernand Léger, Louis Aragon, or the prolific art critic Maurice Raynal? Like Delluc—who at this time was also a playwright—these young artists, writers, and critics were similarly forging new formal and critical languages that we now know to be crucial to our understanding of early cinema, painting, poetry, and modern life in Paris before the war changed everything, as it does. My paper is a study of these languages. It offers a view of the constellation of words, events, and exchanges that arise out of Delluc’s modernist, Parisian milieux (pl.), and that inform the foundation of his cinematic language.
CV:
Jennifer J. Wild is Associate Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and French and Italian at the University of Southern California. She previously taught at the University of Chicago where she wrote her first book, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923 (University of California Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Best Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation and received Honorary Mention for the Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. Wild has published widely on the European historical and neo-avant-gardes, early cinema, and film and the other arts, including an essay for the current exhibition, “Modern Times: The American Dream and the Avant-Gardes of the 1920s,” at the Archiv der Avantgarden in Dresden. She is currently completing the book manuscript, The Perspective of Radiance: Figures of the Avant Garde. In this project, Wild examines the figural logic of photography and film arising from the diverse avant-garde milieux of France and Belgium across the 20th century.