theo van doesburg and writings on film in de stijl

Theo van Doesburg and Writings on Film in De Stijl

Ansje van Beusekom

Theo van Doesburg never became a filmmaker and his involvement with film was of a purely theoretical and critical nature. Between 1921 and 1923 he imported the ideas on film of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter as a universal language of abstract images in De Stijl in order to develop his own dynamic idea of a New Plasticism. His dynamic idea, that he further developed in architecture, turned out to be fundamen-tally different from the static New Plasticism of Piet Mondriaan and eventually caused their break up in De Stijl. Although Theo van Doesburg never became a filmmaker himself, making his involvement with film of a purely theoretical and critical nature, he used film between 1921 and 1923 to develop his own dy-namic idea of a New Plasticism that was fundamentally different from the static one of Piet Mondriaan. The raison detre of the classical avant-garde, no matter what ism, was based on overthrowing the existing arts by opposing old concepts with new ones. New art theories replaced existing ones and some-times even a new art history was developed to replace the traditional one. Being a modern artist thus meant being an art critic who criti-cizes art, artists and works of art in the broadest sense of the word. This tendency was never stronger than in the 1910s and 1920s when groups of artists organized themselves to change the world, or at least the art world, in countless formations and supporting magazines. De Stijl, founded in 1917 in The Netherlands was one of those maga-zines, a little review as Malcolm Gee termed it in his classification of twentiethcentury art criticism (1993:6). Art criticism in those lit-tle reviews was not evaluative or interpretative but rather a promo-tion of the vision on art within the group. De Stijl was such an interna-tional forum for modern artists from various disciplines who had dedicated themselves to the ideology of De Nieuwe Beelding or Neo-Plasticism. The most important axioms of the Stijl expressed in its first Manifest in 1918 were that the new art had to replace the old art

Ansje van Beusekom 56

because it was regarded as representational and reproduced illusions of the natural and the individual. The first lines of the manifesto were:

There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal is revealing itself in the world war as well as in the art of the present day. 1

Instead of representations of an individual reality the new art had to present a universal reality in abstract, geometrical forms and therefore had to destroy all older natural and representational forms. That meant abandoning all visual references to the world as we know it. The New Plasticism, was mainly theorized by Piet Mondriaan who published his ideas on the new art for a world yet to come, in a series of articles De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst [New Plasticism in Paint-ing] in the first year, continuing in Dialoog over de nieuwe beelding [Dialogue on New Plasticism] and Natuurlijke en abstracte realiteit [Natural and Abstract Reality] in the second and third year in almost every single issue of De Stijl until 1921. Although Mondriaan in-cluded all arts in his new system, he considered painting as the most progressed and therefore most suitable art form to theorize on. His articles can be considered as the piece the resistance of De Stijl until 1921. Most articles and manifestos published next to the series of Mondriaan were the responsibility of Theo van Doesburg, either as author or as editor. In theoretical articles, he proved himself a dedi-cated mediator of Mondriaans ideas, trying to explain them in larger art historical frame-work, even outside the inner circle of De Stijl.2 In tone De Stijl was quite aggressive: its manifestos based on the destruction of all existing art forms, making room for new ones. With these criteria for criticism it shall be clear that not many existing works of arts and artists stood the test of approval. In an al-ternative art history of De Stijl only abstract works of art produced by converted artists would play a role, all other artists and works of art had to be lucky to be counted in as a fore grounder of the new art. Moreover, in the future, that means in the ideal modern world, the idea of art would be abandoned all together: art would no longer exist as a separate category but would be fully integrated in modern life and would not longer need representations of the visible world. However, in the 1920s the world had not reached this enlightened state of being yet, and the idealists of De Stijl wisely never specified a date for their

Theo van Doesburg and Writings on Film in De Stijl 57

expectations about the future. Artists, ideas on art and works of art thus were still needed to lead the way into a truly modernist utopia.3 The question remains how a new truly modern technique like the film technique was treated within the concept of the Nieuwe Beelding [New Plasticism] and how existing films were classified in De Stijl and why. In the following I wish to analyze the main articles on film of Theo van Doesburg in 1921 and 1923. I will try to put his criticism of films in perspective of his own project of a new art in De Stijl. Therefore, I will emphasize Van Doesburgs change of direction after 1920, meaning a departure from Mondriaans theory of art. His detachment had a lot to do with his interest and involvement in the new film experiments and theory as it was shown and explained to him in person by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling and later on by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Before zooming in on Van Doesburg as writer on film in De Stijl, a few words on Theo van Doesburg as film spectator in 1918. We are lucky to have access to a letter of Van Doesburg wherein he not only mentions his experience of watching a movie in a cinema but also reflects on this experience in relation to a time in space contin-uum. In June 1918 Van Doesburg wrote in a letter to architect J.J.P. Oud about a Keystone-Comedy he had seen the night before in a movie-theater in Leiden. He described the slap-stick containing a bur-lesque dance of crooks in black suits that ended in a real pandemo-nium, as follows:

In a maximum of motion and light you saw people falling apart in ever di-minishing fields, that reconstructed themselves again in bodies at the same moment. A continuous dying and reviving in the same instant. The end of time and space! The destruction of gravity! The secret of 4 dimensional mo-tion. (Van Straaten 1983: 85)

Van Doesburg evidently saw through the figures a projection of fields of light and darkness and perceived it as a permanent movement of construction and destruction. He called this dynamic le mouvement perpetuel. About the same time Van Doesburg collaborated with Oud building a villa at the seaside, De Vonk. Van Doesburg designed the colour scheme of the entrance hall, including the windows and the tile floor. He described this tile floor in November 1918 in De Stijl:


The floor as the most closed surface of the building needed ... a force working against gravity trough the use of flat colors and a open-space rela-tion. [...] The development and effect of this composition: constructive / de-structive, can only be experienced on the spot. (Van Doesburg 1918: 10-12)

Carel Blotkamp argues that this rather cryptic description contains a clue in the last segment. Experiencing on the spot means perceiving the effect of construction and destruction is only possible if one walks (motion) through the room (space) (1982: 134). Thus, instead of sit-ting still in front of a screen and watch motion in time, the spectator moves through the actual space of the entrance hall and perceives a turning and twisting pattern of the floor. Compared to the description of the slapstick Van Doesburg describes this process quite similar, but the process of perceiving motion in time was reversed to that of the film. Van Doesburgs remarks on the slapstick are a typical example of a process that film historian Yuri Tsivian has defined cultural re-ception: an active, creative interventionist or even aggressive re-sponse to what was perceived on screen (1994:1). Moreover, Van Doesburg shows himself as a exemplary artist in the audience as de-scribed by Greg Taylor who defines the project of the avant-garde as a way of life instead of a style of art or a historical movement:

The avant-garde is, more properly, a mode and tradition of art making steeped in modernist precepts yet seeking a more interventionist role for the modern artist as visionary guru who helps others to see the world through a liberating modernist perspective. The avant-gardes goals are self-consciously political to the extent that the democratizing of artistic produc-tion is considered a radical act of emancipation from the chains of mass cul-ture, a seizing of everyday spectatorship in the interests of a more aestheti-cally fulfilling life praxis (1999: 8).

In other words it is not the works but the attitude that counts in being an avant-garde artist who has an avant-garde way of seeing. If there was one Dutch artist who embodied this attitude, it was Theo van Doesburg.4 Totally different from Mondriaan, Van Doesburg was an outgoing and extravert character, who made friends and enemies wherever he went. While Mondriaan returned to his atelier in Paris after World War I had ended, Van Doesburg traveled as much as he could through Europe to be there where the action was. As a Dutch artist from a neutral country he was welcomed in both Germany and


France and he lived and worked there for shorter or longer periods. He joined the Dada groups and Constructivists and lectured for a short while at the Bauhaus. Until late 1920 he showed no signs of any inter-est in film beyond that of an active spectator whose observations served his own artistic ideas in other techniques. In 1920 his interest in film grew stronger. Van Doesburgs three weeks visit to the family estate in Klein-Klzig of Hans Richter in December 1920 and January 1921 spurred this interest in film more than anything. His experiences as a witness of Richter and Viking Eggeling working on their projects, resulted in his first theoretical text in De Stijl, Abstracte filmbeelding, pub-lished in May 1921. Moreover, Van Doesburg based his ideas on film largely on those of Richter and Eggeling as formulated in their pam-phlet Universelle Sprache.5 Also according to Richters article Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst, published in the summer of 1921 in De Stijl and illustrated with fragments of Eggelings Horizontal-Vertikalorchester, they envisioned a new system of communication based on visual perception. Richter described the films of Eggeling as a step forwards in modern painting: after Czanne and Derain who introduced rhythm in forms on canvas and Picasso who added factor time, Eggeling had introduced rhythm in time, that is movement, in the plane. A universal language of movements based on contrasting lines and forms could develop. Speaking of a new language, film needed to rely on a set of unambiguous elements. Furthermore, Rich-ter would add a year later, this language would not come from the visible world around us but from the spiritual world within us: Es sind Gestaltungen des Geistigen. Die Bewegungskunst geht nicht von der Bewegung, der ausseren mechanischen Welt, sondern von dem Innern einer Erkenntnis aus (Richter 1922: 92). In 1965 Richter phrased the intentions of the pamphlet once more:

This pamphlet elaborated our thesis that abstract form offers the possibility of a language above and beyond all national language frontiers. The basis for such language would lie in the identical form perception in all human beings and would offer the promise of a universal art as it has never existed before. With careful analysis of the elements, one should be able to rebuild mens vision into a spiritual language in which the simplest as well as the most complicated, emotions as well as thoughts, objects as well as ideas, would find a form (Hoffman 1998:76).


Projected light was seen as an autonomous medium to create forms in lines and planes, producing moving pictures that were not represen-tations of the visible world but presentations of a modern abstract universality. They were offered the opportunity to realize their ideas on film in the UFA trick film studios and soon realized that trans-forming abstract drawings into visible motion through film, proved to be much more complicated. In order to achieve movement they manufactured rolls of ab-stract drawings that had to be transferred to film. They were disap-pointed by the results on film and in the end would consider their painted rolls, or Orchestrations as they called it, as works of art in themselves. A spectator was supposed to read the single moments on the roll, moving his eyes from one spot to another and constructing a theme in his head. Again, the pictures dont move, but the act of con-structing a theme by moving ones eyes from spot to spot or follow a line suggests motion in time (Hoffman 1998: 76). Richter and Eggelings work had the enthusiastic response of Van Doesburg and he published Richters Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst a few months after his own article in De Stijl, fol-lowed a year later by Richters Film. It is not hard to see why Van Doesburg was so enthusiastic: a universal language system of abstract forms, the active spectator who perceives movement in color and light presenting time and space are very similar to his own ideas of move-ment (time) through a room (space) while constructing and recon-structing the colored planes of the interior walls and floor. In other words: Richter and Eggelings first film experiments and painted rolls fitted very well in Van Doesburgs idea of an abstract dynamic he was about to develop in De Stijl and that was different from Mon-driaans idea of universal harmony as immutable and timeless. In Abstracte Filmbeelding Van Doesburg, relied mostly on Richter and Eggelings theory. He saw film first of all as a new Ge-samtkunst that offered the artist possibilities to work entirely concep-tually. Instead of struggling with the materials an artist of the future could write his compositions for film: codes for color and forms would be processed mechanically through the film apparatus and re-sult in a perfect product. This observation cannot be based on Richters and Eggelings experiments in the film studio. Their results on film were among the most handy crafted and labour-intensive ones of the period. Van Doesburg rather described a computer artist than a film-


maker and the text reveals that he knew very little about actual film techniques. I want to argue that he based his ideas on the painted rolls and conversations with Richter and Eggeling because he refers no-where to actual film techniques and mentions the use of color often. Especially Richter came to the conclusion that the first ex-periments with the painted rolls lead to a dead end because the film was still representing something pro-filmic albeit an abstract depic-tion. Instead, film had to be treated as film and its elementary compo-nents as media: the screen became a form in its own right and no longer a canvas or a window. Richter divided the screen by rectangu-lar forms that in their contrasts of black and white were expanding and disappearing. The basic elements for this new film art consisted of movement and light. His new ideas resulted in Film ist Rhythmus, later titled Rhythm 21, a film of one-and-a-half minute, made in the months after Van Doesburgs visit. Van Doesburg returned to Ger-many with Nelly van Moorsel in the spring of 1921 and became a go-between, by taking Richters film Rhythm 21 to Paris and showed it to friends on a lecture tour. Although the reception in Paris of the film was rather cold, despite the fact that Van Doesburg presented Richter as a Dane, other critics wrote encouraging of the experiment as the first true motion picture. Art historian Adolf Behne wrote in the Sozialistische Monatshefte:

This film, a logical development of abstract forms of geometric precision, is a true motion picture for the first time, an independent art work not requir-ing any addition. The law of artistic movement sequences appears in com-plete clarity and tectonic discipline, which an artistically sensitive person cannot help perceiving (Foster 1998: 257).

Since Abstracte Filmbeelding more articles including film entered De Stijl but all fitted in the framework of Van Doesburgs premisses: actual films were rarely discussed because they all belonged to the rejected naturalistic and narrative representations. Expressionistic films like Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene 1919), outside De Stijl regarded as utterly artistic and modern were dismissed along with American and French films. The only exception concerning films in the naturalistic mode of representation was made by Dadaists for Charlie Chaplin, or rather his film personage Charlot or the Tramp. Raoul Hausmann called him a physionist labeling every expression of


Chaplin physical instead of psychological. Therefore Charlot was a true modernist and Leon Blumberg even honored him with the word Chaplinism. In 1923 Van Doesburg revised his assumptions on film. In Licht- en tijdbeelding (film) [Plasticism of light and time (film)] he described three forms of film that could eventually free film from its relation to the subjective. Firstly, there was the abstract-graphic and he described the paper roll method of Eggeling and Richter of 1921 once more. Secondly, there was a montage of naturalistic con-trasts with no aesthetic composition in mind that he observed in the films of the American Charles Sheeler. Thirdly, there were deliber-ately deformations by placing deforming devices in front of the lens in order to distract attention from the filmed subject that he found in the films of Man Ray. Van Doesburg noted that no style in itself was completely satisfying, but that they were complementary. This did not mean that all efforts to solve the film problem were meaningless. He reminded how long it had taken to abstract form from the natural to a form element and with film one had to ask oneself what the pri-mary, elementary means of film formation were in the first place. Were these means so far in almost all applications reproductive, a phase all arts had been through, for modern artists one had to know what films elementary productive media were. By all means, it was not the plane (screen) and the projection was not 2-dimensional. Light, x-dimensional and chaotic, was the films latent medium of expression. He rejected the graphic film and stated that motion and light were the elementary media of film form. Through time and space film could make a new dimension visible, but this could only be possible if a film was constructed from its primary elements. Like ar-chitecture, film was unthinkable in two dimensions. Van Doesburg concluded his article with a sharp critique on his brother in art Piet Mondriaan, however, without mentioning his name: Our modern consciousness does not allow to deny the time element as elementary means of expression on theosophical or other imaginary grounds (1923: 61). Film had not been the only thing on Van Doesburgs mind during his hectic travels that Sjarel Ex called his Blitz (1996:71). Van Doesburgs encounter and collaboration with the young architect Chris van Eesteren in 1922 was an important new impulse. Van Eesteren was able to put Van Doesburgs wild dreams about space and


time dynamics in workable structures. Together they worked out a new physical sensibility of a dynamic perception of architectural space in colors, a realization of color in three dimensions. Le mou-vement perptuel would become its leading principle. They showed their work, drawings and models, in 1923 in Paris (Van Straaten 1996: 21-35). Due to the preparation of the exhibition Van Doesburg spend a long time in Paris where he regularly encountered Mondriaan and even started painting again in 1924. Their personal encounters inevitably brought their different theoretical views on presenting time to light and caused the split-up between them (Blotkamp 1994:190-192). Van Doesburg presented movement in space as a crucial action of the perception of the universal as a perpetual movement, a process of construction and destruction in time. Mondriaan sees as the main purpose of the new art a process of abstraction from the natural to the universal. He explains his system and the role of the artist: the artist is bound to present the immutable equilibrium of the universal laws un-derlying the turbulent natural reality wherein everything is always moving and changing. In other words, presenting movement itself did not belong to duties of the modern artist, because movement did not belong to the realm of the neo-plastic aesthetics or the abstract reality (Blotkamp 1994:164). The balance of contrasts that Mondriaan tried to achieve in his theories and art was immobile, not dynamic. Mon-driaan wrote his last article in the same issue of De Stijl that contained mostly articles of Van Doesburg and Van Eesteren on architecture (Mondriaan 1924: 86-88). Architecture surpassed film, but film served Van Doesburgs purpose to embed the factor time in his dynamic ideas on modern art. Theoretically he had found soul mates among the filmmakers Richter and Eggeling who convinced him of the need to go beyond easel painting and see adding time to a work of art as a truly step forward towards a modern art. Practically, Van Doesburg never was involved in making a film and he never would. He lacked the skills, patience, money and drive needed to put his heart into understanding the new film techniques. He wrote about film because it belonged to the realm of modern art and served his own agenda of the dynamic. Indeed as Malcolm Gee stated:

Rather than serving an evaluative or even interpretative function, the prin-cipal goals of writing in this framework were to reflect and order the self-


conceptions of a small group of artists, and through this, to project a public identity both for them and the writers who supported them (Gee 1993: 6).

Van Doesburgs writings on film show that in this context it also can be said that artists within the same group used their criticism to dis-tinct themselves from one another and order a new self-conception. To support this new direction, Van Doesburg brought in other artist writing in his line of thinking. Critical interventions like disturbing a lecture on film as art by Henrik Scholte in The Hague during the early days of the Filmliga in the fall of 1927, show that Van Doesburg kept himself more or less up to date and had not lost interest in film entirely, but he never wrote again about film. Notes 1 Manifest I van De Stijl, 1918, signed by Theo van Doesburg, Robt. van t Hoff, Vilmos Huszar, Anthony Kok, Piet Mondriaan, G. Vantongerloo, Jan Wils. n: De Stijl 2, 1 (1918): 2-5. 2 See for instance: Theo van Doesburg, Grondbegrippen der nieuwe beeldende kunst , which first had been published in two volumes in 1919 in the magazine Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte and in 1925 was published in a German translation as Bauhaus-buch: Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst. 3 See for the history of De Stijl: Carel Blotkamp et. al., De beginjaren van de Stijl. 1917-1922. (Utrecht: Reflex 1982) and idem, De vervolgjaren van De Stijl, 1922-1931. (Amsterdam / Antwerpen: Uitgeverij L.J.Veen, 1996). 4 For more information on Van Doesburg as an avant-gardist pur sang: Ansje van Beusekom, Cinema Militans. Spectators and Authors in the Writings on Film of Theo van Doesburg and Menno ter Braak. In: Anja Franceschetti and Leonardo Quaresima (eds.), Prima dellautore/Before the author. Udine: 1997: 233-242. 5 Although the printed pamphlet is lost, a draft still exists and is reprinted as the ap-pendix, Hans Richter, Demonstration of the Universal Language. In: Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-garde. Cambridge: MIT Press: 1998: 184-239.


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