Art from the Outskirts

Today’s feature is revisited from October 15, 2008 but deserves featuring once more as it is a very funky flick indeed!It is the 70s arthouse adventure The ABCs of Dada!

Dadaism may be the definition of “art from the outskirts.” It is an all arts movement of the political turmoil of the first World War and a rebellion against the rigidity of the established definition of art during the time. The term’s origin is unclear but it is suggested that it is a nonsensical word to mark the “anti-art” feel of the style.

Dada was a provocative and irreverent art movement, founded in Switzerland in the early twentieth century, in which a seemingly chaotic, spontaneous, and pessimistic aesthetic influenced painting, sculpture, theater, literature, and film. The movement’s name is a willfully nonsensical word, intended to punctuate the meaninglessness artists saw in their contemporaneous worldview. Dada filmmakers such as Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Viking Eggeling were challenged by the developing technology of filmmaking in the 1920s. This confluence of technology and aesthetic experimentation suited the Dadaists’ passion for the machine-made object. The visual disruption created by the Dada filmmakers in the 1920s provided a legacy of aesthetic language for the cinematic experiments of future generations of avant-garde artists (MoMa.org).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Credit to YouTube user OttOmOlOtOv for this film.

Bonus: “How One Wages War with a Scissors” by Amy Lipson,
a Satirical bio of John Heartfield

Dada is from the Outskirts!

Next week’s flick: Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi

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