In the 1920s, there were obvious differences between the early and late stages of this art movement in France (1917-1928). Previous theoretical exploration and artistic practice mainly focused on the understanding of light; It tends to be abstract after 1925. Therefore, the French film art movement before 1925 was called "impressionism", while the French school after 1925 became the avant-garde. However, impressionist films are generally regarded as the prelude to avant-garde films, and some even classify them as avant-garde and regard them as the first stage of the movement. The avant-garde film movement in the 1920s was the first film movement in the world film history. The French avant-garde film movement began with the artistic creation principle of L Delluc, who demanded a complete break with the commercial films at that time and explored the characteristic beauty of people and things with the help of films. French avant-garde film movement can be roughly divided into three stages.

First stage

Represented by the experimental films of cubist painters F Lecleres and R Clare, they also regarded sports as the essence of the films at that time, but the difference with German avant-garde films is that they do not take the changes of hand-drawn graphics as the performance content, but combine the objects or scenes in daily life. For example, Lecheres' short film "Mechanical Dance" in 1924 and Claire's "Intermittent Program" (1924) and so on. These films also have no complete stories and distinct themes. These films are also called Dadaism films, abstract films or pure films.

stage Ⅱ

Represented by the experimental films of young female filmmaker G Drucker, L bunuel from Spain and playwright and young poet A Aalto.

Influenced by surrealist literature, their films show people's subconscious, including dreams and hallucinations. The short film Shell and Monk (written by A Aalto) filmed by G Drucker in 1928 mainly analyzes the chaotic psychological activities of a monk. Psychoanalysis with a series of unrelated shots; L bunuel's An Andalusian Dog produced in 1928 also shows people's subconscious activities in a similar way, or pursues an absurd new metaphor. This kind of film is also called surrealist film.

After 1929, the avant-garde movement of French films also turned into documentaries. This documentary is quickly divided into two tendencies: one is to satirize social phenomena, such as A Scene in Nice by French director J Vigo (1929 ~ 1930), which mainly satirizes the ugly life of the upper class in the city with grotesque pictures and grotesque clips; The other is a documentary with lyrical color or aestheticism. For example, the Bridge (1928) and Rain (1929) filmed by J. Evans under the direct influence of W. Ruthman and the French avant-garde movement. Fernand Lochel, a French cubist painter, was originally engaged in film creation, with the aim of studying painting through films. In his creation, he naturally realized why movies can't get rid of narrative and performance. He explored this aspect in the filming of Dance of Machines (1923). He juxtaposes natural moving objects in daily life, such as pendulums, girls swinging, women climbing stairs and moving wooden horses, with moving machine parts in movies, legs of window models, daily necessities in shops, posters and newspaper headlines, and forms a scene full of movie movement effects-machine dance.

Because Lecheres attaches great importance to the collocation of pure composition modeling and the counterpoint of rhythm fragments, all moving objects in the film move like the rhythm of a pendulum. Those natural objects have become moving images full of vitality and strong appeal, and the movement of characters has lost her sense of reality, but at the same time it has caused a special way of sensory movement. Lescher once talked about the purpose of making this film. He wants to "create the rhythm of common objects in time and space and show the beauty of their shapes." However, in fact, as siegfried kracauer pointed out, "the beauty of this shape he showed in the film belongs to the rhythm, not to the object covered by the rhythm itself. As for the experiment of film visual rhythm, Lecleres' Dance of the Machine is undoubtedly exploring a new field of film artistic expression. Dadaism's artistic ideas are regarded as the absurd product of the First World War. Dadaism artists take the anarchist bakunin's political slogan "Destroy is Create" as their own aesthetic creed, and the Renaissance painters as satirical objects, challenging the traditional art view. The most representative is Toussaint's Mona Lisa with a beard. This anti-art school is consistent with the surreal film aesthetics of1920s, and finds its own beauty in experimental films. Manley's Return to Reason (1923) is the first work of Dadaism.

The producer skillfully exposed nails, buttons, photos and tape on the film to create a messy outline on the screen. When the film was released, the enthusiasm of avant-garde film artists almost broke the ceiling, and people regarded this as a very successful party. Dadaists are looking for the beauty of the so-called "sudden encounter between machines and parasols on the operating table" The following year, rene claire's Intermittent became the most outstanding representative work of Dadaism.

Rene and Claire incorporated Chaplin's comic spirit and the sense of humor in Dance of Machines into their works, and created this "absurd masterpiece" of Intermittent Rest. Those are just like the dreams of Dadaism artists-paper boats floating in the air in Parisians' homes, cigarettes turning into pillars of Greek temples, game scenes of several Dadaism artists-Man Sati carrying a cannon, dancer Jean Berlin appearing on the roof of Xiang Shu's theater in funny costumes, funeral procession losing solemn feeling caused by high-speed photography and low-speed photography, and Lin Bu finally standing up from the coffin. , are full of rhythm. It is worth noting that, compared with Man Rey's Return to Reason, rene claire's intermission does not use abstract forms, but uses real-life materials. However, the key to the formation of their same style is that they have anti-rational artistic concepts. The real time and space of visual materials during the intermission was consciously cut out by Claire and appeared in an anti-logical form. At the same time, those out-of-order visual clips have no story structure, but the "transposition method" of Dadaism painting and the new discovery of film editing skills. Especially the famous shot: a ballerina in a skirt dances lightly from below, but when the shot comes up, it is unexpectedly found that Claire, a man with drooping beard and pince-nez, created "a strange visual effect of poetic burning when different elements touch each other on a plane." The purpose is to make the audience burst into laughter. In rene claire's pursuit of Dadaism aesthetics, realistic materials lost their reality and became surreal. The aesthetic pursuit of surrealism in Dadaism films finally led to the birth of surrealism films. Just as literature and painting developed from Dadaism to surrealism. Surrealist filmmakers, on the basis of the illogical and irrational aesthetics of Dadaism films, "try to put dreams, psychological satisfaction, unconscious or subconscious processes (mainly influenced by Freud and a few by Marxism) on the screen." Create an absolute reality film that exists in the artist's mind and transcends dreams and reality. Surrealism has become the final destination of many avant-garde film arts. Shells and Monks by Germain Dulac (an Andalusian dog created by Louis bunuel in 1927). Gaston Lavelle's pearl necklace shot at 1928 and Man Rey's Ocean Star both became the representative works of surrealism in this period.

In these films with dramatic factors but lacking dramatic action, love has become the main object of their description of the disconnection between dreams and reality. Among them, Drucker's Shell and the Monk is regarded as the first surrealist film. The film describes the story of an ascetic and impotent priest who fantasizes about competing for a girl with his rival dressed as a missionary, general and prison guard. However, when the film reveals the psychological state of the characters with a series of pictures, it highlights the pain and sadness of the priest more, but lacks the sense of humor that should have been in that era, so it did not arouse much interest. Since then, bunuel has been an Andalusian dog (El Salvador. Dali described a series of dreams of a homeless man with mental problems, thus entering the exploration of human subconscious state, trying to arouse the inner impulse of the audience, which really attracted people's attention and was regarded as a typical representative work of surrealism. In the film An Andalusian Dog, the dream and subconscious state of the characters are connected by a series of frightening horror events and shots: a man cuts a woman's eye with a razor, a street accident, a hermaphrodite staring at the severed hand, rotten donkey meat piled on the piano, attempted rape, a nest of ants in his palm and so on.

The whole film is full of violence, sexual desire and eccentric humor, which highlights the characteristics of surreal works that are not dominated by reason and logic. Compared with the impressionist psychological narrative and rene claire's Intermittent Rest, An Andalusian Dog has * * similarities, that is, the scenery and characters in the film are realistic, and they seem to be not interested in the way of painting on film with unrealistic geometric figures and lines. Naturally, they are also different: compared with the psychological narrative of Impressionism, the plot of the film has no narrative logic, and the behavior and motivation of the characters in the play have no psychological basis. Everything stems from a primitive irrational impulse. Compared with Claire's intermission, the film lost that carefree and relaxed feeling. Bunuel called An Andalusian Dog a desperate and fierce killing appeal, symbolizing the rebellious spirit of young intellectuals who were full of ambivalence towards social reality in the late 1920s. At the same time, the film has obviously shifted from the avant-garde film's exploration of pure rhythm to the exploration of content. And "this meaningful content obviously belongs to the field of fantasy. More precisely, it is to make fantasy more real and important than our feeling world unconsciously. Inner reality becomes the only reality that surrealists care about, just as kracauer pointed out: surrealists are convinced that inner reality is far higher than external reality. Therefore, their primary goal is to show the inner life flow and all its contents through instinctive activities, dreams and fantasies. Without resorting to stories or any other rational methods.

In the 1920s, various schools with surrealist tendencies were active in France, and they were enthusiastic and active in exploring film aesthetics. Although there are still some limitations in the thoughts of those young filmmakers, and even though some of their theories and propositions are too extreme, their understanding of "dynamic plastic arts", their exploration of film image structure and their contribution to film visual language are immeasurable. As far as surrealism is concerned, it really realizes the wish of surrealist writer bruton in the film: "(Time) is split, disrupted and destroyed. The present and the future no longer conflict with each other. It is as easy to live yesterday or tomorrow as it is to live today. You can even live yesterday and tomorrow at the same time. This undoubtedly became the creative basis of the resurgent modernist films in the late 1950s. At the same time, the experimental spirit of French avant-garde films constantly inspires film artists of different periods and nationalities to make more imaginative, novel, strange and in-depth aesthetic exploration of film art.