Page 98 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 98/146
Bruguière’s experimental photo-storyboard/mood board for his film project The Way, is fascinating - he both creates scenes from the proposed films - using his wife and other collaborators - and then montages them with double, or multiple exposures - as if creating both a film ‘poster’ and/or implying the nature of the transitional special effects intended for the film.
Robert Florey: The Love of Zero (short film) 1927.
This is a delightful reminder of Florey’s early canon - a quasi expressionist/cubist/surrealist short film
that is essentially a fairy-tale love story, and that plays with all the avant-garde film techniques of the
time - multiple exposures, double exposures(above right), kaleidoscopic use of mirrors, expressionist
sets and lighting (above left), and much more. The Franco-American Florey, who was an assistant to
Louis Feuillade (Judex, and other highly successful crime film serials), is best known for his other
experimental short of this time: The Life and Death of 9413--a Hollywood Extra (1928) and his feature
Murders on the Rue Morgue (1932) - a film that has been compared favourably to Robert Weine’s Cab-
inet of Dr Caligari (1920). Florey went on to become possibly ‘the best director of B-Movies’, notable
for his Hollywood Boulevard (1936), King of Gamblers (1937), and Dangerous to Know (1938). I like
Florey’s experimentalist absorption in hand-crafted set-design expressionism a-la-Caligari, his cast-
ing of Tamara Shavrova as Beatrix and Joseph Marievsky as Zero, and of course, his romantic flair.
Florey had
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Florey
The 1920s was a decade almost as rich as the 1960s in cultural innovation. In the 1920s, the cross-fer- tilisation of all the arts - from fine-art through to graphic design, to the theatre, to cinematography, to music and oral poetry, to architecture, product-design, exhibition-design, to animation - all these ideas - and the super-abundance of the moving image in all its forms - was perhaps another source of inspiration to Bruguière - there are scenes in Robert Florey’s whimsical, touching, experimental ro- mance The Love of Zero of a couple of years previously where Florey rehearses a wide range of zeit- geist photographic techniques, from expressionist set design, to multiple exposure frames and split- exposures - that Bruguière may have been aware of.