Page 99 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 99/146
George Antheil (composer) + Fernand Leger + Dudley Murphy (dirs): Ballet Mecanique 1924. Ballet Mecanique predates most of the other famous experimental films of this period (Florey: Love of Zero 1927; Vertov: Man With A Movie Camera - 1929), and Murphy and Leger - with the help of artist-photographer Man Ray - invent (or discover) many of the techniques and camera-angles later deployed by both Florey and Vertov. But it’s the fusion of Anthiel’s revolutionary music and the syn- copated imagery that impress and inspire. It’s always difficult - maybe impossible - to understand the sensibility of times past - to imagine what it was like to see this film in 1924. As viewers, we have become sophisticated, and satiated with rapid-cut commercials, TV and Film. But this must have been wildly radical at the time... “Murphy had a kind of radar for breaking cultural scenes—Green- wich Village, Jazz-Age Paris, Harlem at the height of the renaissance, early Hollywood. Man Ray, Ezra Pound, and architect Richard Neutra were just a few of his collaborators. He talked montage theory with Sergei Eisenstein and got drunk with James Joyce. The only surviving North American mural by Mexican master David Alfaro Siqueiros was painted on the walls of his back garden.” from Susan Delson: Dudley Murphy Hollywood Wild Card (2006).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballet_M%C3%A9canique
Although some of Bruguière’s own experiments predate both Florey’s Love of Zero (1927) and Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924). There is no doubt that these ideas (of Cubism, Expression- ism, Abstraction, etc) were in the air - part of the new avant-garde, components of the ‘spirit of the age’, so ascribing priorities seems largely irrelevant. Consider also that still photographers and cinematographers were both pushing the limits of what camera, film, post-production (darkroom, and film-processing and printing), mirrors, reflections, camera angles, etc - could do - exploring the creative possibilities of what their tools and their similar media could achieve - that it is unsurprising that interesting discoveries were made by un-related individual artists around the the same time.
So, the movies and fine art were influencing the the range of possibilities that the pictorialist photo- graphers - but especially Bruguière - began to explore.
Before we go on to survey the range of experimental photography from the 1920s and 1930s and beyond, I want to mention an early expansion of photography that was still being used in the 20th centiry by artist-photographers like Jacques Henri Lartigue. It’s a technology that links photography to an emerging use of technology as a form of home entertainment. I’m talking about stereoscopy. The writer and researcher Scott Bukatman in Matters of Gravity (2003) roots the Western developing taste for spectacle in the late 18th and early 19th centuries - in the Phantasmagoria, the Diorama and Panorama - and in the huge popular craze following the invention of the Kaleidoscope: "huge com- mercial potential of adult 'toys' like this not only kick-started a string of other optical toys - the thaumatrope, the Anorthoscope, Stereoscope, Anaglyphic 3d, the Flip-book, the Grimatiscope, the