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Bloomsbury and the Cinema: Practice and Theory of a New Form of Expression

Floriane Reviron

Résumé

Just as Bloomsbury introduced post-impressionism in Great Britain, the cinema was beginning to emerge as a new art, introducing new visual vocabularies and perceptions. Our aim is to analyse Bloomsbury’s ethics and aesthetics in relation with the new issues raised by the technology of the moving pictures and the cross-fertilization between the terminology created by Bloomsbury and avant-garde film criticism. Bloomsbury’s own practice of film criticism was informed by formalism and abstraction and attests to a confluence between pictorial post-impressionism and cinematic expressionism.

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  • 1 We have notably reduced ‘Bloomsbury’ to such members as Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell and Virgi (...)
  • 2 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, ed. Leo (...)
  • 3 See Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, A Biography (1940; London: The Hogarth Press, 1991) 239–40 and 172.

1The 1910s and 1920s were pivotal decades in modernist art: the creation of new technologies of vision, particularly cinema and photography shaped a whole new subjectivity and the cross-fertilization between the arts helped map a different world perception. Literature and drama nourished the cinema which in turn inspired a new type of literature, painters came to write about the cinema, film makers wrote essays and novels and we shall try to see to what extent Bloomsbury’s ethics and aesthetics were coterminous with these new modes of expression.1 Virginia Woolf’s apparently simple but somewhat cryptic statement ‘[i]n or about December, 1910, human character changed,’ has been diversely analysed as referring either to the death of Edward VII or to the first post-impressionist exhibition organised by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in October 1910. In the light of the essay in which it is to be found,2 it can be understood as meaning that the historical opportunity for change in human relationships and human character triggered the modern stylistic revolution but also that modern art had a social and epistemological cause. The advent of the cinema is precisely such a cause: not only is its history congruent with the history of modernism but it also brought about a new definition of human relationships and of their representation. Both modernist art and philosophy shared cinema’s ambitious project to refashion representations of subjectivity and time, and Bloomsbury’s aim was no different: Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were concerned mainly with beauty, emotion and their representation in non-mimetic ways. Considering that they were constantly searching for new ways to fuse emotion with motion, and that the cinema seems precisely to be defined by its (e)motive power, the mistrust of the cinema they expressed in their theoretical essays is somewhat puzzling. In fact, their avowed contempt for the commercial adaptations of drama or literature designed to entertain the crowds, was modified by their awareness of the potentialities of this new medium in terms of vision. Their knowledge about avant-garde abstract movies informed their criticism and their practice of their own art. The ‘raids [they made] across the boundaries’ of their own medium, their knowledge of expressionist and surrealist cinema, together with their own attempt at telling life and transforming reality into art by ‘fling[ing] representation to the winds’3 hinted at a common ground between visual artists and writers.

  • 4 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, 1915–19, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Ho (...)
  • 5 Virginia Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1929–31, e (...)
  • 6 See Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and (...)
  • 7 Clive Bell, ‘Art and the Cinema: A Prophecy that the Motion Pictures, in Exploiting Imitation Art, (...)
  • 8 ‘The Cinema’ was published by Arts in New York in June 1926, reprinted as ‘Cinema’ in the Nation an (...)
  • 9 Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘“Across the Screen of my Brain”: Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema” and Film F (...)
  • 10 For a detailed analysis of British film culture in the twenties, see Hankins, 148–79.
  • 11 For the development of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s see George Perry, The Great British Pictur (...)
  • 12 Not only was the general trade not interested in masterpieces emerging from other countries but the (...)

2Bloomsbury members, if they were not avid cinemagoers, at least enjoyed quite simply going to the pictures. As early as 1915, Virginia Woolf mentions in her diary going to the Picture Palace as a birthday treat4 and then contrasts her pleasure in going to the movies with Leonard’s attending his political meetings: ‘I went to my picture palace & L. to his Fabians; & he thought, on the whole, that his mind & spirit & body would have profited more by the pictures than by the Webbs’’ (Woolf 1977, 8). Apparently the Woolfs and the Bells made eclectic choices and a thorough reading of their diaries and letters reveals that they saw movies belonging to very different genres, whether they be the traditional screen adaptations of novels (Woolf mentions ‘being given stalls for a night of Wuthering Heights5), Tarzan films, Chaplin’s Modern Times or the more avant-garde movies imported from France, Germany or Russia.6 They were not just moviegoers though, they were passionately involved in the debates surrounding the invention of the cinema and its consequences on modernist aesthetics. They were conscious of its epistemological and ontological import and as the discourse of film theory began to be articulated at this time, they informed it and took part in the debate as two crucial contributions to film criticism attest. In 1922, Clive Bell published an article whose main argument is summed up in its subtitle and which establishes a parallel between the emergence of the ‘Victorian revolution in painting,’ i.e. ‘the absolute negation of art’ and the advent of the cinema as ‘foreboding another victory for the machine on the frontiers of art, for the standardized on the frontiers of the personal.’7 Virginia Woolf also voiced her opinion four years later in an essay whose editorial history in itself tells a lot about her expertise in film theory and criticism.8 It is along the same lines as Bell’s essay and disparages the movies as a mere craft although it forecasts a time when the movies might become an art. Bloomsbury, then, alternated between a fascination with film, as their diaries, memoirs and other writings attest, and the dismissal of movies, expressed in their theoretical essays. This discrepancy between their lively and enthusiastic discussions about the novelty of cinematic techniques and their theoretical disparagement of the movies is not just indicative of their own conviction that their arts (painting and writing) were superior to the others. It also reflects the lack of creative energy which characterized the British film culture in the 1920s and the divide between cinema as a popular entertainment—imported from Hollywood mainly—and as a higher form of art—imported from Russia, France and Germany. But, if as Leslie Kathleen Hankins argues ‘the prolific film theory and advanced energetic film culture of Paris had an impact on the sluggish British cultural scene,’9 this impact was somewhat attenuated by the English intelligentsia’s mistrust of the cinema as a product of mass diffusion.10 Although the medium itself, because it was based on mechanical reproduction, was modern, it was far from expressing the aspirations of modernist intellectuals, painters, writers and art critics of the time. In Great Britain the birth of the cinema had been somewhat more chaotic and slower than in France and in other European countries. The French cinema manifested from the start an acceptance of experimentation and expressionism, which did not necessarily run counter to the traditions of the intellectual establishment, and film provided a new medium for avant-garde invention, while British film culture lagged far behind.11 Hollywood’s economic power and technological advances combined with national censorship to produce not only economic and legislative barriers to creative film practice, but more importantly a general inhibiting anti-intellectualism. After the war which was the worst blow dealt since the cinema was born, ordinary commercial films imported from Hollywood dominated the production together with adaptations from Shakespeare or Victorian novels. The breach between the interest of the trade and that of the cultured audiences widened.12 Indeed British filmmakers and the intellectual elites such as the Bloomsbury group pursued radically different interests: whereas the former aimed at the widest audience possible, the latter addressed the happy few, a more rarefied brand of public.

  • 13 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, ed. Leonard W (...)

The cinema [. . .] is too low in the scale of human activities to reveal the insufficiency of anything but itself and its admirers. It appeals exclusively to the lowest factor of humanity [. . .] [It] is too hopelessly obvious and unreal to have any effect on the at all civilised. They must see that it is merely ridiculous. (Bell 1922, 39)
People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. [. . .] at first sight the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid.13

  • 14 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930) 39.
  • 15 Anatole France, ‘Dernières conversations avec Anatole France,’ Cinéa ciné pour tous 15 juin 1929. Y (...)
  • 16 Clive Bell, Civilization: an Essay (1928; London: Penguin Books, 1947) 67.

3Clive Bell’s virulent attack against the failure of the cinema to civilize the crowds together with Woolf’s comparison between the cinema and an entertainment for the savages were not the only voices of dissent to be heard at the time among the European intellectuals. In France, Georges Duhamel who considered the movies as ‘un divertissement d’ilotes, passe-temps d’illettrés’, shared this opinion.14 Anatole France also joined him in this aristocratic scorn: ‘[Le cinéma] matérialise le pire idéal populaire [. . .]. Il ne s’agit pas de la fin du monde mais de la fin d’une civilisation.15 Modernist writers and members of the Bloomsbury Group in general positioned themselves in opposition to the masses and popular readership or audience; their works, in their quest for aesthetic autonomy tried to resist commodification, which is the reason why they deplored the degraded status of mass-produced objects such as the movies. It is not really a surprise then that at first, Bell should have thought that the cinema was ‘all insipid, standardized matter for the million’ and that ‘it could have no effect whatever beyond lowering—if that were possible—the taste and intelligence of the proletariat’ (Bell 1922, 39). Bloomsbury is after all rather famous for its mistrust of what it often called the ‘herd.’ In Civilization, an essay he dedicated to Virginia Woolf, Bell argued: ‘there is no ground for supposing that such a thing as a collective mind exists.’ ‘Absolute good,’ he went on, ‘is to be found in the individual.’ And individualism itself resulted in cosmopolitanism ‘a movement of liberation from the herd instinct.’16 His use of the metaphor of the herd to describe one of the scenes of the standard movie melodrama is therefore in keeping with Bloomsbury’s ethics:

[. . .] though vast crowds were continually dashing across the stage, no attempt was ever made to give a little character to the business by an incident, by making someone lose his hat or his head, by allowing some ‘super’ to particularize himself as much as half a dozen sheep in any flock may be trusted to do whenever the shepherd is in a hurry. (Bell 1922, 39)

  • 17 See also Roger Fry, quoted by Virginia Woolf: ‘I’m gradually getting hold of a new idea about the r (...)
  • 18 See Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, (London (...)
  • 19 In her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf explains that he was moved by his eagerness to educate people (...)
  • 20 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), trans. Harry Z (...)

4Bloomsbury largely subscribed to the notion that civilization is more of an individual than a collective phenomenon17 and Virginia Woolf herself tended to hierarchize different forms of cultural production depending on their degree of popularity, accessibility, or commercialism. Although she never participated in a full-scale repudiation of mass-culture she ranked popular art as the lowest, hence her search for ‘some queer individuality.’18 Yet, unlike Bell but rather like Fry, she was aware that if civilization was to begin again, the herd had to be fought against, ‘the herd with its immense suggestibility more than ever at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians.’19 Bloomsbury thought the cinema was worthless precisely because it consisted of what Walter Benjamin praised, namely reduced reproductions accessible to everyone.20 Bloomsbury was aware that the mass-production and the mechanical reproduction of images threatened the ‘uncompromising artists.’

Should the cinema take to dealing with themes a cut above those of the penny-dreadful and the popular melodrama, should these themes be developed in photographs a cut above the sensational academy-pictures, we may come in possession of a new semi-mechanical art, but personal art will be driven closer and closer to that stronghold which is inaccessible to the profane. Concerning itself exclusively with purely aesthetic problems, appreciated only by those rare people who are capable of reacting to abstract form, art might become [. . .] the preoccupation of a tiny international elite. (Bell 1922, 40)

  • 21 Bell also used a comparison with literature to debunk the cinema’s inability to express ‘the possib (...)
  • 22 Iris Barry, Let’s Go to the Movies (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1926) 53.
  • 23 Naturally, the cross-fertilization between the movies and literature had an impact on Woolf’s own f (...)
  • 24 See ‘Phases of Fiction’ (Woolf, 1966, 101).
  • 25 Virginia Woolf, ‘Roger Fry’, The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, vol. 4 (Lon (...)
  • 26 In France for example, Colette wrote film reviews and film scripts from 1914 onwards, she also subt (...)
  • 27 What Roger Fry called ‘the visual language of the imagination’ was ‘the discovery of what arrangeme (...)
  • 28 The reactions triggered by the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions among the general public and the (...)
  • 29 Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914) 8.

5Although they disclaimed the movies first and foremost as a popular art, Fry, Woolf and Bell’s main criticism towards the cinema was that it was based on a mimetic representation of reality. At some point, both Bell and Woolf denounced the movies’ inability to create a world of their own: according to Woolf, cinema was ‘a parasite,’ ‘falling upon its prey [the novel and the other arts at its disposal] with immense rapacity.’ Confronting the cinema with their own medium (painting for Bell, writing for Woolf) led them to the same conclusions. Bell used the contrast between the mid-Victorian painters (Sir Luke Fildes, Landseer, Stanhope Forbes and Alma Tadema with their insistence on likeness and ‘unflinching verisimilitude’), and the modernist painters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Derain (characterized by ‘deformations and distortions’) to set photographic representation against cinematic expression. He forecast the advent of a cinema which could reveal the inadequacy of the ‘semi-aesthetic, demi-mondaine school of art’ (Lavery, Blanche, Boldini, Mc Evoy, Orpen, Nicholson and Munnings) just like the cabinet photograph revealed the inadequacy of the Victorian academicians. Likewise, Woolf’s insistence that the cinema should become independent instead of merely adapting literary masterpieces is reminiscent of the arguments she developed in essays like ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ or ‘Modern Fiction.’ Like the Edwardian or materialist writers, picture-makers ‘laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things’ (Woolf, 1966, 332) and she deplored the fact that they were dissatisfied with such obvious ‘sources of interest as the passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality,’ focusing instead on a character’s teeth, pearls and velvet (Woolf 1926, 269).21 Both essays are therefore characteristic of the need for modern artists ‘to reassess boundaries per se, to challenge and undermine the restrictions and limitations of their arts’ by making forays into other arts (Hankins, 159). Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Virginia Woolf, like most artists linked with Bloomsbury shared this need to cross boundaries, and the movies, because they were not governed by any laws or canons,—’you can mix up any ingredients,’ said Iris Barry—22 represented a formidable opportunity to do so.23 At the same time, they came to view the dream of fusing or confusing the arts, with some suspicion. Woolf claimed to be striving to balance the arts so that their differences would be preserved and would enhance each other.24 Similarly, Fry ‘disliked the mingling and mixing of different things. He wanted art to be art; literature to be literature; and life to be life.’25 This might explain why Bloomsbury members were relatively shy when it came to crossing the boundaries of film criticism. Unlike other British intellectuals and unlike their French and German counterparts, they essentially explored the media they were most familiar with.26 Their involvement in film criticism is therefore steeped in their own appreciation of post-impressionist and formalist aesthetic. But although it remains subterranean it can be also considered as an echo chamber of film theory in the 1920s and attests to the theoretical and creative energy which characterized the emergence of high cinematic art. As Maggie Humm points out ‘twentieth century modernism’ [was] obsessed with issues of visuality’ and the birth of the cinema corresponded with a period during which ‘new vocabularies of vision were transforming literary and cultural texts.’ The cinema truly began to evolve from an animated photography to a real moving picture in the 1910s and so there is a peculiar congruence between the introduction of post-impressionism in England (with its insistence on colour and form) and the appearance on the screen of more artistic movies. The great technological invention of editing—again contemporary with the second post-impressionist exhibition—meant that the cinema had stopped being a mere show and intended to tell a story, therefore encroaching upon the imaginative field of literature: the cinema stopped being an attraction to become an art. The simultaneity of the pictorial revolution introduced in England by Roger Fry and of the advent of a new discourse on cinema as an art was not a coincidence: if the discovery of Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Picasso, Rouault, Seurat and Van Gogh, implied the overthrow of the impressionistic criterion of conformity to appearances, the discovery of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Richter, Clair, Dulac, Léger, Murphy, Lubitsch, Duchamp, Wiene and other avant-garde film-makers implied the creation of a new visual vocabulary akin to James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf’s creation of shifting viewpoints and stream of consciousness. Modernist writers, painters and avant-garde film makers were indeed preoccupied with the same problems of representation: they were in search of new vehicles for expressing the reality of life—its movement, speed, simultaneity, subjectivity—without resorting to mimesis and by concentrating on the play of abstract form. Bloomsbury’s artistic investigation into the problem of representation synchronised with cinema’s new range of effects, and their attempt at finding ‘the visual language of the imagination’27 corresponded with the film-makers’ desire to find a language of their own. In fact both the new visual codes established by the post-impressionists and those defended by the avant-garde film-makers were equally revolutionary.28 As Bell defined ‘significant form’ as ‘the one quality common to all works of visual art’29 it necessarily informed his own conception of film criticism and that of his contemporaries: the fundamental tenets of Bloomsbury’s aesthetic theory are therefore at the core of Bell’s and Woolf’s essays on the cinema.

  • 30 See for instance Jean Cocteau who, in 1919, expressed the wish that the cinema should express life (...)

6In a visual work of art, Bell argued, ‘lines and colours combine in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form”’ (Bell 1914, 8). This was an echo of Fry’s famous introduction to the French Section of the catalogue of the second post-impressionist exhibition, which might also be said to reflect the preoccupations of film-makers in the 1910s and 1920s:30

These artists only [. . .] attempt to express by pictorial and plastic form certain spiritual experiences, [. . .] they do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact they aim not at illusion but at reality. (Woolf 1940, 17778)

  • 31 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The New Language of Cinematography,’ Close Up, 4.5 (1929) 11.

7‘Making images with a logical structure and a closely-knit unity of texture’ is very much akin to the cineastes’ exploitation of ‘montage.’ Just like Fry and Bell thought painting deserved a new terminology, Eisenstein declared in 1929 that cinema must have ‘its own language, its own speech, its own vocabulary, its own imagery’:31 editing was part of this new visual language. The way Jacques Rancière accounts for Eisenstein’s definition of cinema as an art brings us back to the idea of ‘significant form’:

  • 32 Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001) 32.

À ceux qui n’avaient à opposer aux prestiges de la mimesis que la construction des formes nouvelles de la vie, Eisenstein opposait donc une troisième voie, un art esthétique; un art où l’idée ne se traduit plus dans la construction d’une intrigue, suscitant identification, peur ou pitié, mais s’imprime directement dans une forme sensible propre [emphasis mine].32

  • 33 André Bazin pointed at this paradox in his essay entitled ‘Montage Interdit’: ‘Le montage dont on n (...)
  • 34 ‘L’art ‘idéogrammatique’ du Kabuki est l’art du montage et de la contradiction qui oppose à l’intég (...)
  • 35 Maggie Humm comments on Eisenstein’s use of hieroglyphs and reminds us that Woolf herself depicted (...)

8Paradoxically, although editing was said to be the defining characteristic of cinema as an art, its fragmenting and nevertheless unifying effect was inseparable from processes common to other arts, like Japanese ideograms or Chinese rolls.33 Eisenstein’s use of Japanese ideograms to define the language of cinematography34 (or his use of hieroglyphs)35 is again strangely akin to Fry’s resorting to the image of Chinese rolls to define pictorial unity:

  • 36 Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics,’ Vision and Design (1920; London: Penguin Books, 1961) 35.

In certain Chinese paintings, the length is so great that we cannot take in the whole picture at once, nor are we intended to do so. Sometimes a landscape is painted upon a roll of silk so long that we can only look at it in successive fragments. As we unroll it at one end and roll it up at the other we traverse wide stretches of country, tracing, perhaps all the vicissitudes of a river from its source to the sea, and yet, when this is well done, we have received a very keen impression of pictorial unity.36

  • 37 Quoted by Regina Marler, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Group (New York: Henry Holt a (...)
  • 38 Simon Watney, English Post-Impressionism (London: Studio Vista, 1980) 98. Duncan Grant’s painting i (...)

9Bloomsbury’s exploration of cinematic devices such as montage was not restricted to criticism as a letter from Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry seems to attest. She wrote that Duncan Grant had ‘started on a long painting which is meant to be rolled up after the manner of those Chinese paintings and seen by degrees.’37 As Simon Watney explains, the fifteen-foot painting, entitled Abstract Kinetic Scroll, was less a painting that moves than an analysis of movement itself, resembling the early abstract films of Hans Richter.38

  • 39 Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Abstract Movie,’ The New Republic [New York] 48. 615 (15 September 1926) 95.

10Another aspect of Bell’s and Fry’s aesthetic theory which is to be found in avant-garde film criticism is the idea that the viewer of a painting (or a movie for that matter) needs to feel the aesthetic intention behind it, an idea Fry expressed in 1909 in ‘An Essay in Aesthetic’ and which he was to expatiate upon ten years later in ‘The Artist’s Vision.’ If order and variety are necessary conditions to stimulate our emotions, without this recognition of purpose we remain unmoved. This is precisely what Bell expressed in his essay on ‘Art and the Cinema,’ when he praised the Caligari film at least for its ‘rudimentary, aesthetic intention’: ‘Caligari, so far as I know, is the first attempt to create an art of the cinema. [. . .] It is not the mere record of crude events; it has an aesthetic intention and certain artistic qualities’ (Bell 1922, 40). Likewise, Gilbert Seldes, in an article he devoted to Woolf’s analysis—although he wrongly claimed she had written her essay ‘without knowledge of the abstract films which have been made in Paris in the last two or three years’—convincingly argued that precisely what the abstract movie had added was ‘deliberate intention.’ Commenting on Léger and Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique he added: ‘The repetitions, the changes of pace, the variations in the form projected [. . .] were intended to create cumulative emotion, coming to a climax.’39 Woolf was to express herself on the subject in a somewhat more negative way. She deplored the fact that although the cinema had been ‘born fully-clothed’ (and she evoked ‘its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency’) it lacked an aesthetic purpose: ‘it can say everything before it has anything to say’ (Woolf 1926, 272). Her discussion of the potentialities of film and of its lack of artistic purpose is highly reminiscent of the ‘creative vision’ defined by Fry in ‘The Artist’s Vision’ as a sine qua non condition of a work of art:

Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist this detached and impassioned vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (aesthetically) chaotic and accidental conjunction of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm which has been set up within him. (Fry 1920, 48)

  • 40 See Jeanne-Marie Clerc for further comments on this idea frequently expressed until the 1930s that (...)

11Woolf considered that no one could tell in 1926, how such harmony could be brought about in the cinematic field: ‘We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement, suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed’ (Woolf 1926, 272). Her choice of the verb ‘transfix’ is in itself rather telling. Not only does it imply that the cinema could have the power to give permanence to certain scenes or events but also that it could have the power to transform them through and through. Incidentally, Transformations is the title Roger Fry chose for the second collection of his essays, published in 1926. It is therefore legitimate to think that Woolf was indirectly commenting on Fry’s own justification: ‘By the word ‘Transformations’ I wish to suggest all those various transmutations which forms undergo in becoming parts of esthetic [sic.] constructions’ (Woolf 1940, 258). What Woolf hinted at was the power of the movies to transpose appearances, a process avant-garde film makers were familiar with.40

  • 41 ‘We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life from the cinematograph. T (...)

12Fry’s conception of art and of painting in particular, because it relied on creative vision, meant that he had to educate the common seer. The challenge for him was to make people look at things and not merely see them, what he famously called the ‘biological blasphemy of art’ (Fry 1920, 45). They had to understand that ‘the graphic arts were to be the expression of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life’ [emphasis mine] (Fry 1920, 25–6). Interestingly enough, he chose the cinematograph as the emblem of this imaginative life: it was a rare means to see things more clearly than in actual life.41 Unlike what happens in actual life, when ‘we learn to see only so much as is needful for our purposes’ and lack clearness of perception, watching a mirror in which a street scene is reflected, or watching a movie, make it easier to abstract ourselves completely and to ‘become true spectators, not selecting what we will see, but seeing everything equally’ (Fry 1920, 25–9). His description of the cinematograph as an expression and a stimulus of the imaginative life, separated from actual life by the absence of responsive action, amounted to ascribing an artistic value to the cinema. Fry expressed what most avant-garde film theoreticians would express, namely that the cinema created a whole new world of perceptions, a theme which Bell and Woolf were also to explore in their own essays. Bell’s first impulsion was indeed to demonstrate that ‘the inability, or unwillingness rather, of the cinema to say anything of interest to the eye was more striking even than its contempt of brain,’ but he went on admitting that ‘it was on the visual side that the possibilities of development seemed boundless.’ (1922, 40). In a similar way, Woolf evolved from a ‘simple even stupid’ vision of cinema as appealing only to the ‘ordinary eye,’ the English unæsthetic eye’ to a more complete understanding of the new type of vision induced by the cinema:

[We] see at once that [the king, the boat, the horse] have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life. They have become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. (Woolf 1926, 269)

  • 42 In France, Antonin Artaud voiced the same idea: ‘Par le fait qu’il isole les objets, [le cinéma] le (...)

13What Bloomsbury acknowledged then, was that the cinema gave a new vision of the world and was capable of (e)motive power, endowing objects, things and people with a life of their own.42 ‘When an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen [. . .] we really look at it,’ said Fry; so life projected on the screen was bound to trigger the artistic attitude of ‘pure vision abstracted from necessity’ he recommended (Fry 1920, 29). He went on to say that the emotions felt by the spectator of a film were pure, unfettered by the impediments of real life:

Whatever emotions are aroused by [the cinematographic visions], though they are likely to be weaker than those of ordinary life, are presented more clearly to the consciousness. If the scene presented be one of an accident, our pity and horror, though weak, since we know that no one is really hurt, are felt quite purely, since they cannot, as they would in life, pass at once into actions of assistance. (Fry 1920, 25)

  • 43 The very first occurrence of the phrase ‘significant form’ in Bell’s contribution to the Catalogue (...)

14Although expressed seventeen years later, Woolf’s reaction to the emotive power of the movies is strikingly similar: ‘The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement’ (Woolf 1926, 269). It is precisely because the cinema offers a different point of vantage, a certain distance that it teaches us to look at the world differently and arouses our emotions. Woolf perceived that its imaginative power might be boundless and that its ability to magnify objects and people meant that ‘the film-maker has enormous riches at his command’ (Woolf 1926, 271). Just like the post-impressionists had taught people to see that all objects were equally significant,43 the cinema could operate a synthesis, an organic fusion of matter and spirit. And so Blaise Cendrars could exclaim:

  • 44 Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du Cinéma (Paris, Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926).

Nouvelle civilisation, nouvelle humanité [. . .]. Cent mondes, mille mouvements, un million de drames entrent simultanément dans le champ de cet œil dont le cinéma a doté l’homme. [. . .] Le cerveau en est bouleversé. [. . .] Pourquoi la matière est-elle imprégnée d’humanité? A un tel point! Quel potentiel! . . . Extase! Les animaux, les plantes, les minéraux sont des idées, des sentiments, des chiffres . . . [. . .] Et ceci n’est pas d’un symbolisme abstrait mais fait partie d’un organisme vivant que nous surprenons, que nous délogeons, que nous traquons et qui n’a jamais été vu.44

15Hence Woolf’s intimation that a ‘tadpole’ could say as much as ‘rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists’ (Woolf 1926, 270), and that the cinema could really start saying something to the brain only if it found a means to address the eye. About a performance of Dr Caligari she noticed that a ‘shadow shaped like a tadpole [. . .] seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement “I am afraid.”’ And she went on:

If a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. (1926, 270)

  • 45 See Woolf’s comment on the popular movies as it is expressed in ‘Life and the Novelist,’ an essay w (...)
  • 46 See ‘Quelques peintres français modernes,’ Le Français: Journal de la Société des Professeurs de Fr (...)
  • 47 As such, her definition of the movies was to be echoed by Walter Benjamin who was to consider that (...)

16In their desire to elevate art, Fry, Woolf and Bell insisted on the necessary shock creating capacity of the movies. The creative vision demanded the most complete detachment from any of the meanings and implications of appearances but not just on the artist’s part (Fry 1920, 48). It also required a state of alertness on the part of the spectator. Both Woolf and Fry rejected the easy readability of popular movies.45 Just like Fry distinguished between the impressionists’ passive eye and Cézanne’s shaping eye,46 Woolf distinguished between the popular movies’ regressive effect on the spectator and the progressive effect provoked by abstract movies. She evoked a new type of movies which would not simply appeal to the unæsthetic eye but would create a shock by waking the eye.47

  • 48 Let us note in passing that the analogy between abstract movies and dreams is a almost a cliché in (...)

We should see emotions mingling together and affecting each other.
We should see violent changes of emotion produced by their collision. The most fantastic contrasts could be flashed before us with a speed which the writer can only toil after in vain; the dream architecture of arches and battlements, of cascades falling and fountains rising, which sometimes visits us in sleep or shapes itself in half-darkened rooms, could be realized before our waking eyes. (Woolf 1926, 272)48

  • 49 André Gaudreault, Du Littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999) 33.
  • 50 Interestingly, in the same essay she explained the change between Edwardian and Georgian writers in (...)
  • 51 As Makiko Minow-Pinkney points out, ‘The logic of the machine, being different from human logic, di (...)
  • 52 Léon Moussinac L’Âge ingrat du cinéma (1946; Paris: Editeurs français réunis, 1967) 143.
  • 53 My translation of the adjective ‘pluriponctuel’ used by Eisenstein and quoted by Iouri Lotman, Esth (...)
  • 54 Virginia Woolf probably knew quite a lot on the subject as the Hogarth Press’s publication of Eric (...)

17It is not surprising that Woolf should have chosen The Cabinet of Dr Caligari as a model of a work that could jar people out of their ritualistic involvement in pageant and popular films. Because it was highly disturbing, monstrous (no doubt Woolf used the word in its etymological sense), it possessed the shock-capacity she valued. This shock-creating capacity as it was defined by Woolf can be said to be the equivalent of Eisenstein’s ‘attraction’ aptly defined by André Gaudreault as ‘un phénomène spectaculaire de premier plan qui permettrait d’interpeller directement le spectateur sur son siège, et, en un sens, “d’aller l’y chercher” afin de le provoquer, de l’amener à réagir.’49 In order to create this shock, the movies should come to express a complex welter of emotions shifting very rapidly because in one day ‘thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder’ (Woolf 1966, 336).50 Speed and movement, which Woolf saw as intrinsic qualities of the ‘picture-making power’ of the cinema, explain why the movies were seen as the privileged means to express modern life.51 La vie moderne,’ said Léon Moussinac, ‘avec son champ nouveau de valeurs changeantes, ne peut être transposée dignement que par un instrument maître de la simultanéité et de ses mystères.52 Because they were beginning to visualize the need for flexible, shifting structures in order to express the qualities of modern life, the post-impressionists were trying for a new quality of immediacy. This was also the project of avant-garde film-makers who ‘used the cinema screen as a direct substitute for the painter’s canvas in order to organise kinetic plastic forms better.’ Richter, Eggeling and Léger were among the artists who were ‘radically transforming film-spectator relationships with technological effects such as kinetic speed and simultaneity’ (Humm, 135). Visual artists, whether they be painters or film makers, shared the same ambition of showing the shifting uncertainties within the human psyche. Because the movie stopped being a punctum temporis to become ‘pluripunctual’53 it was particularly appropriate to render the perceptual confusion of moving colours and forms and the fragmentation or dissolution of the self induced by modern life: editing introduced spatial and temporal dislocation; film space subverted chronology. So, rhythm and distortion, two notions Fry associated in his definition of art as ‘Significant Deformity’ (Woolf 1940, 195) were to become the hallmark of film culture in the 1920s.54 Because it suggested a particular kind of spatial complexity, deformity meant that visual artists could construct forms which were equivalent images for—rather than scientific representations of the things. Hence a play on perspective, proportions and other spatial elements of design. Gilbert Seldes comments on Ballet Mécanique, Of What Are Young Films Dreaming and Entr’acte is a case in point:

These films are made for pure visual enjoyment. In general the spectator has seen objects in motion; the objects may be easily identified—a straw hat, a boat on the Seine, a row of bottles, a shoot-the-chutes; or they may be distorted, seen through a prismatic glass, through smoke, at unusual angles, upside down. The movement may be accelerated or retarded, shown backward, repeated, tricked in a hundred ways. (95)

  • 55 The impact of Fry’s formalist aesthetics on To the Lighthouse, ‘Blue & Green’, ‘Kew Gardens’, or ‘T (...)
  • 56 Roger Fry’s definition of the ‘emotional elements of desire’ can be found in Vision and Design (Fry (...)

18The convergence between Bloomsbury’s aesthetics and their practice of film criticism seems only too natural if one bears in mind the fact that the 1920s were a period when their commitment to formalism was at its apex. Woolf’s exploration of the ‘emotional elements of design’ in her fiction and essays,55 obviously led her to ponder their impact on film theory. Her understanding of rhythm, mass, space, light, shade, and colour provided her with valuable tools and strategies to challenge cinema as an art in an imaginative interrogative manner.56 The visual potentialities of abstract movies could not escape her sharpened senses and critical dexterity. In fact what Bell’s and Woolf’s film criticism manifests is their growing attraction towards expressionism and abstraction.

  • 57 Bell noted that ‘among the visual novelties of the film was the attempt to create a background whic (...)

19Because it gave life to shapes, because it was the outcome of an æsthetic purpose and mostly because it created a visual language, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was equally praised by Bell and Woolf. Robert Wiene’s movie was perhaps the first most important attempt to integrate to the movie all the other forms of artistic expression. The movie set depicted exaggerated dimensions and deformed spatial relationships. To heighten this architectural stylization, bizarre patterns of light and shadows were painted directly onto the scenery and even onto the character’s make-up.57 Clive Bell who complained that although the cinematograph was a ‘pliable’ instrument (therefore able to record the flexibility and constant flux of life) it failed to give ‘accent and intensity’ by a manipulation of space and proportion couldn’t but admire this masterpiece of German expressionism:

Accent and emphasis are imposed on important figures at critical moments by giving them a value which is dramatically correct though quite out of natural proportion. The producers, in a word, have got their effects by employing those means which are the familiar instruments of art.
(Bell 1922, 40)

  • 58 ‘The Russian Point of View’ (Woolf 1966, 242).
  • 59 Woolf’s short stories such as ‘Solid Objects’, ‘Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’’ o (...)
  • 60 ‘In a picture, [. . .] unity is due to the balancing of the attractions of the eye about the centra (...)
  • 61 Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane was published in 1925 and the translation of On the Spiritual i (...)
  • 62 Roger Fry, quoted by Virginia Woolf (Woolf 1940, 177).

20Similarly, Woolf’s admiration for the movie probably stemmed from her consciousness that life being ‘formless, confused, diffuse, tumultuous, incapable it seems of submitting to the control of logic’58 couldn’t be expressed otherwise than by suggesting formlessness within form.59 Caligari, because it created a highly subjective mood thanks to distorsion, juggling with proportions and space, answered Woolf’s wish that ‘one day some new symbol for expressing thought’ be found, (Woolf 1926, 271). It actually brought her to say that ‘thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words’ or that anger might be ‘a black line wriggling upon a white sheet.’ If one bears in mind Fry’s insistence on the emotional value of the line, one sees that post-impressionist aesthetics and expressionism had much to tell each other.60 Shapes and lines had a similar value in Vanessa Bell’s paintings: they were the direct expression of the link between interiority and exteriority. Her portraits of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant are good examples of her abandoning literal forms of representation in favour of picturing internal as well as external processes: the light source partially bleaches facial details in favour of a more abstract figuration in profile. Her illustrations of Virginia Woolf’s short stories—in which spiralling lines and contours are meant to evoke a character’s subjectivity—can also be said to manifest the fusion between the arts advocated by expressionist artists.61 The fascination exerted by the post-impressionist painters on Bell, Woolf and Fry is very much akin to their admiration for abstract or expressionist movie-makers: both stemmed from these artists’ ability to subordinate ‘the production of illusion to the direct expression of feeling’ [emphasis mine].62 Just as the geometrical pattern of some of Cézanne’s still lives or their monumental solidity endowed the objects represented with duration, the abstract movies had the power to open our minds wide to beauty: ‘This beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not’ (Woolf 1926, 269).

21It is therefore tempting to see Woolf’s definition of the cinema as ‘something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the slightest help from words for music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently’ as an apt definition of the project common to modernist visual artists to ‘find some secret language, which we feel and see, but never speak’ (Woolf 1926, 271). The raids Bloomsbury made across the boundaries of other arts were of course not limited to film criticism but their knowledge of high cinematic art manifestly informed their conception of their own medium of expression and of the world at large. Their understanding of the visual potentialities of film as cognitive source of psychic transformations and as a means to express entirely unrealistic but emotionally correct forms of subjectivity attests, if necessary, to their pioneering role among British intellectuals.

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Bibliographie

Anon. ‘Quelques peintres français modernes’. Le Français: Journal de la Société des Professeurs de Français en Angleterre 218 (January 1919): 108–14.

Artaud, Antonin. ‘Sorcellerie et Cinéma’. Œuvres complètes 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. 82–85.

Barry, Iris. Let’s Go to the Movies. New York: Payson and Clarke, 1926.

Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1975.

Bell, Clive. ‘Art and the Cinema: A Prophecy that the Motion Pictures, in Exploiting Imitation Art, will Leave Real Art to the Artists’. Vanity Fair November 1922: 39–40.

Bell, Clive. ‘The English Group’. Catalogue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition. London: Ballantyne, 1912. 22.

Bell, Clive. Art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1914.

Bell, Clive. Civilization: An Essay. 1928. London: Penguin Books, 1947.

Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. 1936. Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.

Cendrars, Blaise. L’ABC du Cinéma. Paris, Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926.

Clerc, Jeanne-Marie. Littérature et cinéma. Paris: Nathan, 1993.

Cocteau, Jean. ‘Carte Blanche’. Paris-Midi 21 April 1919. Lausanne: Mermod, 1953.

Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979.

Duhamel, Georges. Scènes de la vie future. Paris: Mercure de France, 1930.

Eisenstein, Sergei. ‘The New Language of Cinematography’. Close Up 4.5 (1929): 11.

Fry, Roger. ‘Post-Impressionism’. The Fortnightly Review 95 (May 1911). Post-Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception. Ed. J. B. Bullen. London: Routledge, 1988. 168.

Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. 1920. London: Penguin Books, 1961.

Gaudreault, André. Du Littéraire au filmique: Système du récit. Paris: Armand Colin, 1999.

Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. ‘“Across the Screen of my Brain”: Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema” and Film Forums of the Twenties’. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F. Gillespie. Columbia OH: U of Missouri P, 1993.

Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002.

L’Herbier, Marcel. Intelligence du Cinématographe. Paris: Corrêa, 1946.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film. Vols. 2 & 3. London: Allen and Unwin, 1949–1950.

Marler, Regina. Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Group. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. ‘Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars’. Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie. New York & London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 177

Moussinac, Léon. L’Âge ingrat du cinéma. 1946. Paris: Editeurs français réunis, 1967.

Perry, George. The Great British Picture Show. London: Pavilion Books, 1985.

Rancière, Jacques. La Fable cinématographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001.

Reid Broughton, Panthea. ‘The Blasphemy of Art: Fry’s Aesthetics and Woolf’s “Non-Literary” Stories’. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Gillespie. Columbia OH: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 37–57.

Reviron, Floriane. ‘Virginia Woolf et l’esthétique cinématographique’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines 26 (June 2004) : 139‒52. 

Roe, Sue. ‘The Impact of Post-Impressionism’. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. 164–190.

Seldes, Gilbert. ‘The Abstract Movie’. The New Republic (New York) 48.615 (15 September 1926): 95.

Tiessen, Paul. ‘The Shadow in Caligari: Virginia Woolf and the “Materialists”’ Responses to Film’. Film Criticism 11 (Fall, Winter 1986–87): 75–83.

Watney, Simon. English Post-Impressionism. London: Studio Vista, 1980.

Woolf, Virginia. ‘A Sketch of the Past’. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Sussex: The University Press, 1976. 72.

Woolf, Virginia. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. I. Ed. Leonard Woof. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.

Woolf, Virginia. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966.

Woolf, Virginia. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. vol. 4. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press, 1967.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915‒19. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II, 1920‒24. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978.

Woolf, Virginia. A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4, 1929–31. Ed. N. Nicholson and J. Trautmann Banks. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978.

Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry, A Biography. 1940. London: The Hogarth Press, 1991.

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Notes

1 We have notably reduced ‘Bloomsbury’ to such members as Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf because they may be seen as artists or art critics particularly devoted to visual arts and also because other Bloomsbury members did not really take part in the debate surrounding the advent of the cinema.

2 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. I, ed. Leonard Woof (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966) 320.

3 See Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, A Biography (1940; London: The Hogarth Press, 1991) 239–40 and 172.

4 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, 1915–19, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977) 28.

5 Virginia Woolf, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1929–31, eds. N. Nicholson and J. Trautmann Banks, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978) 332.

6 See Maggie Humm, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) 75–76.

7 Clive Bell, ‘Art and the Cinema: A Prophecy that the Motion Pictures, in Exploiting Imitation Art, will Leave Real Art to the Artists,’ Vanity Fair, November 1922: 39–40.

8 ‘The Cinema’ was published by Arts in New York in June 1926, reprinted as ‘Cinema’ in the Nation and Athenaeum on 3 July 1926, and, without Woolf’s permission, as ‘The Movies and Reality’ in the New Republic (New York) on 4 August 1926. For the main differences between the manuscript version and the three published versions, see Humm, 187–88.

9 Leslie Kathleen Hankins, ‘“Across the Screen of my Brain”: Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema” and Film Forums of the Twenties,’ The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia OH: University of Missouri Press, 1993) 156.

10 For a detailed analysis of British film culture in the twenties, see Hankins, 148–79.

11 For the development of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s see George Perry, The Great British Picture Show (London: Pavilion Books, 1985) 1–68, and Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, vols. 2 & 3 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949–1950).

12 Not only was the general trade not interested in masterpieces emerging from other countries but the British Board of Film Censors adopted an extreme and authoritarian attitude to them. For instance, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari made in Germany in 1919 by Robert Wiene was banned because of its frightening content, but more sinisterly the masterpieces of Eisenstein and Pudovkin from the new Communist state of Soviet Russia, including The Battleship Potemkin, Mother and October, were rejected as subversive propaganda. These films would not have been seen at all without the London Film Society—founded in 1925 at the instigation of Ivor Montagu and Iris Barry. Because it was as an alternative to American hegemony and an attempt to promote cinema as an art in its own right, it attracted a large membership from the intelligentsia of the day. Roger Fry and Maynard Keynes were among the founding fathers, Clive Bell was a member; its programmes—an innovative mixture of avant-garde and popular film—were announced and reviewed in The Nation and Athenaeum while Leonard Woolf was the literary editor.

13 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) 268.

14 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930) 39.

15 Anatole France, ‘Dernières conversations avec Anatole France,’ Cinéa ciné pour tous 15 juin 1929. Yet in France, Louis Moussinac’s famous assertion (‘Le cinéma sera populaire ou il ne sera pas’) was rather representative of the intellectuals’ faith in the cinema as an object of mass-civilization. Marcel L’Herbier, was an ardent promoter of the cinema—and so was Louis Delluc—because of its appeal to a popular audience: ‘J’avais la croyance absolue que le cinéma ne pouvait être un art neuf que si c’était un art populaire, de très large audience, un art tourné vers l’extérieur où le monde pouvait trouver distraction, spectacle et loisir.’ Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du Cinématographe (Paris: Corrêa, 1946).

16 Clive Bell, Civilization: an Essay (1928; London: Penguin Books, 1947) 67.

17 See also Roger Fry, quoted by Virginia Woolf: ‘I’m gradually getting hold of a new idea about the real meaning of civilization, or what it ought to mean. It’s apropos of the question of the existence of individuals. It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals’ (Woolf 1940, 272).

18 See Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II, 1920-1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978) 168. Saturday 18 February 1922: ‘There was something about fame I had it in mind to say yesterday—oh I think it was that I have made up my mind that I’m not going to be popular, & so genuinely that I look upon disregard or abuse as part of my bargain. I’m to write what I like; & they’re to say what they like. My only interest as a writer lies, I begin to see, in some queer individuality: [. . .] people with this gift go on sounding long after the melodious vigorous music is banal.’

19 In her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf explains that he was moved by his eagerness to educate people not collectively but individually. Here is Fry’s credo: ‘The herd is the adversary, swollen immensely in size and increased in brute power, the herd on the one side, the individual on the other—hatred of one, belief in the other—that is the rhythm, to use his favourite word, that vibrates beneath the surface’ (Woolf 1940, 232).

20 See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 217–251.

21 Bell also used a comparison with literature to debunk the cinema’s inability to express ‘the possibility of spiritual adventures’: ‘Instead of taking the world where it found it about the year 1900, [the cinema] has actually gone back to the crudest Victorian melodrama; on the literary or dramatic side, it is below the meanest lending-library novel or the silliest west-end play’ (Bell, 1922, 39).

22 Iris Barry, Let’s Go to the Movies (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1926) 53.

23 Naturally, the cross-fertilization between the movies and literature had an impact on Woolf’s own fiction but it is not our purpose to define her novels in terms of cinematic techniques. We have hinted elsewhere at the confluence between her narrative techniques and cinematic expression. Floriane Reviron, ‘Virginia Woolf et l’esthétique cinématographique,’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 26 (June 2004) 139-52. See also Paul Tiessen, ‘The Shadow in Caligari: Virginia Woolf and the “Materialists”’ Responses to Film,’ Film Criticism 11 (Fall, Winter 1986–87) 75–83. Keith Cohen in Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) has notably established theoretical analogies between selected work by Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf and film in terms of spatial structure, point-of-view and continuity.

24 See ‘Phases of Fiction’ (Woolf, 1966, 101).

25 Virginia Woolf, ‘Roger Fry’, The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, vol. 4 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967) 90.

26 In France for example, Colette wrote film reviews and film scripts from 1914 onwards, she also subtitled the German film Mädchen in Uniform and many of her novels were adapted for the screen. Other notable writers who experimented with film criticism include Hilda Doolittle, Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein. Man Ray’s painting Admiration of the Orchestrelle for Cinematograph anticipated his films Emak Bakia (1926) and L’Etoile de Mer (1928). In France, the list of writers, poets and playwrights who turned to film criticism would be long, let us just quote Canudo, Louis Delluc, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Cocteau, Max Jacobs.

27 What Roger Fry called ‘the visual language of the imagination’ was ‘the discovery of what arrangements of form and colour are calculated to stir the imagination most deeply through the stimulus given to the sense of sight.’ ‘Post-Impressionism,’ The Fortnightly Review 95 (May 1911), Post-Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception, ed. J. B. Bullen (London: Routledge, 1988) 168.

28 The reactions triggered by the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions among the general public and the Establishment are well-documented. See for instance Virginia Woolf’s account of the public’s reaction in her biography of Roger Fry (Woolf 1940, 153–78): ‘Once more the public exposed themselves to the shock of reality, and once more they were enraged.’ Ivor Montagu explained that some of the Film Society’s programmes brought ‘fights and quarrels a-plenty.’ He added: ‘I do not think it is conceit to claim that, in the midst certainly of plenty of dull drivel, we did introduce in England new technique, new workmen, and new films. ‘The Film Society, London,’ Traditions of Independence, ed. D. Macpherson (London: BFI, 107). Montagu also suggested the fervour surrounding the early days of experimental film and Clive Bell’s participation in that milieu (Hankins 153).

29 Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914) 8.

30 See for instance Jean Cocteau who, in 1919, expressed the wish that the cinema should express life thanks to shape, volume or shadows: ‘des artistes désintéressés exploitent la perspective, le ralentissement, l’accélération, la marche à l’envers, monde inconnu sur lequel un hasard entr’ouvre souvent la porte. Le cinéma moyen neuf servirait un art neuf [. . .]. On y verrait grouiller l’architecture des formes, des volumes, des ombres, des plans, évoquant mieux la vie qu’une représentation nécessairement inexacte de la réalité,’ ‘Carte Blanche,Paris-Midi 21 April 1919 (Lausanne: Mermod, 1953).

31 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The New Language of Cinematography,’ Close Up, 4.5 (1929) 11.

32 Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001) 32.

33 André Bazin pointed at this paradox in his essay entitled ‘Montage Interdit’: ‘Le montage dont on nous répète si souvent qu’il est l’essence du cinéma, est le procédé littéraire et anti-cinématographique par excellence. La spécificité cinématographique, saisie [. . .] à l’état pur, réside au contraire dans le simple respect photographique de l’unité de l’espace.’ Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1975) 55.

34 ‘L’art ‘idéogrammatique’ du Kabuki est l’art du montage et de la contradiction qui oppose à l’intégrité du personnage le morcellement des attitudes du corps, et aux ‘nuances’ de la traduction mimétique des sentiments, le choc des expressions antagoniques. Et le montage cinématographique hérite du pouvoir de cette langue. Mais l’idéogramme est aussi l’élément d’une langue fusionnelle, d’une langue qui ne reconnaît pas la différence des substrats et des composantes sensibles. Et le cinéma est, à son image, l’art fusionnel, l’art qui réduit les éléments visuels et sonores à une même ‘unité théâtre’ [. . .]’ (Rancière, 33).

35 Maggie Humm comments on Eisenstein’s use of hieroglyphs and reminds us that Woolf herself depicted ‘images of the future as an indecipherable hieroglyph’ (Humm, 144).

36 Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics,’ Vision and Design (1920; London: Penguin Books, 1961) 35.

37 Quoted by Regina Marler, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Group (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997) 169.

38 Simon Watney, English Post-Impressionism (London: Studio Vista, 1980) 98. Duncan Grant’s painting is reproduced in Bloomsbury: The Artists, Authors and Designers by Themselves, ed. Gillian Naylor (London: The Octopus Group, 1990) 248.

39 Gilbert Seldes, ‘The Abstract Movie,’ The New Republic [New York] 48. 615 (15 September 1926) 95.

40 See Jeanne-Marie Clerc for further comments on this idea frequently expressed until the 1930s that the cinema had the ability to reveal not reality but its essence or the reality beyond appearances. Littérature et cinéma (Paris: Nathan, 1993) 20.

41 ‘We can get a curious side glimpse of the nature of this imaginative life from the cinematograph. This resembles actual life in almost every respect, except that what the psychologists call the conative part of our reaction to sensations, that is to say, the appropriate resultant action is cut off. If in a cinematograph, we see a runaway horse and cart, we do not have to think either of getting out of the way or heroically interposing ourselves. The result is that in the first place we see the event much more clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which in real life could not struggle into our consciousness bent as it would be entirely upon the problem of our appropriate action [. . .]’ (Fry 1920, 24–5).

42 In France, Antonin Artaud voiced the same idea: ‘Par le fait qu’il isole les objets, [le cinéma] leur donne une vie à part qui tend de plus en plus à devenir indépendante et à se détacher du sens ordinaire des objets. Un feuillage, une bouteille, une main etc., vivent d’une vie quasi animale et qui ne demande qu’à être utilisée.Sorcellerie et Cinéma,Œuvres complètes 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) 82–85.

43 The very first occurrence of the phrase ‘significant form’ in Bell’s contribution to the Catalogue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition underlined this new equality: ‘How then, does the Post-Impressionist regard a coal-scuttle? He regards it as an end in itself, as a significant form related on terms of equality with other significant forms. Thus have all great artists regarded objects’, ‘The English Group,’ Catalogue of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (London: Ballantyne, 1912) 22.

44 Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du Cinéma (Paris, Les Ecrivains réunis, 1926).

45 See Woolf’s comment on the popular movies as it is expressed in ‘Life and the Novelist,’ an essay written in the wake of her contribution on the cinema. ‘We have been letting ourselves bask in appearances. All this representation of the movement of life has sapped our imaginative power. We have sat receptive and watched, with our eyes rather than with our minds, as we do at the cinema, what passes on the screen in front of us’ (Woolf 1966, 133–34).

46 See ‘Quelques peintres français modernes,’ Le Français: Journal de la Société des Professeurs de Français en Angleterre 218 (January 1919): 108–14.

47 As such, her definition of the movies was to be echoed by Walter Benjamin who was to consider that being the art form that ‘corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus—changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen’, the film had established ‘perception in the form of shocks’ (Benjamin 1936, 175, 250).

48 Let us note in passing that the analogy between abstract movies and dreams is a almost a cliché in film criticism. Jeanne-Marie Clerc explains that the New Realism in cinema was based on the ambivalence between dream and reality: ‘Seule jusqu’alors, la vision onirique justifiait cet univers fluide où les objets et les êtres pouvaient échanger leurs qualités et devenir tout à tour individualités séparées ou éléments d’une totalité mouvante. Seule, elle avait permis d’exprimer cette ubiquité que les changements de plans, sinon encore la mobilité de la caméra, vulgarisaient tous les jours sur l’écran.’ She also quotes Léon-Pierre Quint who expressed the same idea: ‘La véritable signification du cinéma, c’est le rêve’ (Clerc, 19). In the 1920s several experiments were made to create films without sequential narrative. The Surrealists and Dadaists notably subverted temporal representation by mirroring dreams and the absurd.

49 André Gaudreault, Du Littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999) 33.

50 Interestingly, in the same essay she explained the change between Edwardian and Georgian writers in terms of ‘smashing’ and ‘crashing’ so in terms of shock (333–34). Woolf also defined her own ‘shock receiving capacity’ as her intrinsic quality as a writer. She added that scene making was the origin of her writing impulse and allowed her to see that ‘behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that [. . .] the whole world is a work of art.’ ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: The University Press, 1976) 72.

51 As Makiko Minow-Pinkney points out, ‘The logic of the machine, being different from human logic, disrupts the association and coherence of the human mind, which is felt as shock. So the fast, constantly changing fragments one encounters in both the experiences of motoring and film viewing, produce the shock-effect.’ ‘Virginia Woolf and the Age of Motor Cars,’ Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 2000) 177. Coincidentally, Roger Fry used the metaphor of the different gears of a motor car to define the four types of vision among which the aesthetic vision was the highest (Fry 1920, 51).

52 Léon Moussinac L’Âge ingrat du cinéma (1946; Paris: Editeurs français réunis, 1967) 143.

53 My translation of the adjective ‘pluriponctuel’ used by Eisenstein and quoted by Iouri Lotman, Esthétique et sémiotique du cinéma (Paris: Editions sociales, 1977) 83–84.

54 Virginia Woolf probably knew quite a lot on the subject as the Hogarth Press’s publication of Eric White’s Parnassus to Let: An Essay About Rhythm in Film (1928) seems to indicate.

55 The impact of Fry’s formalist aesthetics on To the Lighthouse, ‘Blue & Green’, ‘Kew Gardens’, or ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is conspicuous enough and has been discussed at length notably by Sue Roe, ‘The Impact of Post-Impressionism,’ The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 164–190. See also, Panthea Reid Broughton, ‘The Blasphemy of Art: Fry’s Aesthetics and Woolf’s ‘Non-Literary’ Stories,’ The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane Gillespie (Columbia OH: University of Missouri Press, 1993) 37–57.

56 Roger Fry’s definition of the ‘emotional elements of desire’ can be found in Vision and Design (Fry 1920, 36).

57 Bell noted that ‘among the visual novelties of the film was the attempt to create a background which shall be at once decorative and appropriate.’ (1922, 40). One naturally thinks back to the Omega workshops created in 1913 by Fry and Bell and which may be seen as an attempt to mix the formal with the expressive, the abstract with the descriptive.

58 ‘The Russian Point of View’ (Woolf 1966, 242).

59 Woolf’s short stories such as ‘Solid Objects’, ‘Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’’ or ‘Monday or Tuesday’ offer an interesting kaleidoscope of her literary exploration of deformity. They explore perception, representation, fiction making and aesthetic experience itself while being largely abstracted from their human context.

60 ‘In a picture, [. . .] unity is due to the balancing of the attractions of the eye about the central line of the picture. [. . .] A line, which indicated the sudden bend of a head in a certain direction would have far more than its mere value as line in the composition because of the attraction which a marked gesture has for the eye’ (Fry 1920, 34).

61 Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane was published in 1925 and the translation of On the Spiritual in Art had been published in 1912.

62 Roger Fry, quoted by Virginia Woolf (Woolf 1940, 177).

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Floriane Reviron, « Bloomsbury and the Cinema: Practice and Theory of a New Form of Expression »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 62 Automne | 2005, mis en ligne le 20 novembre 2023, consulté le 19 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/13603 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.13603

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Floriane Reviron

Floriane Reviron is a lecturer at the University of Burgundy where she teaches 19th and 20th century English literature. She wrote a PhD on the biographical revolution launched by Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (TheNew biography’: Revaluation and Continuity) and since then has written a number of articles about different Bloomsbury members and their relationship with the representation of reality.

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