‘The Art I Love is the Art of Cowards’: Francis Picabia and René Clair's Entr'acte and the Politics of Death and Remembrance in France after World War One

Abstract

Francis Picabia and René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924), shown within the context of the ballet Relâche, undertaken in collaboration with the composer Eric Satie, is a critique by Picabia of the political and aesthetic effects of the call-to-order in France after the Great War (1914–1918), with affinities to his critical position expressed in both paintings and writings. This critique is part of a wider project by Picabia engaged with the relation of the individual subject to technology and modernity, as manifestations of industrial capitalism and of new forms of governmentality that erase subjectivity. The project deliberately satirises the post-war cult of the dead, using a Keystone Cops like chase to mock the repatriation of the French war dead from battlefield cemeteries in the early 1920s. In their satire, however, both film and ballet also establish a distinctive critique of the technology of film itself as implicated in a modernity where the individual can be easily and indifferently annihilated by the demands of the state.

Keywords:

• Francis Picabia
• World War One
• death
• remembrance
• intermediality

Notes

For a wider discussion on intermediality in Relâche and Picabia's projects at large, see my forthcoming essay (Townsend, 2010a).

Also see Green (1987) and Golan (1995).

For an outstanding treatment of Purism and modes of subjectivity in post-war France, see Rosenblatt (2001); for a discussion of Léger and Purism see Green (1970) and also Green (1976). For a wider discussion of notions of classicism and the body within the avant-garde on either side of the Great War see the University of London PhD thesis of my student, Tom Slevin (2009).

Robert Orledge notes that Satie did not see the final cut of Entr'acte to prepare the music until late October (Orledge, 1990, p. 240). This suggests that something intervened in the editing process: this may have been Picabia, notified in July 1924 that the film was ready, asking for changes, or it may have been because both he and Clair in early autumn became aware of the style and content of L'Herbier's L'inhumaine.

The production came in the season following Ricciotto Canudo's ballet Skating Rink, based upon a 1917 Chaplin film for the Mutual studio, The Rink.

Picabia had already severed his ties with the movement in an acrimonious dispute.

This figure is variously claimed as being Picabia or Börlin, and it is not entirely clear. Close examination of the scene, comparing the physiques of the two men and their hair, suggests that it is the latter.

See Townsend (2010a, passim) and also both Michelson (1995, passim) and Baker (2007, pp. 288–337).

I would suggest that there is a continuity in modernist culture between the poet Gérard de Nerval's horrified fascination with the disappearance of the self into photographic fixity and his textual resistance, which Jonathan Strauss (1998, passim) addresses, and Picabia's equally ambivalent engagement with reproductive technologies, whether photography, film or the mechanised human. I am here rehearsing an argument that I make in wider theoretical terms, whilst using contemporary art as a context, in the concluding chapter of my Art and Death (Townsend, 2008). The argument is developed in the specific context of modernism in my forthcoming Modernism and Death (Townsend, 2010b).

At the beginning of Chapter IV Picabia writes, ‘You always seek out the emotion you've already experienced, the same way you like recognizing an old pair of pants coming back from the dry cleaners, which seem new if you don't look at them too closely. Don't be fooled: artists are dry cleaners’.

For more extensive theoretical discussion of this concept see, inter alia, Foucault (2003, 2007, pp. 333–358), Agamben (1998, pp. 119–188) and Strauss (1998, pp. 1–73).

A timely revision of Futurism, suggesting that it contains a powerful undercurrent of anxiety about technology, rather than unproblematically endorsing it, has recently been undertaken by Christine Poggi (2009).

There may, however, be a further engagement with Duchamp here, and indeed George Baker sees much of Relâche as a sustained exchange between Picabia and his friend, understanding it as ‘a staging, at least in part, of the thematics of … Duchamp's Large Glass’ (Baker, 2007, p. 302). In Duchamp's posthumously published notes for the Large Glass he writes: ‘(In slow motion) Boxing match. Get hold of a film of a real boxing match which takes place in white gloves and blacken everything else out so that all can be seen are the white gloves boxing’ (Duchamp, 1980, np). White gloves, however, were not uncommon in boxing at this time, so cannot be read simply as a sign of pacifism.

By 1924 Carpentier had starred in three feature films: Le Trésor de Kériolet (Félix Léonnec, France, 1920), The Wonder Man (Hénri d'Alour, France/USA, 1920) and The Gypsy Cavalier (J. Stuart Blackton, UK, 1922).

For a full record of Carpentier's bouts see: http://www.boxrec.com/list_bouts.php?human_id=10604&cat=boxer. For Carpentier's own memoirs see, Carpentier (1921).

With the 1938 release of a freshly edited sound version the film could be more readily understood as a pacifist work.

‘Poilou’ or ‘hairy one’ was the affectionate nickname given by the French public to its soldiers in the trenches during World War One.

Golan here cites as authorities Wright (1964, p. 28) and Bernard and Dubief (1975, p. 108), along with a letter by Adrian Croix, dated 12 February 1916, published in Guillaumin (1951). In a note Golan observes a remark by Wright that some half a million peasants ‘suffered grave permanent injuries’.

Lyautey had taken Houssaye's seat in the Académie Française in 1912, after the latter's death in September 1911. During the war he was Résident Général of French Morocco and briefly, in 1917, Minister of War. Joffre had been Commander in Chief of the French army from 1914 to 1916, and was in part responsible for the British catastrophe on the Somme in 1916 and French losses at Verdun. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1918, taking the seat left vacant by Jules Claretie in 1913. Picabia omitted Ferdinand Foch, Commander in Chief of all allied armies at the end of the war and another holder of the Légion de Honneur, who replaced Melchior de Vogüé in the Académie in 1918.