Here�s a Picture of Ren� Clair Chilling with Erik Satie: Some Thoughts on Artistic Movements and Communities

Translate this Article...

Of the many time periods/places I would have liked to inhabit, 1920�s Paris has to be in the top five.  Everybody was there.  Gertrude Stein hung out with Picasso who painted Stravinsky who (maybe) had an affair with Coco Chanel.  Ren� Clair apparently hung out with Erik Satie, because why not?

Clair and Satie, 1924.

But it�s not just nostalgia or romanticism that attracts me to 1920�s Paris (although that�s certainly an element) but rather the attraction of a historically significant intellectual milieu.  I�ve never lived in one and I don�t know where I�d go to find one today.  It used to be you had Beats in New York, poets in Heian Kyoto, decadents in 1890�s London, and fucking everybody in Paris.  Is there anywhere like that in the United States today? Or in the world, even? (or perhaps there is and we just haven�t recognized it yet? Or myattention has not been called to it?)

The great Mexican poet and essayist and intellectual jack-of-all-trades Octavio Paz frequently harps on this theme in his essays; he says the last major artistic movement was the Surrealist movement, and that after that everything became fragmented.  Now, that doesn�t mean that important works of art haven�t been produced since the Surrealists, but Paz says you don�t have zeitgeisty artistic waves like you used to.

I�d argue that the French New Wave constitutes an artistic movement, but you know, I don�t think Paz was into film.  He held forth on every other artistic medium, but I don�t remember him ever discussing cinema.  With the French New Wave, you have a community of people who know each other and work together (the former writers for Cahiers du cin�ma: Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, etc.) and certain commonalities of style.  You also have a distinctive break with the recent past while hearkening back to previous artistic movements; in this case, the New Wavers are breaking with French studio cinema and its Hollywood counterparts and referring back to Italian neorealism and the poetic realism of the inter-war period.  It�s similar to how Ezra Pound sought to �make it new� and become ultra-modern by reviving the poetry of the French troubadours and bringing classical Chinese poetry to the �West.� Perhaps the recent New Waves in Romania, Iran, and Thailand qualify as artistic movements of the type that Paz thought had gone extinct.  So there�s hope in that.