When the way becomes the core

The cinematographic avant-garde as a reflection of its time

Abstract

Cinema is art, expression, media and trace. Therefore, it is a memory support which helps us to approach the past. In this context, the so-called historical avant-garde is essential in order to understand the new world opened during the interwar period. Beyond the aesthetical rupture, the avant-garde film was a way to channel the desire for change in the face of the collapse in modern society.  The experimentation on the cinematographic forms also became a warning, a complaint and a political commitment. By visual provocation, the visual reader was attempted to be mobilised.  The aim of the article is not reflecting on the cinematographic avant-gardes during the interwar period from an artistic perspective but approaching what the genre captured and reported in that period of time. Nowadays, that cinematic representation has become a source of knowledge that, one hundred years later, brings us closer to the history of the period since cinema is an object of its time that provides information on its epoch.