Léon Moussinac (1890-1964) was one of the
most prolific and influential French critics/theorists of
cinema during the 1920s. A boyhood friend of Louis Delluc
in Bordeaux, Moussinac did three years of military
service beginning in 1910 and then was recalled into the
French army during World War I. He aspired to be writer
and tried his hand at novels, poems, plays, and criticism
until, after the war, in Paris, he secured editorial
positions at the theater monthly, Comoedia
illustré, and the publisher, Editions Albert
Lévy. His friendship with Delluc led Moussinac to
begin writing about film, and soon he was contributing a
review column to the prestigious literary monthly,
Mercure de France, as well as the daily newspaper,
L'humanité, and publishing articles in a
range of magazines, from Le crapouillot to
Cinémagazine and Cinéa
(Delluc's own journal). Some of those pieces would form
the basis for his first important book, Naissance du
cinéma (1925). Moussinac was especially active
in the French ciné-club movement: in late 1922,
for instance, he founded the Club Français du
Cinéma, which sponsored special film screenings
and discussions; two years later, he merged the group
with Ricciotto Canudo's CASA (Club des Amis du
Septième Art), after the latter's death, into the
Ciné-Club de France. In 1924, he also persuaded
the Musée Galliera to mount an unusual,
six-month-long L'exposition de l'art dans le
cinéma français, which included
exhibits of film production and exhibition material and
weekly series of film screenings and lectures. That
exhibition would become the model for most others
throughout France in the last half of the decade.
The war propelled Moussinac to the left and, in 1923,
he finally joined the French Communist Party, after which
both his writing and organizing gradually took on a more
overtly political cast. At the 1925 Exposition
internationale des arts décoratifs in Paris,
he introduced the first essays and films by Dziga Vertov
and Sergei Eisenstein (Strike) to France. As part
of the regular screenings sponsored by the
Ciné-Club de France, Moussinac then arranged to
show other Soviet films that had been banned
commercially, including Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin in November 1926. The enthusiastic response
to Potemkin, along with the popularity of the
Bellevilloise, a workers cooperative cinema in the 20th
arrondisement, prompted Moussinac and his
brother-in-law, Jean Lods, to begin organizing a new kind
of ciné-club in the summer of 1927, Les Amis de
Spartacus. Their purpose was to create a mass cinema
movement, and to that end they secured a lease to the
Cinéma du Casino de Grenelle (the largest in the
15th arrondisement) and distribution rights to
more Soviet films (while attending the RAPP conference in
Moscow in late 1927). By March 1928, Les Amis de
Spartacus finally was ready to begin a six-month series
of weekly screenings--among them were Vsevelod Pudovkin's
Mother and The end of St. Petersburg, along
with Potemkin. Membership grew so rapidly (perhaps
in the tens of thousands) that the club planned to extend
its work into the Paris suburbs and French provinces.
That work was to come to a climax in the fall of 1928
with the screening of Eisenstein's October. As
political attacks against the French Communist Party
mounted and commercial cinemas complained increasingly
about unfair competition, however, the Paris police chief
stepped in to threaten Les Amis de Spartacus with
agent provocateurs that would disrupt any further
screenings of Soviet films. Having no legal recourse,
Moussinac and Lods were forced to halt the club's
activities and ultimately close down the
organization.
Moussinac wrote "Cinéma: expression sociale"
during the heady days following Potemkin's initial
screening and leading up to Les Amis de Spartacus. He
first delivered it as a lecture for a series organized by
the Ciné-Club de France at the College Libres des
Sciences Sociales in Paris, on 28 January 1927. A longer
version was published in the fourth volume of René
Jeanne's special serial collection of essays, L'art
cinématographique (1927), and an excerpt
appeared in Cinégraphie (September 1927).
"Cinéma: expression sociale" is Moussinac's first
lengthy, explicitly political essay on cinema, and he
would continue to advance its polemical ideas in Le
cinéma soviétique (1928) and
Panoramique du cinéma (1929). The essay is
not without problems: repetitious, overly insistent,
inconsistent in style, elliptical in argument. It also
makes several moves that now may seem strange: taking the
Minister of Fine Arts in the Second Empire as a precursor
and using the intellectual pessimism of Elie Faure (the
famous art historian) to more sharply outline his own
optimism. Yet the essay is notable for proposing to
reorient the cinema, as a new form of art with its own
aesthetic, away from any dependence on a bourgeois
capitalist economy and towards alignment with a new
social economy and the emergence of a new social order
like that of the Soviet Union. Specifically, that would
entail a form of filmmaking, in which individual
cinéastes worked in collaboration, within a
cooperative community, a mode of production for which,
Moussinac hoped, Les Amis de Spartacus would establish a
solid basis of support. Moreover, that reorientation
would depend on other changes in the material conditions
of making cinema, and he cites two technological
innovations as examples: the invention of an inexpensive,
reliable film stock and the development of a system of
instantly transmitting moving images across the globe, a
system then already in the process of being realized as
television. In other words, however roughly formulated,
Moussinac's essay brings together two 19th-century dreams
of human progress: one in which new relations of
production could construct more just and equitable social
relations, the other in which new technologies could
eliminate the differences among peoples caused by spatial
distance.
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