MIES VAN DER ROHE AND THE MOVING IMAGE Lutz Robbers A ...

film’s ‘immoral’ bodily immediacy, was the new medium’s uninhibited visuality that threatened
the hegemony of distanced, contemplative thought and the reign of the word. 33
By contrast, parts of the avant-garde emphatically embraced film’s enchanting dynamism,
universal intelligibility and class-transcending appeal. There was a widely shared conviction that
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cinema would, as Yvan Goll notes in 1920, the “basis of all future art.” With cinema a new
popular language had emerged that finally superceded the logocentric worldview. As the poet
Blaise Cendrars proclaims in 1917: “We are moving towards a new synthesis of the human spirit,
towards a new humanity, that a new humanity and a new human race will emerge. Its language
will be cinema. Look!” 35
There was a growing sense that cinema was more than a dynamic
variant of photography or a technically sophisticated form of theater. Cinema was perceived as a
fundamentally new medium, the symptom of a profound cultural and technological shift which
penetrated deep into all areas of modern life altering even the parameters of perception and
thought. Many avant-garde artists hailed the cinematic image as a successor to the word capable
of creating a new coherence between the cacophonic impressions of a more and more fragmented
life world. For example, in the very first issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, published in 1920, the writer
Bosko Tokin demands for instance to update Victor Hugo’s famous catchphrase from Notre
Dame de Paris “Ceci tuera cela” for the new era: after the printing press had taken over the role
of the mass medium architecture it was now the question whether cinema, as Tokin argues, “is
33
See Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-Debatte (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978). Jörg Schweinitz, ed., Prolog
vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909-1914 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992).
34
Yvan Goll, "Das Kinodram," Die neue Schaubühne 2, no. 6 (1920), 142.
35 Blaise Cendrars, "L'ABC du cinéma," Hollywood, la Mecque du cinéma (Paris: Grasset, 1987
[1917]), 215. Another important figure in French poetry who was directly inspired by cinema
was Pierre Albert-Birot, editor between 1916 and 1920 of the journal SIC (standing for ‘sons –
idées – couleurs’) and author of Cinéma: drames poèmes dans l’espace (1920).
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