Europe After the Rain

Barry Beckett's account of 'Europe after the Rain' is misleading. It remains one of the most compelling documentaries on modern art ever made. As a collage of Dada and Surrealist artifacts it is priceless. It unearths rare recordings of Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, Ernst, Duchamp and Schwitters. The film is more impressionistic than any book, but it is grounded in the conviction that Dada and Surrealism are more than a weird collection of images, that they tell a historical story. It does justice to the fraught relation between Surrealism and politics, dramatising Andre Breton's attempt to ally himself with the Communist Party. What is striking now is now topical this debate still seems. The Communists accused Breton and his friends of being the self-indulgent children of the bourgeoisie. Breton objected to the way the Communists wished to impose 'correct' modes of analysis on the imagination. The same arguments still recur today, because Breton was one of the first to address these issues.

It is easy to laugh at Breton's self-righteousness and his contempt for mass culture, but 'Europe after the Rain' affirms his majestic stature. He recruited a squad of brilliant poets and painters, and attempted to engage with the most progressive ideas in politics and psychology. We are reminded that Breton at the age of 20 was a medical student following in Freud's footsteps by writing down the dreams of shell-shocked soldiers on the battle fields of the Western Front. 'Europe after the Rain' gives Dada and Surrealism credit for rising to the challenge of rebuilding Europe's concept of culture after the First World War had unveiled a talent for self-destruction on an unprecedented scale.

The film cannot be called pompous because there is almost no commentary in it. The commentary is limited to very short linking sentences. Instead, the story is told by the artists' own words: aphorisms, manifestos, excerpts from poems and writing. Their imagination is contagious because the Surrealists were equally adept at words and images. There is humour in it too, perhaps at its wryest with Marcel Duchamp. You get a rare glimpse of his tombstone and the inscription he prepared for it, which provides a good twist to the perennial question about whether Surrealism is dead or not. As Duchamp says from his grave: 'Always, it's other people who die'.

I wrote the piece under my editor's name, BARRY BECKETT some years ago. Looking at it now I am embarrassed, because 34 years have passed since we made it and that changes the perspective of the film today. I still find it lacking pace and spark, but that is irrelevant to the mount of solid material Mick Gold sought and found in an age of dusty libraries, laborious film archives and mountains of paper work. It is a bowl of gem stones for today's internet researchers who will never get the "smell" of an ancient can of film, or mining the columns of magazines and articles for material. It was shot and cut on 16mm film, today a bit like saying 78rpm to mp3 user, as a labor of love. It should be more widely available because it has its own history.

I cut this movie for the Arts Council of Great Britain in Sept. to November 1978. It was my first full film as an editor. It attempts to put on film the history of Dada and Surrealism using stills, contemporary film footage, television interviews (Marcel Duchamp was particularly charming, erudite and sly with his young female interviewer). As a film it fails. It becomes a book on film, and not what I had hoped it would be; a cinematic opening out of a widely known but little understood influence on 20th century western culture. Like many editors, I fought with Mick Gold the director to bring this about. Mick had managed to extract the largest budget to date from the Arts Council of Great Britain, allowing trips to various capitals around the world to shoot his story. He was unmoved by my attempts to restructure his paper script into a movie, He was the director, and I was the editor. Looking and listening to it now, I have a copy on Cassette, it is slow, ponderous, (especially the acted bits) and pompous, which only the hilarious sound poems of Kurt Schwitters manages to cut through. But still worth a look .

Gold's film is a model of its kind - indeed it's impossible to see how such a thoroughly researched and meticulously presented documentary study of an art movement would get made today. God bless the old Arts Council of Great Britain.

Anyone with an interest in 20th Century art should get hold of a copy. The film's very varied riches include gems such as a most entertaining interview with the mischievous Marcel Duchamp, the contemporary sounds of Dada poetry being read (if that is the word) and actors solemnly intoning the thoughts of Surrealist activists, half playful and half deadly serious. The film sees Dada and Surrealism as an intellectual current, often inextricably bound up with radical politics, something easily forgotten in an age where art can be a branch of celebrity culture. Above all it gives context, intellectual, social, economic and political. Dada and Surrealist objects were not just brilliant visual witticisms (a pair of women's shoes with flesh and blood toes etc etc), they were - and are - much more dangerous than that.