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Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.2023.a913401

1080-6601

Stephanie Lebas Huber,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism Stephanie Lebas Huber (bio) In May 1929, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition of German paintings under the banner of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” based on Gustav Hartlaub’s seminal 1925 show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim of the same title.1 The Amsterdam leg of the tour exhibited many of the same artists included in the original program. Well-known painters such as George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Carl Mense, and George Schrimpf hung alongside several other artists who did not appear in the Mannheim iteration, including Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, and Carl Grossberg. Exhibition organizers capitalized on the Dutch art world’s growing appreciation for the return to figuration that was emerging among artists associated with the Onafhankelijken (Independents) group in Amsterdam who also happened to be on display at the Stedelijk that month.2 By that time critics had begun to observe in the work of Pyke Koch, Carel Willink, Raoul Hynckes, Dick Ket, Charley Toorop, and Wim Schuhmacher, among others, echoes of “Magic Realism,” a figurative idiom sometimes synonymous with Neue Sachlichkeit, known for its cold visual sobriety and emphasis on banal subject matter.3 Often described as more of a broad stylistic tendency than a concise movement, Magic Realism was an idiom that transcended international boundaries, emerging simultaneously in Italy, Germany, France, and beyond, where it provided an aesthetic language to convey the experience of physical, psychological, and economic devastation that followed World War I, and the more generalized anxieties that accompanied the accelerating clip of modernization. Emerging nearly a decade after these other European variants, the major exemplars of Dutch Magic [End Page 227] Realism expressed many of these same concerns as their stylistic predecessors but distinguished themselves in their pointed references to the temporal disjunctures and synthetic mediation of the film apparatus. These methods, I argue, allowed the aforementioned painters to visualize the rapid-paced, and sometimes dehumanizing, experience of modern life. A look into their production in the late 1920s and early 1930s will set the stage for a closer investigation into the understudied influence of film on interwar figurative painting in the rest of Europe and abroad. First defined by the Munich-based art historian Franz Roh in an article from 1924, the term Magic Realism officially received an elaborated treatment in book-length form the following year when he published Nach-Expressionismus: Der magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei. Although Roh had developed the idea from an early collaboration with Gustav Hartlaub—at a moment when he and the museum director intended to co-curate the Neue Sachlichkeit show in Mannheim—Roh began to express in the 1925 manuscript his own independent interpretation of the modernist tendency that he referenced in his subtitle.4 In the vague, expository prose of his book, Roh characterized the idiom as one evolved from Expressionism, a style known for embedding itself within the existing world, rather than escaping from it. Drawing inspiration from the elements of everyday reality, such as middle-class dwellings, factory settings, and mundane household objects, he argues that Magic Realist painters put into visual terms the tension that they observed between a loosely-defined “spiritual” entity and the solid objects that workaday, everyman spaces. By bringing into vivid conversation the aesthetic qualities of opposing textures or materials, such as the organic and the man-made, he asserts that the Magic Realists’ imagery offers a studied, critical perspective on the contingencies of modernity as opposed to the emotive and chaotic fervor of Expressionism.5 The version of Magic Realism that began to appear in The Netherlands at the turn of the 1930s—dubbed Neorealism by Dutch critics—was distinct from other European variants in the way it mimicked the transitory and artificial visual effects of silent-era film and combined them with references to native Dutch artistic traditions. This intermedial synthesis, rife with anachronisms, reflected the instability of the period by illustrating an estranged modern reality, wherein it was impossible to reconstruct the unadulterated ideal of the past. Neorealism’s crisp “objective” optical clarity and its emphasis on the highly mechanized processes of filmmaking could appropriately convey the turmoil of...