Cinéma pur

Cinéma Pur (French for "Pure Cinema") was an avant-garde film movement begun by filmmakers, like René Clair, who "wanted to return the medium to its elemental origins" of "vision and movement."

The term was first coined by Henri Chomette. The goal of the movement was to create a cinema that focused on the pure elements of film like motion, visual composition, and rhythm. It was begun by European filmmakers René Clair, Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and others. They sought to accomplish their goal by minimizing story and plot, focusing instead on visual concerns by using close-ups, dolly shots, montage, lens distortions, and other cinematic techniques. Films like Ballet Mécanique, Symphony Diagonale, and The Symphony of a Great City projected rhythm and motion in the title of the films and the works themselves. In addition to close-ups, other filmmaking techniques were used to create rhythm and visual interest. They include fast and slow motion, trick shots, stop-action cinematography and dynamic cutting.

The clearest examples of pure cinema are said by essayist and filmmaker Hubert Revol to be documentaries.

Documentary must be made by poets. Few of those within French cinema have understood that in our country, we possess innumerable elements and subjects to make, not just insignificant ribbons (of film), but splendid films lively and expressive... The purest demonstration of pure cinema, that is to say of poetry which is truly cinematographic, has been provided us by some remarkable films, vulgarly called documentaries, particularly Nanook and Moana.

The Dadaists saw in film an opportunity to transcend "story", to ridicule "character," "setting," and "plot" as bourgeois conventions, to slaughter causality by using the innate dynamism of the film medium to overturn conventional Aristotelian notions of time and space. The movement also encompasses the work of the feminist critic/filmmaker Germaine Dulac, particularly Thème et variations, Disque 957, and Cinegraphic Study of an Arabesque. In these as well as in her theoretical writing, Dulac's goal was "pure" cinema, free from any influence from literature, the stage, or even the other visual arts.

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