André Delons

André Delons (30 January 1909 – May 1940) was a French poet, essayist and film critic. He became associated with the avant-garde group Le Grand Jeu in late 1928 and was one of the nine signatories of its collective response to the proposed cooperation among Parisian revolutionary intellectuals in February 1929. He contributed two works, the prose essay “De certains soleils fixes” and the poem “L'Incantation du Grand Désastre”, to the third issue of Le Grand Jeu in 1930.

Delons was also an important contributor to French film criticism during the transition from silent to sound cinema. In December 1928, his questionnaire “Avez-vous peur du cinéma?” (“Are You Afraid of the Cinema?”) opened the first issue of Du Cinéma: Revue de critique et de recherches cinématographiques. Rather than asking whether cinema qualified as an art, Delons presented it as a force, an act and a means of knowledge through which chance, memory, humour, night and the disturbance of ordinary perception might be experienced.

His series “Chronique des films perdus” (“Chronicle of Lost Films”) rejected purely technical or formalist standards of film evaluation in favour of fugitive images, disorientation, unusual grandeur and the unstable relation between film and spectator. Jennifer Wild describes Delons as the figure who gave the early issues of Du Cinéma their characteristic “negativity” and identifies his criticism as an attempt to move beyond cinephilia as the governing model of film culture.

Delons disappeared during the Battle of Dunkirk in May 1940. The Bibliothèque nationale de France records Zuydcoote, near Dunkirk, as his place of death.

Film criticism

Early articles in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous

Delons began publishing film criticism in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, the journal directed by Jean Tedesco, in the spring of 1928. Three articles established the concerns that he would later develop in Du Cinéma:

“Cinéma pur et cinéma russe” (“Pure Cinema and Russian Cinema”), 15 March 1928; “Pour plus de franchise” (“For Greater Candour”), 1 May 1928; “L'Émotion comique” (“Comic Emotion”), 1 June 1928.

In “Cinéma pur et cinéma russe”, Delons reconsidered the contemporary division between avant-garde “pure cinema” and the realism of Soviet film. Rather than defining purity through abstraction or the exclusion of subject matter, he suggested that Soviet cinema could attain a different kind of purity through its direct relation to lived reality.

“Pour plus de franchise” attacked the vague use of the word in film criticism. Delons argued that critics too readily treated technique as a decisive argument and attributed a film's beauty to formal novelty or mechanical effectiveness. The term had consequently become, in his account, a defence for false ideas rather than an instrument of precise analysis.

Karine Abadie uses this intervention as a point of departure for her study of the multiple meanings assigned to cinematic technique between 1925 and 1932. The French word could refer to machinery, technology, craft, visual style, editing, lighting or almost any aspect of film production. Delons's objection was not to the material basis of cinema but to the substitution of an undefined technical vocabulary for critical judgement.

In “L'Émotion comique”, he treated film criticism as an opportunity to observe the disturbance that films introduced into spectators' habits and received ideas. The critic's task was consequently not limited to identifying formal achievements but included tracing the change in perception and conduct produced by cinematic experience.

Formation of Du Cinéma

In December 1928, the publisher and bookseller José Corti launched the illustrated journal Du Cinéma: Revue de critique et de recherches cinématographiques. Jean George Auriol was its founding editor, while contributors included Delons, Jacques Brunius, Robert Aron, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Desnos, Germaine Dulac, René Clair and writers and filmmakers associated with the Parisian avant-garde.

Corti later described the review's purpose as providing cinema with a laboratory for research and ideas. It differed from both film-trade publications and journals organised around the appreciation of recognised masterpieces. Its initial programme treated cinema as a field whose effects, materials and forms of knowledge remained unsettled.

Delons was central to defining this programme. Corti later remembered him as “the philosopher” and “the thinker” of the review. His contributions appeared alongside experimental photographs and visual documents, including work by fellow Grand Jeu member Artür Harfaux.

The first two issues were published by Corti. Beginning with the third issue in May 1929, publication passed to Gallimard under the banner of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and the title was gradually standardised as La Revue du cinéma. The journal retained avant-garde contributors but increasingly resembled a high-cultural film review rather than the open-ended research laboratory of its first issues.

“Are You Afraid of the Cinema?”

The first page of the first issue carried the questionnaire “Avez-vous peur du cinéma?” Although the review was edited by Auriol, Delons wrote the question and the statement explaining its purpose. He warned that the apparently simple question had a double meaning and was intended to unsettle rather than to elicit predictable declarations of enthusiasm or hostility.

Delons was not primarily concerned with whether respondents feared cinema as a commercial institution, a new technology or a threat to existing arts. Nor did he ask them to predict its future or list improvements still to be made. He rejected the long-running controversy over whether cinema was an art, since “art” interested him only as a provisional instrument of desire, destiny or magic.

Instead, Delons proposed that cinema be recognised as:

a force rather than a stable cultural object; an act rather than merely a product; a sign through which otherwise inaccessible experiences might become perceptible; a site in which the arbitrary and the inevitable appeared together.

He invited respondents to consider moments of “cinematographic revelation”: images or sequences that had disturbed them through tragedy, chance, surprise, ridicule or an inexplicable uneasiness. The desired responses were not abstract theories but personal secrets or confessions.

Published responses came from figures including Dulac, Clair, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jean Benoît-Lévy and Jules Supervielle. Some treated the question as an invitation to affirm cinema's future or its poetic possibilities. Ribemont-Dessaignes came closer to Delons's intention by describing cinema as opening provisional windows upon an unknown metaphysical world and unsettling the separation between animate and inanimate things.

Wild interprets the questionnaire as an avant-garde use of the , a form already employed by Dada and Surrealism to expose assumptions concealed within apparently neutral questions. In Delons's formulation, the questionnaire did not collect objective information; it placed the spectator's supposed autonomy in question by asking how cinema had already altered or implicated the person responding.

The questionnaire was continued in the second issue but was soon replaced by the more conventional permanent survey “Le Cinéma et les mœurs” (“Cinema and Customs”). The change from Delons's question “Are you afraid?” to questions such as “What have you learnt at the cinema?” marked the journal's movement towards a more affirmative and sociological form of film inquiry.

“Chronicle of Lost Films”

Delons's “Chronique des films perdus” appeared in each of the first three issues of Du Cinéma. The title did not primarily refer to films whose physical prints had disappeared. “Lost films” were films, fragments, gestures and sensations excluded from conventional histories and standards of cinematic value.

Delons declared an attraction to films that were muddled, badly made, forgotten, excessive or marked by an unusual greatness that polite critical judgement could not accommodate. He opposed the prestige granted automatically to conspicuous technical achievement, using the reception of Abel Gance's triple-screen Napoléon and Ben-Hur as examples of admiration disciplined by respectable taste.

For Delons, a film became critically productive when it ceased to appear eternal or self-identical and unsettled the spectator's position. The “lost” film could provoke the question “Where am I?” by displacing viewers within a world they thought familiar. It offered encounters with fear as well as hope and with bodies, affects and visual events that resisted orderly classification.

The second instalment was accompanied by Harfaux's photograph of bound arms and hands. Its epigraph, taken from Novalis, invoked storms and interruptions of bourgeois existence. The interaction of Delons's text and Harfaux's photograph linked the review's cinema research with the Grand Jeu's wider interest in bodily constraint, revolt and destabilised perception.

Delons eventually described cinema's negative and mutable range as an “exercise in oblivion”. Wild argues that his criticism joined fear of death to another anxiety: the fear of disappearance from memory.

Later cinema writings

Delons continued writing for La Revue du cinéma after Gallimard assumed publication. His later contributions included:

“Chronique du mauvais œil” (“Chronicle of the Evil Eye”), 1929; “Parler aux yeux ou le mélange des genres” (“Speaking to the Eyes, or the Mixture of Genres”), 1929; reviews and short critical notes; “Les Vedettes laides” (“Ugly Stars”), 1931.

“Chronique du mauvais œil” extended his interest in cinema's capacity to examine its own corrupt, abject or decadent desires. “Les Vedettes laides” challenged the visual economy organised around beautiful stars by asking what cinema disclosed through faces that conventional glamour rejected.

Delons also contributed to Bifur, Variétés and other periodicals in which film, photography, literature and ethnographic or philosophical inquiry were brought together. He was a friend and collaborator of Jacques Brunius and the photographer Denise Bellon.

Delons met Aragon, Breton and Queneau to confirm that he and Audard genuinely supported the Grand Jeu response. In a letter to Breton dated 25 February 1929, he explained that individual differences within the group did not invalidate the possibility of a collective position and affirmed the precise ties connecting him to the Grand Jeu.

Poetry and art criticism

Delons's poetry appeared in literary and avant-garde journals rather than in a completed collection during his lifetime. Commerce published a group of poems in its spring 1931 issue.

The publication of Chroniques des films perdus made possible a reassessment of Delons as more than a minor poet associated with the Grand Jeu. His film criticism has subsequently been studied within histories of avant-garde periodicals, cinephilia, cinematic technology and the emergence of film theory in interwar France.

Wild argues that Delons gave the earliest phase of Du Cinéma its most unsettling intellectual tendency. Rather than seeking to secure cinema's legitimacy or celebrate a canon, he treated fear, forgetting, negativity and the instability of knowledge as productive elements of spectatorship.

Abadie places Delons among the interwar writers who helped form a specifically cinematic discourse without becoming filmmakers themselves. His criticism is important because it resists both the subordination of cinema to literature and the reduction of film to machinery or formal procedure.

Her study of the “imaginary of film technology” also shows the historical importance of his critique of . Delons identified a problem that extended across interwar film culture: the same word was being used for apparatus, craft, visual style, industrial processes and aesthetic invention, making it appear explanatory while leaving its meaning indeterminate.

In 2014, Nicolas Droin and Prosper Hillairet directed Les Eaux noires: André Delons, poète du Grand Jeu, an essay-documentary featuring Simone Delons, Catherine Delons and Alain Virmaux.

Selected writings

Film criticism

“Cinéma pur et cinéma russe”, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 15 March 1928 “Pour plus de franchise”, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 1 May 1928 “L'Émotion comique”, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 1 June 1928 “Avez-vous peur du cinéma?”, Du Cinéma, no. 1, December 1928; continued in no. 2, February 1929 “Chronique des films perdus”, Du Cinéma, nos. 1–3, 1928–1929 “Chronique du mauvais œil”, La Revue du cinéma, no. 4, October 1929 “Parler aux yeux ou le mélange des genres”, La Revue du cinéma, no. 5, November 1929 “Les Vedettes laides”, La Revue du cinéma, no. 23, June 1931

Poetry, prose and art criticism

L'Homme désert, partly published in Bifur, 1929 “De certains soleils fixes”, Le Grand Jeu, no. 3, 1930 “L'Incantation du Grand Désastre”, Le Grand Jeu, no. 3, 1930 “Poèmes”, Commerce, no. 27, spring 1931 writings on Josef Šíma for Cahiers du Sud and an exhibition catalogue

Posthumous books

Poèmes, 1927–1933, suivi de L'Homme désert, edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux, Rougerie, 1986 Au carrefour du Grand Jeu et du surréalisme: textes polémiques et artistiques, edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux, Rougerie, 1988, Chroniques des films perdus: écrits de cinéma, 1928–1933, edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux, Rougerie, 1995