André Delons

André Delons
Born	(1909-01-30)30 January 1909 Le Vésinet, France
Died	May 1940 (aged 31) Zuydcoote, Nord, France
Occupations	Poet essayist film critic
Relatives	Jacqueline Lamba (cousin)
Writing career
Language	French
Period	1927–1933
Genres	Poetry; film criticism; essay
Notable work	“Avez-vous peur du cinéma?” (1928) “Chronique des films perdus” (1928–1929) “De certains soleils fixes” (1930) L'Homme désert
Literary movement	Le Grand Jeu

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.^[1][2][3]

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.^[4]

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.^[5]

Delons disappeared during the Battle of Dunkirk in May 1940. The Bibliothèque nationale de France records Zuydcoote, near Dunkirk, as his place of death.^[1] Most of his poetry, film criticism and writing on the Grand Jeu and Surrealism remained dispersed in periodicals until three posthumous collections were edited by Alain and Odette Virmaux between 1986 and 1995.

Delons was born on 30 January 1909 at Le Vésinet, then in the department of Seine-et-Oise.^[1][2] Little has been published about his family background or formal education.

His surviving literary work begins in the late 1920s. He wrote poetry, prose and criticism for periodicals including Bifur [fr], Cahiers du Sud, Commerce, Présence, Variétés and film journals. Karine Abadie dates his principal period of creative and critical activity from 1927 to 1933, during which his poetry and cinema writing developed alongside one another rather than as separate careers.^[6][7]

One of his principal prose works, L'Homme désert, began appearing in Bifur in December 1929. Delons later announced a book under the same title, arguing that poetic experience required the consciousness to investigate the real sources of its enchantment rather than rely on a belief in gratuitous inspiration. The projected volume did not appear during his lifetime. Alain and Odette Virmaux reconstructed it from manuscripts and texts dispersed among periodicals for the 1986 collection Poèmes, 1927–1933, suivi de L'Homme désert.^[8]

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.^[9]

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.^[10]

“Pour plus de franchise” attacked the vague use of the word technique 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.^[9][11]

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.^[11]

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.^[9]

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.^[12]

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.^[13]

Delons was central to defining this programme. Corti later remembered him as “the philosopher” and “the thinker” of the review.^[14] 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.^[15]

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.^[16]

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.^[17]

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.^[17]

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.^[18]

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.^[19]

Wild interprets the questionnaire as an avant-garde use of the enquête, 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.^[20]

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.^[21]

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.^[22]

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.^[22]

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.^[22]

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.^[22]

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.^[22]

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.^[22]

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.^[2]

Abadie places his writing within an interwar development she calls cinéologie: a form of writing in which poets, novelists and essayists sought not merely to review individual films but to construct cinema as an independent object of thought. Delons's work is distinctive within this field because it continually resists settling upon a complete definition of cinema.^[6][7]

Delons encountered the Grand Jeu circle in late 1928.^[2] He had not belonged to the original Phrères Simplistes formed in Reims by René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat. He entered the wider Parisian collective after its first magazine issue had appeared.

The Grand Jeu joined poetry and visual art to revolutionary politics, psychological and parapsychological experiments, Hindu philosophy, Western esotericism and what its central writers termed “experimental metaphysics”. Its members understood literature and art as instruments within a broader research into consciousness rather than as self-contained cultural activities.^[23][24]

This conception corresponded closely with Delons's emerging approach to cinema. Jennifer Wild observes that film became one of the principal “means” through which he carried the group's research methods into an established cultural field. His criticism sought to discover the disruptions caused by cinema rather than define and defend a stable cinematic art.^[25]

In February 1929, Raymond Queneau circulated an invitation asking approximately thirty avant-garde writers and artists to discuss possible common political action. The Grand Jeu replied collectively, agreeing on the need for cooperation. Delons and Pierre Audard, whose connection with the group was not yet widely known, joined the signatories.^[26]

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.^[26]

The resulting meeting took place at the Bar du Château in Montparnasse on 11 March. Before discussing political cooperation, Breton demanded an examination of the participants' “individual moral qualification”. He criticised the Grand Jeu's religious and metaphysical language and challenged the journalistic conduct of Vailland, particularly an article sympathetic to the right-wing police prefect Jean Chiappe.^[27]

The encounter made the conflict between the two groups public, but it was not an “excommunication”. The Grand Jeu had never belonged to Breton's organisation. Delons's participation in the collective response demonstrates both the group's independence and its willingness, at this stage, to consider common revolutionary action with Surrealists and other writers.^[26][27]

Delons published two texts in the third and final issue of Le Grand Jeu, released in autumn 1930:

• “De certains soleils fixes” (“On Certain Fixed Suns”);
• “L'Incantation du Grand Désastre” (“The Incantation of the Great Disaster”).^[3]

“De certains soleils fixes” begins with the case of a man who suffers from his memory and gradually expands into a meditation on chance, destiny, myth, contemplation and the relation between body and consciousness. Its references include Novalis, Plotinus, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Thomas De Quincey and Buddhist and Vedic traditions.^[3]

The essay refuses a simple opposition between hope and despair. Delons links chance to destiny and treats myth not merely as an invented story but as an active reality in which the separation between subject and object becomes unstable. Its discussion of the senses proposes that conscious human transformation would require their “dedifferentiation”, first overcoming their apparent separation and eventually their status as intermediaries between the individual and the world.^[3]

The prose closes by identifying the members' bond with “a storm that is not of this world”. The phrase condenses Delons's relation to the Grand Jeu: political and personal solidarity is presented together with a catastrophic and metaphysical experience exceeding ordinary social categories.^[3]

“L'Incantation du Grand Désastre” develops comparable themes in poetic form through images of fire, bodily mutation, catastrophe, minerals, machines and violent renewal. Its imagery connects Delons's poetry with the group's wider language of destruction and transformation.^[3]

The final internal crisis of the Grand Jeu followed the prosecution of Louis Aragon for his revolutionary poem Front rouge. André Rolland de Renéville published a critical article on Aragon's poetry in the Nouvelle Revue Française. Delons and Audard regarded the article as politically unacceptable and resigned rather than continue collaborating with Renéville.^[28]

Renéville also resigned after refusing Daumal's demand for a retraction. Harfaux and Maurice Henry then accused Daumal of speaking for the group without proper authority. At the last collective meeting, held at Daumal's apartment on 30 November 1932, Renéville's conduct and the group's remaining unity were again debated.^[28]

The dispute was one cause of the Grand Jeu's dissolution, alongside Vailland's earlier withdrawal, Gilbert-Lecomte's opiate dependence, financial difficulties and Daumal's growing commitment to the teaching transmitted by Alexandre de Salzmann.^[29]

Delons's position in the affair suggests that his attachment to the Grand Jeu combined its metaphysical research with an increasingly explicit commitment to revolutionary politics. Jacqueline Lamba's official chronology likewise describes him during this period as more directly engaged with politics than with the group's metaphysical tendency.^[30]

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.^[2] Other works appeared in Cahiers du Sud, Bifur, Présence and Variétés.^[8]

The surviving poems often place bodily and natural imagery within landscapes of catastrophe, emptiness and impersonal transformation. The posthumous volume Poèmes, 1927–1933 also contains the fragments of L'Homme désert, which had been intended as a more extensive poetic and prose work.

Delons wrote about visual art and was particularly interested in Josef Šíma, the principal painter associated with the Grand Jeu. For Cahiers du Sud, he helped direct a special group of texts devoted to Šíma.^[2] The Bibliothèque nationale de France also records Delons as a collaborator on a 1929 catalogue for an exhibition of Šíma's drawings, watercolours, pastels and gouaches and holds a manuscript entitled “Sima”.^[1]

His writing on Šíma belongs to the Grand Jeu's attempt to develop a visual equivalent of its theories of participation, altered perception and the instability of the isolated individual. Šíma's figures and landscapes frequently dissolve the boundaries between bodies, stones, trees, light and surrounding space.^[31]

Delons was also connected with Brunius, Bellon and Harfaux, whose photography and film criticism crossed the fields of Surrealism, the Grand Jeu and experimental cinema. His posthumous collection Au carrefour du Grand Jeu et du surréalisme brings together writings on these overlapping artistic and political networks.

Delons was a cousin of the painter Jacqueline Lamba. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he introduced her to writers and periodicals of the Parisian avant-garde.

By December 1929, Lamba was reading Breton's Nadja and Les Pas perdus, together with Proust, Goethe, Freud, Rimbaud, Hölderlin and Aragon. Through Delons she also read Bifur, Variétés and La Revue du cinéma.^[30]

She remained close to him in 1930 and benefited from his knowledge of the Grand Jeu and his literary connections. In 1932, through Delons's connection with the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires, she read Breton's Les Vases communicants and recognised concerns resembling her own.^[30]

Delons did not personally arrange her eventual encounter with Breton. Lamba met Breton independently at the Café Cyrano on 29 May 1934, after already having developed a strong interest in his writing. They married on 14 August 1934.^[30]

Delons's role is nevertheless significant in Lamba's intellectual biography: he gave her access to Breton's work and to publications in which Surrealism, the Grand Jeu, cinema, photography and revolutionary politics intersected before she became personally involved with the Surrealist group.

Delons disappeared in May 1940 during the Battle of Dunkirk. The French article and Mélusine associate his disappearance with Dunkirk, while the Bibliothèque nationale de France records Zuydcoote, a coastal commune immediately east of Dunkirk, as his place of death.^[1][2]

The available sources do not establish an exact date or a fully documented account of the circumstances. He was 31 years old.

A memorial plaque bearing his name is installed in division 90 of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Delons left no major book published during his lifetime. His writings remained dispersed across film and literary periodicals for more than four decades.

Alain and Odette Virmaux assembled three principal posthumous volumes:

• Poèmes, 1927–1933, suivi de L'Homme désert (1986);
• Au carrefour du Grand Jeu et du surréalisme: textes polémiques et artistiques (1988);
• Chroniques des films perdus: écrits de cinéma, 1928–1933 (1995).

The first reconstructed his poetry and the unfinished L'Homme désert. The second collected polemical, political and artistic writings concerning the Grand Jeu, Surrealism and related figures. The third brought together his film essays and reviews from Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, Du Cinéma, La Revue du cinéma and other journals.^[1][32]

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.^[33]

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.^[6][7]

Her study of the “imaginary of film technology” also shows the historical importance of his critique of technique. 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.^[11]

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.^[34]

• “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

• 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

• 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, ISBN 2-85668-277-4
• Chroniques des films perdus: écrits de cinéma, 1928–1933, edited and introduced by Alain and Odette Virmaux, Rougerie, 1995

• Abadie, Karine (2017). Delons et le cinéma (in French). Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Place. ISBN 978-2-37628-012-5.
• Abadie, Karine (2018). "Écrire sur le cinéma durant l'entre-deux-guerres: Vers une cinéologie". 1895 (in French) (84): 88–105. doi:10.4000/1895.6058.
• Abadie, Karine (2024). The Imaginary of Film Technology (1925–1932). Translated by Barnard, Timothy. Montreal: CinéMédias. doi:10.62212/1866/33944. ISBN 978-2-925376-11-8.
• Duncan, Dennis (2015). "Introduction". Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu. Atlas Press. pp. 7–28. ISBN 978-1-900565-67-7.
• Roberts, Donna (2018). "The Vertiginous Pursuit of the Grand Jeu: Experimental Metaphysics, Paramnesia, and Creative Involution". In Bauduin, Tessel M.; Ferentinou, Victoria; Zamani, Daniel (eds.). Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvellous. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. pp. 39–56. doi:10.4324/9781315146652-4. ISBN 978-1-138-05433-2.
• Wild, Jennifer (2015). "'Are You Afraid of the Cinema?': Du Cinéma and the Changing Question of Cinephilia and the Avant-Garde (1928–1930)". AmeriQuests. 12 (1): 1–19. doi:10.15695/amqst.v12i1.4148.

• Biro, Adam; Passeron, René (1982). Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs (in French). Office du livre / Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-037280-5.
• Delons, André (1988). Virmaux, Alain; Virmaux, Odette (eds.). Au carrefour du Grand Jeu et du surréalisme: textes polémiques et artistiques (in French). Mortemart: Rougerie. ISBN 2-85668-277-4.
• Delons, André (1995). Virmaux, Alain; Virmaux, Odette (eds.). Chroniques des films perdus: écrits de cinéma, 1928–1933 (in French). Mortemart: Rougerie.
• Delons, André (1986). Virmaux, Alain; Virmaux, Odette (eds.). Poèmes, 1927–1933, suivi de L'Homme désert (in French). Mortemart: Rougerie.
• Virmaux, Alain; Virmaux, Odette (1996). Le Grand Jeu et le cinéma (in French). Paris: Paris Expérimental.

• André Delons at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
• André Delons at Mélusine
• Delons's contributions to issue 3 of Le Grand Jeu at Mélusine
• Works and biographical materials at the Société d'histoire du Vésinet