Cinema
Surrealist of Cinema
Surrealist cinema
is a modernist approach to film theory,
criticism, and production with origins in Paris in the 1920s. Related to Dada
cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterised by juxtapositions, the rejection of
dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. The first
Surrealist film was The Seashell and the Clergyman from 1928, directed
by Germaine Dulac from a screenplay by Antonin Artaud. Other films include Un
Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí;
Buñuel went on to direct many more films, with varying degrees of Surrealist
influence.
Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement in Paris from 1924 to
1941, consisting of a small group of writers, artists, and filmmakers,
including André Breton (1896–1966), Salvador Dali (1904–1989), and Luis Buñuel
(1900–1983). The movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and
Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to
represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterised
by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of
shocking imagery.
Critics
have debated whether 'Surrealist film' constitutes a distinct genre.
Recognition of a cinematographic genre involves the ability to cite many works
which share thematic, formal, and stylistic traits. To refer to Surrealism as a
genre is to imply that there is repetition of elements and a recognizable,
generic formula which describes their makeup. Several critics have argued that,
due to Surrealism's use of the irrational and on non-sequitur, it is impossible
for Surrealist films to constitute a genre or a style. In his 2006 book Surrealism and Cinema, Michael
Richardson argues that surrealist works cannot be defined by style or form, but
rather as results of the practice of surrealism. Richardson writes: "Within popular
conceptions, surrealism is misunderstood in many different ways, some of which
contradict others, but all of these misunderstandings are founded in the fact
that they seek to reduce surrealism to a style or a thing in itself rather than
being prepared to see it as an activity with broadening horizons. Many critics
fail to recognized the distinctive qualities that make up the surrealist
attitude. They seek something – a theme, a particular type of imagery, certain
concepts – they can identify as 'surrealist' in order to provide a criterion of
judgement by which a film or art work can be appraised. The problem is that
this goes against the very essence of surrealism, which refuses to be here
but is always elsewhere. It is not a thing but a relation between
things and therefore needs to be treated as a whole.
DADA ROOTS
"Dada was a movement that
attracted artists in all media. It began around 1915, as a result of artists'
sense of the vast, meaningless loss of life in World War I. Artists in New York, Zurich, France, and Germany proposed to sweep aside
traditional values and to elevate an absurdist view of the world. They would
base artistic creativity on randomness and imagination. Max Ernst displayed an
artwork and provided a hatchet so that spectators could demolish it. Marcel
Duchamp invented "ready-made" artwork, in which a found object is
placed in a museum and labeled; in 1917, he created a scandal by signing a urinal
"R. Mutt" and trying to enter it in a prestigious show. Dadaists were
fascinated by collage, the
technique of assembling disparate elements in bizarre juxtapositions. Ernst,
for example, made collages by pasting together scraps of illustrations from
advertisements and technical manuals.
Under the leadership of poet Tristan Tzara, Dadaist publications,
exhibitions, and performances flourished during the late 1910s and early 1920s.
The performance soirée
included such events as poetry readings in which several passages were
performed simultaneously. On July 7, 1923, the last major Dada event, the Soirée du 'Coeur à Barbe' (Soirée
of the ' Bearded Heart' ), included three short films: a study of New York by
American artists Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, one of Hans Richter's Rhythmus abstract animated works,
and the American artist Man Ray's first film, the ironically titled Le retour à
la raison (Return to Reason). The element of chance certainly entered into the
creation of Retour à la raison,
since Tzara gave Ray only twenty four hours' notice that he was to make a film
for the program. Ray combined some hastily shot live footage with stretches of "Rayograms". The soirée proved a mixed
success, since Tzara's rivals, led by poet Andre Breton, provoked a riot in the
audience.
THE SURREALISTS
The surrealist image could be either
verbal or pictorial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem
incompatible with each other should be juxtaposed together in order to create
startling analogies that disrupt passive audience enjoyment and conventional
expectations of art. This technique was perhaps an influence of Soviet montage theory, with which the
surrealists were familiar. Second, the image must mark the beginning of an
exploration into the unknown rather than merely representing a thing of beauty.
The surrealist experience of beauty instead involved a psychic disturbance, a
"convulsive beauty" generated by the startling images and the
analogies they create in the mind of the viewer.
"Surrealism resembled
Dada in many ways, particularly in its disdain for orthodox aesthetic
traditions. Like Dada, Surrealism sought out startling juxtapositions. Andre
Breton, who led the break with the Dada is it and the creation of Surrealism,
cited an image from a work by the Comte de Lautreamont: "Beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a
sewing machine and an umbrella." The movement was heavily influenced
by the emerging theories of psychoanalysis. Rather than depending on pure
chance for the creation of artworks, Surrealists sought to tap the unconscious
mind. In particular, they wanted to render the incoherent narratives of dreams
directly in language or images, without the interference of conscious thought
processes.
Rose Hobart
Germaine Dulac, who had already worked extensively in regular
feature filmmaking and French Impressionism, turned
briefly to Surrealism, directing a screenplay by poet Antonin Artaud. The
result was La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman,
1928), which combines Impressionist techniques of cinematography with the
disjointed narrative logic of Surrealism. A clergyman carrying a large seashell
smashes laboratory beakers; an officer intrudes and breaks the shell, to the
clergyman's horror. The rest of the film consists of the priest's pursuing a
beautiful woman through an incongruous series of settingsThe initial screening
of the film provoked a riot at the small Studio des Ursulines theater, though
it is still not clear whether the instigators were Artaud's enemies or his
friends, protesting Dulac's softening of the Surrealist tone of the scenario.
With The Seashell and the Clergyman,
Dulac overhauls narrativity entirely and presents us with pure feminine desire,
intercut against masculine desires of a priest. Above all, Dulac is responsible
for "writing" a new cinematic language that expressed transgressive
female desires in a poetic manner.
Cornell avoided giving
more than a hint as to what the original plot, with its cheap jungle settings
and sinister turbaned villain, might have involved. Instead, he concentrated on
repetitions of gestures by the actress, edited together from different scenes;
on abrupt mismatches; and especially on Hobart's
reactions to items cut in from other films, which she seems to "see" through false eye line
matches. In one pair of shots, for example, she stares fascinated at a
slow-motion view of a falling drop creating ripples in a pool. Cornell
specified that his film be shown at silent speed (sixteen frames per second
instead of the usual twenty-four) and through a purple filter; it was to be
accompanied by Brazilian popular music. (Modern prints are tinted purple and
have the proper music.)"
Rose Hobart seems to have had a single screening in 1936, in a
New York gallery program of old films treated as "Goofy Newsreels".
Its poor reception dissuaded Cornell from showing it again for more than twenty
years.
"Whereas the French Impressionist filmmakers worked within the
commercial film industry, the Surrealist filmmakers relied on private patronage
and screened their work in small artists' gatherings. Such isolation is hardly surprising, since Surrealist
cinema was a more radical movement, producing films that perplexed and shocked
most audiences.
Surrealist cinema was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and
painting. According to its spokesperson, Andre Breton, "Surrealism [was]
based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association,
heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of
thought." Influenced by Freudian psychology, Surrealist art sought to
register the hidden currents of the unconscious, "in the absence of any
control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic and moral
preoccupation."
Automatic writing and
painting, the search for bizarre or evocative imagery, the deliberate avoidance
of rationally explicable form or style - these became features of Surrealism as
it developed in the period 1924-1929. From the start, the Surrealists were
attracted to the cinema, especially admiring films that presented untamed
desire or the fantastic and marvelous (for example, slapstick comedies,
Nosferatu, and serials about mysterious supercriminals). Surrealist cinema is
overtly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself. If rationality is to be
fought, causal connections among events must be dissolved, as in The
Seashell and the Clergyman.
The hero gratuitously shoots a child (L’Âge
d’or), a woman closes her eyes only to reveal eyes painted on her eyelids
(Ray's Emak Bakia, 1927), and - most famous of all - a man strops a razor and
deliberately slits the eyeball of an unprotesting woman (Un chien andalou). An
Impressionist film would motivate such events as a character's dreams or
hallucinations, but in these films, character psychology is all but
nonexistent. Sexual desire and ecstasy, violence, blasphemy, and bizarre humor
furnish events that Surrealist film form employs with a disregard for
conventional narrative principles. The hope was that the free form of the film
would arouse the deepest impulses of the viewer.
The style of Surrealist cinema
is eclectic. Mise-en-scene
is often influenced by Surrealist painting. The ants in Un chien andalou come from Dali's pictures; the pillars
and city squares of The Seashell and the Clergyman hark back to the
Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealist editing is an amalgam of some
Impressionist devices (many dissolves and superimpositions) and some devices of
the dominant cinema. The shocking eyeball slitting at the start of Un chien
andalou relies on some principles of continuity editing (and indeed on the
Kuleshov effect). However, discontinuous editing is also commonly used to
fracture any organized temporalspatial coherence. In Un Chien andalou,
the heroine locks the man out of a room only to turn to find him inexplicably
behind her. On the whole, Surrealist film style refused to canonize any
particular devices, since that would order and rationalize what had to be an
"undirected play of thought."
The fortunes of Surrealist cinema shifted with changes in the art
movement as a whole. By late 1929, when Breton joined the Communist Party,
Surrealists were embroiled in internal dissension about whether communism was a
political equivalent of Surrealism. Buñuel left France
for a brief stay in Hollywood and then returned
to Spain.
The chief patron of Surrealist filmmaking, the Vicomte de Noailles, supported
Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduite (1933), a film of Surrealist ambitions, but then
stopped sponsoring the avant-garde. Thus, as a unified movement, French
Surrealism was no longer viable after 1930. Individual Surrealists continued to
work, however. The most famous was Buñuel, who continued to work in his own
brand of the Surrealist style for 50 years. His later films, such as Belle de
jour (1967) and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), continue the
Surrealist tradition." In 1947 Hans Richter released Dreams That Money Can
Buy, seven short episodes that examine the unconscious, written by and
featuring Richter, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst (1891–1976),
and Alexander Calder (1898–1976). Besides Bunuel's work, this is the last
official surrealist film.
After World War I,
France looked toward avant-garde cinema to make its mark against Hollywood.
Impressionism, which focused on psychological realism, naturalism, and
symbolism, became the dominant French film movement. The surrealists, many of
whom were avid film spectators, despised impressionism, but they admired
lowbrow American serials and slapstick comedies. Breton and his fellow
surrealists found the modernism of Hollywood
cinema an exciting medium in its infancy, unencumbered by a conscious artistic
tradition.
Though dada rejected
cinema as a medium of impressionism, a few dada artists experimented with
filmmaking. The Rhythmus films (1921, 1923, 1925) of Hans Richter
(1888–1976) and Symphonie diagonal (Symphonie diaganale, 1924) of
Viking Eggeling (1880–1925) attempted to establish a universal pictorial
language using abstract geometric shapes in rhythmic movement. Duchamp produced
Anémic
cinema (Anemic Cinema, 1926), in which he filmed a
spinning spiral design intercut with a spinning disc containing French phrases.
Man Ray (1890–1976) filmed Le Retour à la raison ( Return to Reason ,
1923) using an avant-garde photography technique he pioneered and named the
"rayograph." Though cubist artist Fernand Léger (1881–1955) and
filmmaker Dudley Murphy (1897–1968) were not members of dada, their
collaborative abstract film Ballet mécanique (1924) is often discussed
in relation to these films because of its similar visual style and Léger's aim
to exasperate viewers. Richter's Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts
Before Breakfast, 1928) merged slapstick and dada to create a highly
entertaining six-minute film.
GERMAINE
DULAC
b. Amiens, France, 17 November 1882, d. 20
July 1942
A director, writer, and film theorist,
Germaine Dulac was the first female avant-garde filmmaker in France. She was
never an official member of the surrealist movement, but her theory of
"pure cinema" shared similar goals and ideals to those of surrealism.
Though many of Dulac's films were highly successful commercial narratives
(serials and melodramas), her best moments evoked emotion without resorting to
dramatic devices. Her skill of tapping into the unconscious processes of her
characters and her viewers' perceptions linked her thematically to the
surrealists. Dulac's goal of "pure cinema" centered on producing films that were independent of literary, theatrical, or other artistic influences. Throughout her film career, she experimented with new ways of presenting characters' inner emotions and exploring their psychological states through cinematic means without ever being tied to one particular avant-garde movement. Her editing techniques have been compared to those of D. W. Griffith, creating an unconscious reaction in the mind of the viewer. She was also very skilled in incorporating music into her later sound films to create visual and aural rhythms.
Dulac's pre-film background involved feminism and journalism, and her films return time and again to themes of femininity. Her films directly challenge the romantic perceptions, metaphorical mythologies, and social constructions of womanhood. She distinguishes between male and female subjectivity in La Mort du soleil ( The Death of the Sun , 1922) and focuses on female subjectivity in La Souriante Madame Beudet ( The Smiling Madame Beudet , 1922), in which she uses a number of special effects, lighting, and editing techniques to represent directly the protagonist's thoughts and imagination.
In 1927 Dulac came across surrealist Antonin Artaud's screenplay for La Coquille et le clergyman ( The Seashell and the Clergyman ), which he had deposited at a film institute due to lack of funds to produce it. The surrealists considered Dulac, who was already well established in the Parisian avant-garde film community, to be strictly impressionist—too loyal to traditions of naturalism and symbolism for their liking. Dulac followed Artaud's script closely in her 1928 film, only changing a few practical elements when necessary. Yet Artaud claimed she had butchered his script, and he staged a riot during the premiere screening. Although André Breton had expelled Artaud from the surrealists the previous year, the group joined in the riot, screaming profanities and halting projection of the film. La Coquille et le Clergyman was removed from the program and its surrealism was overshadowed that year by Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien andalou ( An Andalusian Dog , 1928). Though the surrealists themselves rejected the film, most critics today consider La Coquille et le Clergyman to be the first surrealist film.
Erin Foster
The
Surrealist film Un
Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929)
was a collaboration between filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali.
surrealistic dream
sequence in Spellbound (1945). All other attempts Dali made at
filmmaking proved unsuccessful, and he soon after returned to painting.
Cinema came relatively
late in the surrealist movement, and it was never fully utilized, much to the
regret of Breton. This was probably due to the actual practicalities of
filmmaking, which were inherently opposed to the surrealist ideals of chance
and automation. Buñuel was the only surrealist to have gotten seriously
involved in the technical and practical aspects of the medium, which may have
also helped lead him to breaking with the movement. Another limiting factor in
surrealist film experimentation was that amateur filmmaking was extremely
expensive until after World War II; afterward, cheaper film equipment became
available, but by then the surrealist movement had disbanded. In 1947 Hans
Richter released Dreams That Money Can Buy , seven short episodes that
examine the unconscious, written by and featuring Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp,
Léger, Max Ernst (1891–1976), and Alexander Calder (1898–1976). Besides
Buñuel's work, this is the last official surrealist film.
Though surrealist film was limited, the
artistic ideals of surrealism have been influential for a number of filmmakers.
American experimental filmmakers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth
Anger utilized the surrealistic approach to push the boundaries of film
representation and shock audiences out of passive spectatorship. Deren's Meshes
of the Afternoon (1943) uses a repetitive, loosely narrative structure and
Freudian symbolism to examine female subjectivity in cinema. Brakhage sometimes
painted or scratched abstract designs directly onto celluloid, and films of his
such as Dog Star Man (1962) use repetitive or unrelated imagery in ways
that often alienate viewers. In Anger's dreamlike Fireworks (1947), the
director uses violent imagery to explore his own homosexuality. The surrealist
aesthetic also is apparent in animation, particularly in Japanese animé and in
the work of eastern European animators like Jan Svankmajer. European auteurs
like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Wim Wenders also owe a debt to
surrealism. American filmmakers David Lynch and Terry Gilliam and Canadian
David Cronenberg also rely heavily on surrealistic imagery, ironic
juxtapositions, misleading narrative devices, and Freudian symbolism to shock,
confuse, and challenge spectators.
FILM FORM AND STYLE
- Use of a variety of conventional devices and techniques without wanting to be tied down to
- Any predictable form. Dissolves, superimposition's + some traditional editing conventions.
- Point of view shots , a mixture of discontinuity and continuity editing and the unexpected
- Juxtaposition of images were often used to shock and disorientate the spectator.
Mise - en - Scene was
often influenced by surrealist paintings, e.g. the ants in 'Un Chien'
from Dali's paintings, the pillars and city squares in 'The seashell and the Clergyman' from
De Chirico's paintings. Objects/things often positioned out of
context - free to live a life of
their own and be shown in a new light.
Breton referred to beauty ' as the unexpected
meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing
machine
and an umbrella'.
Impressionism
was the first art movement to be categorized as modernist. Impressionist
painters focused more on the act of seeing then on the subject. They purposefully
made the viewer aware of the brush strokes rather then the pretense of
attempting to replicate reality.
Cubism focused
on playing with perspective, where the artist would show the viewer several
different perspectives of one subject. This sentiment is most well known for
Pablo Picasso. It can also be seen in literature with a book like Faulkner’s As
I Lay Dying.
Expressionism
focused on manipulating physical reality as a means to reflect the emotional
state of the artist or the main character.
Futurism focused
displaying speed and movement. A Woman Descends A Staircase is the
best example of this sentiment. The futurists loved modern technology and
images of the future. I would imagine that they would have loved modern action
movies, that is if most of the futurists weren’t killed in WWII.
Fauvism, a
little known movement, focused on presenting the viewer with a strong pallet of
color.
Surrealism was a
movement that played with the very means of representation. Salvador Dali’s
works appear to exist in a universe where the physical properties of matter are
amorphous, where the subject of representation is up to interpenetration.
Magritte was far more blatant with his examination between reality and
representation. Since motion pictures is a more photographic medium, Surrealist
filmmakers like Bunuel played with narrative conventions, spacial and temporal
relations, and the social relations between characters that defied convention
and logic.
“Los
Olvidados,” which translates to “the forgotten ones,” was one of the series of
films Bunuel made after a fifteen-year hiatus from film that ended shortly
after his move to Mexico in the 1940s. Bunuel had been exiled from Spain after
the Spanish Civil War, having been a member of the Spanish Republic, and
despite the controversy around “L’Age d’or” (and Dali) and the surrealistic
nature of even his documentary, “Land without Bread,” MGM studios in Hollywood
offered him a contract. He made no films whist there. In Mexico, the “Golden
Age of Mexican Cinema” (1930s-50s) was in full swing. Bunuel was attracted to
the flourishing industry, the product of which was not seen in the U.S. though
exported to other Latin countries well, and worked there for 15 years (until
the 1960s). Surprisingly, during this period his career was in the commercial
film industry. “Los Olvidados” was the film marked his return to the
international film scene. Bunuel was uneasy about its release, predicating that
the Italian Neo-Realist influences evident in his new style would be
interpreted as a betrayal of his Surrealism roots by friends and colleagues. In
fact, the film was received with acclaim, and is considered on the key films in
Latin American and World cinemas. I found it interesting that the opening
sequence served almost like a reminder to the world that Mexico exists, too,
and that it’s problems resemble those of European countries, too. This move,
and many other gestures in the film, including the powerful dream sequence, put
the Bunuel twist on neo-realism. Surrealism’s link with dreams actually
supported the presence of organic and realistic symbolism and metaphors found
in recurrent imagery, such as chickens. Early on in “Los Olvidados” a guiding
metaphor is established during a cruelly violent scene, in which the gang
of boys attack the blind, elderly fascist. The high camera angle used
here and throughout the film, visually reiterates the idea of an old Spanish
saying that translates loosely to “a blind man’s blows” and points to the idea
of striking blindly. All the characters depicted in the film are vulnerable to
feeling the need to lash out and react, but know not what to or what for, and
in that sense all the strikes and blows of the film are “blind.” In their
desperation there is little difference between Jaibo killing Julian, and Pedro
killing the chickens. Desperation and the almost utter lack of control they
have over their lives lead them to strike against each other, in the attempt of
the oppressed to become the oppressors instead. Chickens are not metaphors for
anything, though they are a running symbol throughout. More than anything, they
are a part of the daily reality of the characters lives, but here their
presence has a surrealist twist, which alerts us that something is off. It’s
only fitting that they be in most realistic and surrealist scenes.
Pedro’s
dream is the most surreal sequence. It depicts a dream in which you’re dreaming
that you’re dreaming and are in the place where you’re sleeping. It plays out
in slow motion, and is rife with edible implications. Unlike in his surrealist
films where the boundaries between dream and reality are barely existent, this
is clearly delineated as a dream, which on the one hand, makes it a
conventional device, but on the other hand, heightens the sense of reality. The
latter is due mainly to the nature and content of the dream being of such a palpable,
physical quality, like a slab of raw meat.
The
way characters are developed as both conventions and realistically human is an
interesting quality that the film implements. For example, all of the
characters have some resonance of reality, but Ojitos stands out for he is both
different and one and the same as the rest. During “milk bath” sequence we
witness the not only the developing affection between him and Metche, but also
his capacity for violence. He is undoubtedly a good and sweet boy, but he will
also strike out in defense. The blind man appears to be more of a convention
than a particular. As a matter of fact, Bunuel was not fond of blind men, and
had a history of roughing them up in his films (as in the opening sequence of
“L’age d’or”) because they are conventional objects of piety and charity, and
more importantly, of self-satisfied benefaction. He puts a spin on this one,
making the blind man a fascist sympathizer.
Surrealism
and Cinema: Un Chien Andalou:
Bunuel
seems to have had a flare for turning conventions against the conventional. The
narrative, like the symbolism and character treatment, uses a typical device
atypically and in a way that seems to have grown organically out of the
circumstances. The narrative frequently employs the use of coincidence,
but with a realistic function. It adds to the sense how just how intertwined
their lives are, how inescapable the forces of one’s life are, that they are
running around in circles, friction is bottled up, and there is a looming sense
of “sooner or later,” as well as an incestuous quality to the way the lives and
affairs are entangled in these slum areas. All of this comes to a head as a
result of an outside force stepping in. Interestingly, the director of the
youth farm is an authority figure, on e of the few in the film, and portrayed
in a positive light. More interesting is that his good gesture of the best
intentions toward Pedro had the unfortunate and immediate consequence of
leading to tragedy. In fact, it’s a double tragedy because the director had
read Pedro right and Pedro was responding positively. This leads us to ask,
what turned the situation sour? Following this thought thread we end up in a
conflict of problemetizing moralizing. Pedro overcompensates for his feelings
of shame and thinks he cannot return to the farm empty handed. Jaibo
overcompensates his feeling of abandonment by turning on anyone he ever called
a friend. When they duel it out, one could see Pedro as the good boy and Jaibo
the bad, yet the film is not melodramatic in this regard. Here the boys are
treated more like opposite heads of the same coin in the sense that both are
products of similar circumstances. In this way, Pedro’s mother is put on their
same level. It’s important to note that despite seeing how morally questionable
she is, we can empathize with her well she retorts to the official’s
condescension, “what could I do?”. In this example, and in other ways the film
puts moralizing on the back burner, taking up instead a stance that things are
not right, hammered home by the protagonist dying among and being equated with
the chickens. Its also present in the difficulty one has in labeling hero and
villain, finding instead a doubling. Jaibo and Pedro even die “together,”
serially back to back, and both are shown as victims, and victimizers also.
"I
Vitelloni" (1953) directed by Frederico Fellini
Fellini, one of the most famous filmmakers, collaborated frequently with
Rossellini, is accredited for writing “Rome, Open City,” and had only had his
first solo directing job, “Lights of Variety,” a year prior to making
“I’Vitelloni” in 1953. The title literally means, “fatted calves,” but is used
metaphorically in the film for the group of young men who are more or less
living off of their families. The term is now used colloquially, and Fellini
can be credited with introducing “paparazzi” into the vernacular. Fellini’s
work was indebted to neo-realism, but is full of his personal touches. In terms
of the narrative, “I’Vitelloni” is a little bit of both. Fellini was actually
from a small seaside town, though on the opposite coast of Italy, and the film
reflects his experiences growing up in a beach town off-season. The
focus is on the location and the locals, those who live there year round.
“I’Vitelloni” has a very interesting narrative structure
that’s worth taking a look at. While it is certainly a story of the place, and
the ocean representing both horizons and barriers, as well as being part of the
logistical reality, the films main interest lies in its narrative structure in
relation to character development. It is an ensemble piece, and the voice-over
narrator speaks in the first person plural as if one of the group, and yet the
question of “who is the narrator?” cannot really be resolved. The P.O.V. of the
film is not with any one character, but it also never strays from the
individuals of the group, and is therefore not omniscient. There is actually
very little to the plot, and what is there is fleshed out by the subjectivity
and focus on events that the individuals of the group experience. For example,
it’s not all that interesting that a womanizer who had to have a shotgun
wedding would cheat on his wife. What is interesting is how the scene plays
out.
Firstly, it assumes Fausto’s P.O.V. As he follows her we
get a good sense of the place, how quite, safe, and dull the town is at night.
The time of the scene is equitable to Fausto’s subjective sense of time, so
that the screen time and his conception of how much time has passed is only
about 3 minutes, but the time that elapsed in the fictional “real time” was
much more, and he was merely unaware of it. Another example would be the
encounter between Leopoldo and the penny-theater actor. There is again a vivid
sense of space, but now the atmosphere, with all the howling wind and looming
shadows, is a bit spooky and reflects Leopoldo’s fear. He is not a afraid as a
result of the weather, but because of what the dialogue with actor represents.
Outwardly, we can surmise that he is afraid of leaving the nest, and of the
actor’s homosexual pass. The latter is not frightening, but is opens up his
fear of the outside world, for Leopoldo is a dreamer not a doer. Unfortunately,
for any chances he may have had for his career, his fear is misplaced onto the
actor. The final sequence takes Moraldo’s P.O.V. Many initially believe that
Moraldo is the narrator, having been the only one to leave and thus be able to
look back upon it. Certainly, Moraldo is most like Fellini himself, but he is
not the narrator. He does, however, provide us with a striking and tender exit
to the story. In a sequence of traveling shots we pass by all in the group as
if on the train and in his head saying his mental farewells to his sleeping
friends.
Both of these films are ensemble pieces, with a
group narrative structure. Neither film is strictly neo-realist, though the
movement heavily influenced both. Fellini came into it via Rossellini, but came
out of it via his own devices and taking his own approaches. Both films are
undeniably stories of the place, and carry with them and vivid sense of the
space. “I’Vitelloni” more so, but neither film has a tight narrative, either.
As is “Bicycle Thieves” the looseness of it lends itself to the realism, in
that it makes the plot more open and the story more permeable to reality, as
well as allowing for a greater exploration of the space. All three films all
seem to deal with themes that involve the vicious circles social classes go in.
Surrealism has long been recognized as having made a major
contribution to film theory and practice, and many contemporary film-makers
acknowledge its influence. Most of the critical literature, however, focuses
either on the 1920s or the work of Buuel. The aim of this book is to open up a
broader picture of surrealism's contribution to the conceptualisation and
making of film. Tracing the work of Luis Buuel, Jacques Pervert, Nelly Kaplan,
Walerian Borowcyzk, Jan vankmajer, Raul Ruiz and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Surrealism
and Cinema charts the history of surrealist film-making in both Europe and
Hollywood from the 1920s to the present day. At once a critical introduction
and a provocative re-evaluation, Surrealism and Cinema is essential reading for
anyone interested in surrealist ideas and art and the history of film.
Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement in
Paris from 1924 to 1941, consisting of a small group of writers, artists, and
filmmakers, including André Breton (1896–1966), Salvador Dali (1904–1989), and
Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). The movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd
imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of
art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is
characterised by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a
frequent use of shocking imagery.
Critics have debated whether 'Surrealist film'
constitutes a distinct genre. Recognition of a cinematographic genre involves
the ability to cite many works which share thematic, formal, and stylistic
traits. To refer to Surrealism as a genre is to imply that there is repetition
of elements and a recognizable, generic formula which describes their makeup.
Several critics have argued that, due to Surrealism's use of the irrational and
on non-sequitur, it is impossible for Surrealist films to constitute a genre or
a style. In his 2006 book Surrealism and Cinema, Michael Richardson
argues that surrealist works cannot be defined by style or form, but rather as
results of the practice of surrealism. Richardson writes: "Within popular
conceptions, surrealism is misunderstood in many different ways, some of which
contradict others, but all of these misunderstandings are founded in the fact
that they seek to reduce surrealism to a style or a thing in itself rather than
being prepared to see it as an activity with broadening horizons. Many critics
fail to recognise the distinctive qualities that make up the surrealist
attitude. They seek something – a theme, a particular type of imagery, certain
concepts – they can identify as 'surrealist' in order to provide a criterion of
judgement by which a film or art work can be appraised. The problem is that
this goes against the very essence of surrealism, which refuses to be here
but is always elsewhere. It is not a thing but a relation between
things and therefore needs to be treated as a whole.
Surrealists are not concerned with conjuring up
some magic world that can be defined as 'surreal'. Their interest is almost
exclusively in exploring the conjunctions, the points of contact, between
different realms of existence. Surrealism is always about departures rather
than arrivals."
[3]
While there are numerous films which are true
expressions of the movement, many other films which have been classified as
Surrealist simply contain Surrealist fragments. Rather than 'Surrealist film'
the more accurate term for such works may be 'Surrealism in film'.
Film Styles
- British New Wave
- Cinema Novo
- Cinéma vérité
- Film Noir
- French Impressionism
- German Expressionism
- Italian Neorealism
- Nouvelle Vague
- Screwball Comedy
Even
though by 1922, dada was dead, key Dada films were still to come. "In late
1924, Dada artist Francis Picabia staged his ballet Relâche (meaning
"performance called off"). Signs in the auditorium bore such
statements as "If you are not satisfied, go to hell." During the
intermission (or entr'acte), René Clair's Entr'acte was shown, with music by
composer Erik Satie, who had done the music for the entire show. The evening
began with a brief film prologue (seen as the opening segment of modern prints
of Entr'acte) in which Satie and Picabia leap in slow motion into a scene and
fire a cannon directly at the audience. The rest of the film, appearing during
the intermission, consisted of unconnected, wildly irrational scenes. Picabia
summed up the Dada view when he characterized Clair's film: "Entr'acte
does not believe in very much, in the pleasure of life, perhaps; it believes in
the pleasure of inventing, it respects nothing except the desire to burst out
laughing."
Dada artist Marcel Duchamp
made one foray into cinema during this era. By 1913, Duchamp had moved away
from abstract painting to experiment with such forms as ready- mades and
kinetic sculptures. The latter included a series of motor-driven spinning
discs. With the help of Man Ray, Duchamp filmed some of these discs to create Anémic
cinema in 1926. This brief film undercuts traditional notions of cinema as a
visual, narrative art. All its shots show either turning abstract disks or
disks with sentences containing elaborate French puns. By emphasizing simple
shapes and writing, Duchamp created an "anemic" style. (Anemic is
also an anagram for cinema.) In keeping with his playful attitude, he signed
the film "Rrose Selavy", a pun on Eros c'est la vie (Eros is life).
Entr'acte and other dada films were on the 1925
Berlin program, and they convinced German filmmakers like Walter Ruttman and
Hans Richter that modernist style could be created in films without completely
abstract, painted images. Richter, who had been linked with virtually every
major modern art movement, dabbled in Dada. In his Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts
before Breakfast, 1928), special effects show objects rebelling against their
normal uses. In reverse motion, cups shatter and reassemble. Bowler hats take
on a life of their own and fly through the air, and the ordinary laws of nature
seem to be suspended."
Riven by
internal dissension, the European Dada movement was largely over by 1922. Many
of its members formed another group, the Surrealists. While many dadaists
considered Breton to be a traitor to dada, others made the transition directly
into surrealism. After a brief period of what was termed "le mouvement
flou,"(the fuzzy movement) in which the surrealists defined the movement
by reference to the discarded dada, Breton (known as the Pope of Surrealism)
published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It was
surrealism's declaration of the rights of man through the liberation of the
unconscious. The goal of surrealism was to synthesize dream and reality so that
the resulting art challenged the limits of representation and perception.
Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct transmitter of thought
and focused instead on expressing the rupture and duality of language through
imagery.
The surrealist image could be either verbal or
pictorial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem incompatible with
each other should be juxtaposed together in order to create startling analogies
that disrupt passive audience enjoyment and conventional expectations of art.
This technique was perhaps an influence of Soviet montage theory, with which
the surrealists were familiar. Second, the image must mark the beginning of an
exploration into the unknown rather than merely representing a thing of beauty.
The surrealist experience of beauty instead involved a psychic disturbance, a
"convulsive beauty" generated by the startling images and the
analogies they create in the mind of the viewer.
Germaine Dulac,
who had already worked extensively in regular feature filmmaking and French
Impressionism, turned briefly to Surrealism, directing a screenplay by poet
Antonin Artaud. The result was La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and
the Clergyman, 1928), which combines Impressionist techniques of cinematography
with the disjointed narrative logic of Surrealism. A clergyman carrying a large
seashell smashes laboratory beakers; an officer intrudes and breaks the shell,
to the clergyman's horror. The rest of the film consists of the priest's
pursuing a beautiful woman through an incongruous series of settings. His love
seems to be perpetually thwarted by the intervention of the officer. Even after
the priest marries the woman, he is left alone drinking from the shell. The
initial screening of the film provoked a riot at the small Studio des Ursulines
theater, though it is still not clear whether the instigators were Artaud's
enemies or his friends, protesting Dulac's softening of the Surrealist tone of
the scenario. With The Seashell and the Clergyman, Dulac overhauls
narrativity entirely and presents us with pure feminine desire, intercut
against masculine desires of a priest. Above all, Dulac is responsible for
"writing" a new cinematic language that expressed transgressive
female desires in a poetic manner.
Perhaps the quintessential
Surrealist film was created in 1928 by novice director Luis
Buñuel. A Spanish film enthusiast and modernist poet, Buñuel had come to
France and been hired as an assistant by Jean Epstein. Working in collaboration
with Salvador Dali, he made Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Its basic
story concerned a quarrel between two lovers, but the time scheme and logic are
impossible. Throughout, intertitles announce meaningless intervals of time
passing, as when "sixteen years earlier" appears within an action
that continues without pause." A series of shocking sequences were
designed to challenge any audience: a hand opens to reveal a wound from which a
group of ants emerge; a young man drags two grand pianos across a room, laden
with a pair of dead donkeys and two nonplussed priests, in a vain attempt to
win the affection of a woman he openly lusts after. These are just two of the
more outrageous sequences in the film; perhaps the most famous scene occurs
near the beginning, when Buñuel himself is seen stropping a razor on a balcony
and then ritualistically slitting the eyeball of a young woman who sits
passively in a chair a moment later.
Buñuel and Dali would collaborate on one more film together, the very
early sound picture L'âge d'or (The Age of Gold, 1930), but the two artists
fell out on the first day of shooting, with Buñuel chasing Dali from the set
with a hammer. L’Âge d’or was savagely anticlerical, and the initial
screening caused such a riot that the film was banned for many years before
finally appearing in a restored version on DVD. L'âge d'or loosely follows
two lovers whose passion defies society’s conventions; the film begins with a
documentary on the mating habits of scorpions and ends with an off-screen orgy
in a monastery. Bunuel, when asked to describe L'âge d'or, said that
it was nothing less than "a desperate and passionate call to murder."
Jean Cocteau, a
multitalented artist whose boldly Surrealist work in the theater, as well as
his writings and drawings, defined the yearnings and aspirations of a
generation. His groundbreaking sound feature film, Le sang d'un poète (The
Blood of a Poet, 1930), was not shown publicly until 1932 because of
controversy surrounding the production of Dali and Buñuel’s L'âge d'or,
both films having been produced by the Vicomte de Noailles, a wealthy patron of
the arts.
Dispensing almost entirely
with plot, logic, and conventional narrative, The Blood of a Poet
relates the adventures of a young poet who is forced to enter the mirror in his
room to walk through a mysterious hotel, where his dreams and fantasies are
played out before his eyes. Escaping from the mirror by committing ritualistic
suicide, he is then forced to watch the spectacle of a young boy being killed
with a snowball with a rock center during a schoolyard fight and then to play
cards with Death, personified by a woman dressed in funeral black. When the
poet tries to cheat, he is exposed, and again kills himself with a small
handgun. Death leaves the card room triumphantly, and the film concludes with a
note of morbid victory.
Photographed by the great Georges Périnal, with music by Georges Auric, The
Blood of a Poet represented a dramatic shift in the production of the
sound film. Though influenced by the work of Dali and Buñuel and the Surrealist
films of Man Ray and René Clair, the picture represents nothing so much as an
opium dream (Cocteau famously employed the drug as an aid to his creative
process). Throughout, Cocteau uses a great deal of trick photography, including
negative film spliced directly into the final cut to create an ethereal effect,
mattes (photographic inserts) to place a human mouth in the palm of the poet’s
hand, and reverse motion, slow motion, and cutting in the camera to make people
and objects disappear. For someone who had never before made a film, Cocteau
had a remarkably intuitive knowledge of the plastic qualities of the medium, which
he would exploit throughout his long career."
"Self-taught American
artist Joseph Cornell had begun painting in the early
1930s, but he quickly became known chiefly for his evocative assemblages of
found obj ects inside glass-sided display boxes. Mixing antique toys, maps,
movie-magazine clippings, and other emphemeral items mostly scavenged from New
York secondhand shops, these assemblages created an air of mystery and
nostalgia. Although Cornell led an isolated life in Queens, he was fascinated
by ballet, music, and cinema. He loved all types of films, from Carl Dreyer's The
Passion of Joan of Arc to B movies, and he amassed a collection of 16mm
prints.
In 1936, he completed Rose
Hobart, a compilation film that combines clips from scientific documentaries
with reedited footage from an exotic Universal thriller, East of Borneo (1931).
The fiction footage centers around East of Borneo's lead actress, Rose
Hobart. Cornell avoided giving more than a hint as to what the original plot,
with its cheap jungle settings and sinister turbaned villain, might have
involved. Instead, he concentrated on repetitions of gestures by the actress,
edited together from different scenes; on abrupt mismatches; and especially on
Hobart's reactions to items cut in from other films, which she seems to
"see" through false eyeline matches. In one pair of shots, for
example, she stares fascinatedly at a slow-motion view of a falling drop
creating ripples in a pool. Cornell specified that his film be shown at silent
speed (sixteen frames per second instead of the usual twenty-four) and through
a purple filter; it was to be accompanied by Brazilian popular music. (Modern
prints are tinted purple and have the proper music.)"
Rose Hobart seems to have had a single
screening in 1936, in a New York gallery program of old films treated as
"Goofy Newsreels". Its poor reception dissuaded Cornell from showing
it again for more than twenty years.
Surrealist Cinema's Style:
"Whereas the French
Impressionist filmmakers worked within the commercial film industry, the
Surrealist filmmakers relied on private patronage and screened their work in small
artists' gatherings. Such isolation is hardly surprising, since Surrealist
cinema was a more radical movement, producing films that perplexed and shocked
most audiences.
Surrealist cinema
was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and painting. According to its
spokesperson, Andre Breton, "Surrealism [was] based on the belief in the
superior reality of certain forms of association, heretofore neglected, in the
omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought." Influenced by
Freudian psychology, Surrealist art sought to register the hidden currents of
the unconscious, "in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and
beyond any aesthetic and moral preoccupation."
Automatic
writing and painting, the search for bizarre or evocative imagery, the
deliberate avoidance of rationally explicable form or style - these became
features of Surrealism as it developed in the period 1924-1929. From the start,
the Surrealists were attracted to the cinema, especially admiring films that
presented untamed desire or the fantastic and marvelous (for example, slapstick
comedies, Nosferatu, and serials about mysterious supercriminals). Surrealist
cinema is overtly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself. If rationality is
to be fought, causal connections among events must be dissolved, as in The
Seashell and the Clergyman.
Many Surrealist films tease us to find a
narrative logic that is simply absent. Causality is as evasive as in a dream.
Instead, we find events juxtaposed for their disturbing effect. The hero
gratuitously shoots a child (L’Âge d’or), a woman closes her eyes only to
reveal eyes painted on her eyelids (Ray's Emak Bakia, 1927), and - most famous
of all - a man strops a razor and deliberately slits the eyeball of an
unprotesting woman (Un chien andalou). An Impressionist film would motivate
such events as a character's dreams or hallucinations, but in these films,
character psychology is all but nonexistent. Sexual desire and ecstasy,
violence, blasphemy, and bizarre humor furnish events that Surrealist film form
employs with a disregard for conventional narrative principles. The hope was that
the free form of the film would arouse the deepest impulses of the viewer.
The style of Surrealist
cinema is eclectic. Mise-en-scene is often influenced by Surrealist painting.
The ants in Un chien andalou come from Dali's pictures; the pillars
and city squares of The Seashell and the Clergyman hark back to the
Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealist editing is an amalgam of some
Impressionist devices (many dissolves and superimpositions) and some devices of
the dominant cinema. The shocking eyeball slitting at the start of Un chien
andalou relies on some principles of continuity editing (and indeed on the
Kuleshov effect). However, discontinuous editing is also commonly used to
fracture any organized temporalspatial coherence. In Un Chien andalou,
the heroine locks the man out of a room only to turn to find him inexplicably
behind her. On the whole, Surrealist film style refused to canonize any
particular devices, since that would order and rationalize what had to be an
"undirected play of thought."
The fortunes of Surrealist cinema shifted with
changes in the art movement as a whole. By late 1929, when Breton joined the
Communist Party, Surrealists were embroiled in internal dissension about
whether communism was a political equivalent of Surrealism. Buñuel left France
for a brief stay in Hollywood and then returned to Spain. The chief patron of
Surrealist filmmaking, the Vicomte de Noailles, supported Jean Vigo's Zéro de
conduite (1933), a film of Surrealist ambitions, but then stopped sponsoring
the avant-garde. Thus, as a unified movement, French Surrealism was no longer
viable after 1930. Individual Surrealists continued to work, however. The most
famous was Buñuel, who continued to work in his own brand of the Surrealist
style for 50 years. His later films, such as Belle de jour (1967) and Le charme
discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), continue the Surrealist tradition." In
1947 Hans Richter released Dreams That Money Can Buy, seven short episodes that
examine the unconscious, written by and featuring Richter, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp,
Fernand Léger, Max Ernst (1891–1976), and Alexander Calder (1898–1976). Besides
Bunuel's work, this is the last official surrealist film.
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