Surrealism and Cinema

Surrealism and Cinema

The conjunction of surrealism and cinema is a seducing one it evokes an undefined relation, a meeting point between the opposites of light and dark. Presence and absence, actuality and imagination which suggests the actualisation of the supreme point which Andre Breton identified as the aim of surrealism. So evocative is this concurrence that it already seems present in the human imagination long before either cinema or surrealism actually existed. 

Dark memories hovering below the transparent screen of the present will present images of reality in sharp silhouette to create the pleasurable effect of a doble world. The outer world become so transparent and the inner world so diverse and full of meaning that one finds oneself in a state of nervous animation between the two. 

- Novalis 

Surrealism is a cultural movement that emerged in the early 20th century as a response to the devastation and fragmentation caused by World War I. The movement was characterized by a rejection of rationality and a celebration of the irrational, the subconscious, and the dreamlike. Surrealism had a significant impact on the arts, including cinema, and its influence can be seen in a range of films, from experimental shorts to Hollywood blockbusters. 

This quote by Novalis suggests a form of dialectic linking thought and sight to plays of light and dark which evokes a condition the surrealists believed the cinema was uniquely qualified to induce. Surrealism has been transformed, for many people, into an evanescent category, reified as the ‘surreal,’ has gained such currency that it is rarely questioned what it might actually mean. It is important, therefore, to emphasise the extent to which surrealism from its very origins has consistently refused to be identified as any sort of style. If both Dalí and Magritte were surrealists, it was to the extent that they embraced a shared moral sensibility; their painting is the result of this commitment rather than its aim. Surrealism has never been concerned with the production of works, even if this is what it is most noted for. The works of surrealism must rather be seen as a residue, a mark of the practice of surrealism. But they are not the essential element of that activity. As Alain Joubert makes clear, Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, for instance, ‘cannot be considered as representative of some surrealist form; if we can witness the birth of a personal style in it, this does not represent the codification of a certain type of images according to a model destined to be indefinitely reproduced by others.

The question of intention should also be taken into account. 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.

but all 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.

If ‘surrealism’ can be said to ‘exist’ at all it is in the tension that exists between the activities of the surrealists and the fundamental principles of surrealism as it has historically unfolded.

André Robert Breton gives perhaps the only explicit statement of the qualities that make a work ‘surrealist’: it should, he asserted, strive to ‘encompass the whole psychophysical field,’ constituted by ’unfathomable depths in which there reigns the absence of contradiction, the relaxation of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure principle.’

Ado Kyrou argues that cinema is in essence surrealist. one imagines, he may have been responding to André Bazin’s contrary assertion that film was a fundamentally realist medium. Kyrou was not necessarily completely disagreeing with Bazin, since he was making a different sort of claim: it is not film as such that is surrealist, but cinema: the experience of seeing a film in a darkened hall. The claim that cinema is a fundamentally surrealist experience is founded upon several elements. The first is the obvious one of the analogy between film viewing and the dream state; the significance being that surrealism is not necessarily embodied by particular films, but is a phenomenon established by the environment of the cinema, created by the relationship the audience creates with the screen. Virtually any film could thus be potentially surrealist, at least if viewed from a certain angle. Conversely, it might be argued that no film could be surrealist if seen on television, because television lacks the possibility of communion, which is the essence of cinema for the surrealists. If a film could be viewed as surrealist under certain conditions, this did not make this or that film a ‘surrealist’ one. In fact there is no such thing as a ‘surrealist film’. There are only films made by surrealists and films that have an affinity or correspondence with surrealism, as well as those that have no affinity with surrealism. It is why the surrealists are interested in cinema rather than in film: it is the environment within which films are shown that provides a place in which the marvellous may be encountered. Breton defined cinema in the Manifesto: ‘Three cheers for darkened rooms!’ If, therefore, film is a realist medium, then the arena in which it was screened effectively subverts this realism.

The fact that the storyline had to be sustained by the use of images and music, with only minimal support from words, made early film a unique medium for the exploration of universal themes. Early cinema equally functioned as a powerful democratising mechanism, since the darkened room abolished class distinctions among the audience, while the fact that speech could not be used meant that language barriers were also temporarily overcome. This unique atmosphere did not last: each new technical innovation has served to break down the ritual atmosphere the surrealists cherished. In consequence, the surrealist experience of cinema has become increasingly remote with the passage of time. It is not simply because its flickering images are experienced in a dark room, that the surrealists were able to equate the experience of cinema with that of the dream. While it may be true that surrealist artists have used the dream in this way at times, to characterise this as a surrealist aim is to miss the point. What the dream offered the surrealists more than anything was an experience of otherness. For them the unconscious did not simply contain the detritus of everyday life, nor was it principally the realm of repressed memory. For all their interest in Freud, they were not concerned to rationalise the dream or the unconscious in this way. Dream was also – and perhaps principally – an arena of unknown experience, one that was contained within the individual, but was also projected onto the collective. It was in this projective quality, as much as in providing an environment analogous with the dream state, that cinema could be equated with dream. Films were projected not simply in a literal but also in a communicative sense: the film was a point of convergence in which a collective myth, emanating from within the unconscious of society as a whole, could be enacted. Andre Breton gives the most hyperbolic statement in surrealism:

‘The eye exists in a savage state.’ the statement is significant and bears witness to a surrealist desire to clean the slate, to reach the essence of things. That the eye does not exist in a savage state, that it is in fact the most acculturated of all the senses, does not bring into question the surrealist demand, but gives it a further dimension. We need to learn to place the eye in such a state of receptivity that it becomes able to see in a savage way’. At least this is one of the starting points of surrealist cinema, as is underlined by the famous first scene of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou.

As an idea, surrealism is nor seen as a style or a mechanism, equally it is not mode of existence. Surrealism can never be tied down to a thing; it is either dynamic or it is nothing.

Luis Bunuel: ‘The’ Surrealist Filmmaker

Un Chien andalou in the fact that it is ‘the primary source for the spread of a Surrealist style in the commercial cinema, the first film to assault its spectator systematically, the classic example of cinematic poetry, and an important precursor of the current American Avant Garde. His films are something more than a fierce attack on so-called reality; they are the revelation of another reality which contemporary civilization has humiliated. Certainly throughout Buñuel’s films there is a discernible thematic continuity that essentially seems in harmony with a surrealist world view. Buñuel is also probably unique as a film director in the fact that, more or less, as Robert Benayoun remarked, each of his films went beyond the previous one, in the sense that each new film, without demonstrating any ‘advance’, deepened and made more incisive the central themes of the other. Buñuel’s late movies show at the same time the triumph and the limits of traditional surrealist cinema. Fundamentally built upon the element of surprise, they proceed through industrious gags and absurdities (actually rather close to popular ‘misconceptions’ of surrealism); drawing on dreams, simplistic anti-bourgeois sentiments, more or less outdated anticlerical reflexes and murky banal eroticism. They are beautiful, marvellous, instigative, but they also represent an obvious cul-de-sac. 

Nelly Kaplan: The Revolutionary Surrealist

As the only female film maker linked with surrealism, Nelly Kaplan’s work raises the complex and controversial topic of the surrealist relation to women. Although she denies any feminist agenda and, like most of the women associated with surrealism, is suspicious of feminism as an ideology, insisting that her work exists beyond gender, Kaplan’s work has been taken up by feminist film critics and her films help to elucidate the theme of sexual relations in the context of surrealism. If it cannot be denied that issues of sexual politics are present in her work, it would be a serious error to reduce it to this.1 Kaplan addresses us in a tone of intimacy. She is concerned not to convince us, but to take us into her confidence. She demands accomplices rather than viewers, and it is in terms of a sense of complicity that her link with surrealism has to be understood: she is surrealist above all in the faith she places in revolt as a moral principle, pure revolt that has its own justification irrespective of the conditions that have given rise to it or the consequences it may have. It was under the sign of surrealism that she sought her intellectual weapons. In fact, she tends to wears her surrealism on her sleeve like a medal of honour, even whilst maintaining a certain distance from it: there are constant references to surrealist myths and ideas throughout her work and her heroines are generally marked by their surrealist tastes. The memory of the witchcraft burnings is a theme that runs through all of Kaplan’s work, giving a stimulus for the avenging role that many of her women characters assume. Kaplan’s surrealism is founded in a sense of complicity that begins in personal encounter but extends through elective affinity to those who participate in her world. Although never a member of the Surrealist Group, surrealism is integral to her work and in a sense she creates her own imaginary surrealist group with whom, like the crew of The Sperma in her novel Un Manteau de fou rire Mémoires d’une liseuse de draps, she embarks on a sensual adventure founded in revolt and passion. 

The influence exerted by surrealism on film has been immense but elusive, and as time goes by it becomes ever more diffuse and nebulous. Surrealism is not one thing, and there are as many manifestations of it as there are surrealists. Its protean nature, however, should not cause us to think that it can be anything, in the process causing us to lose sight of its specificity. We should also remember that surrealism itself will always escape us. It will forever be elsewhere, that point on the horizon which remains beyond our grasp. In the cinema it will be found wherever one has a sense of transparency in the dark.