Surrealism and Film

Surrealist film

and surrealist film

Introduction: Surrealism and Film

In a memorable vignette from this novel Nadja, Andre Breton relates an experience of an early French film serial “touching him like no other.” For a time, the plot of the film becomes the object of the narrative completely, the other trifles of life vanishing into the background, the film instead becoming the sole object of focus and deliberation. The Surrealists’ interest in the cinema is well known, and this memorable passage recalls a common activity of the fledging post-WWI Surrealist group. In the course of their seemingly endless treks through the city of Paris, the young artists would often stop at the popular movie houses and view short segments of films already in-progress, before becoming bored and eventually wandering out into the daylight, the continuity of the day’s journey broken by the spell of light and shadow upon the screen. In this way, according to Breton, they were able to make the act of film going a surreal act--adjusting their eyes back to the light and forced to resume life as usual, but given powerful creative fodder.

What can be extrapolated from this famous scenario? Even today, Surrealism is a difficult movement to interpret because many of its works still seem potent in their ability to captivate an audience, but also suspect, due to their naive, Romantic reliance on outdated psychological notions that have become cliché in the postmodern era. Nevertheless, the attempt to unravel and translate Surrealist thought is necessary if one is to fully understand the far-reaching effects of the avant-garde on contemporary points of view. In many ways, groups such as the Dadaists and Surrealists acted as bridge between 19th century and today, and examining these works of the immediate past can bring about awareness of the present, and reinvigorate the quest for the future of art in the 21st century.

The goal of this paper is to make sense of claims about Surrealism and film in contemporary culture. Nowadays, “surreal” is a label used to describe a vast range of contemporary films, but the exact nature of the films’ connection to Magritte, Ernst, and the theoretical framework of the Bretonian movement is unclear. Despite Breton’s engagement with the film medium, he wrote poetry and novels. The most famous Surrealists were painters, and art historians regard only a few films as examples of Surrealist film (films by Surrealists). And yet the term is used in contemporary film criticism to describe elements of commercial filmmakers as far apart as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. And the leading Surrealist filmmaker, Luis Buñuel continued making films long after the Surrealist movement had died.

Several questions emerge from the seeming facts. Could it be that the meaning of the term changed, or became so broad as to be meaningless? What would count as a surrealist film (utilizing a small “s” in order to separate it from the historical period), and is it still possible to construct a film that works upon the psyche in the same way as a piece of Surrealist art, despite the apparently different temperament of the postmodern artist?

In order to solve these questions, it seems essential to understand the effect of the early motion pictures on Breton and Surrealists and their effect, in turn, on the burgeoning medium. By evaluating the initial connection, we may understand the exact nature of Surrealism’s legacy in today’s cinema culture.

Film as medium

Surrealism and film are inexorably entwined both historically and formally. Breton and his contemporaries not only used film as a jumping off point for literary activity, they were also fascinated by the expressive possibilities of the medium itself, writing critical articles in Surrealist publications[1] about recognizably “surreal” elements in popular film (which usually focused on the elements of fantasy filmmakers used, following from Breton’s “There are fairy tales to be written for adults”[2]), and eventually sponsoring and making films themselves.

Why did the Surrealists latch onto this new technology? It is important to understand the intellectual foundations for Surrealism before we can begin to evaluate its output. Fundamentally, Surrealism must be seen as a resistance against the status quo from a pocket of young dissatisfied bourgeois; a desperate cry from a group of temperamental egos seeking intellectual freedom and artistic autonomy. Prompted by disillusionment with literary naturalism, Breton presented a particular codification of one artistic pocket’s reaction to aesthetic precedents in the first decades of 20th century. Breton lived in a dynamic world of powerful machines and buzzing electricity. As a participant in the First World War, he saw first hand the dramatic leaps technology had made for better and worse. And though the world seemed to be changing at an incredible rate, the primary literary enterprise was the novel, which despite its revolutionary possibilities was still a cultural institution rooted in 19th century values. To Breton, the attributes of literary naturalism seemed relatively innocuous, needlessly lengthy, time-consuming, and boring--a format designed for an earlier era’s attention span. “I do not take particular note of the empty moments of my life,” said Breton, “that it may be unworthy for any man to crystallize those which seem to him to be so”[3].

Instead, Breton sought a form that was new and exciting, still capable of attracting attention in the desensitized age of shell shock. The novel, which utilized a uniquely polished vocabulary, Breton equated with a game of chess. Not only did it seem like the manipulation of a set of predetermined rules, a blind stylistic exercise, but it also seemed inherently removed from authentic experience.

Breton’s outrage with the status quo has a now familiar feel. As a member of the emergent bourgeois class, he was given a hitherto undreamed of degree of freedom and individuality, but was faced with the increasingly faceless rationalizing force of Modern society, which dominated culture with a technological and scientific preoccupation. Like the Bohemian Avant-Garde that came before and after him, Breton attached himself to a popular intellectual philosophy rooted in Romanticism, in his case Freudian psychology. Adapting this Freudian worldview, Breton resolved to reconcile the seemingly interrelated psychic crises of life and art by engaging the unconscious. If following the rational trends seemed insufficient for the future of art, Breton would use art to derationalize the institutions of logic and order, reclaiming culture for the individual.

He took as his role model the lesser-known 19th century poet comte de Lautréamont, a experimenter who innovatively utilized the poetic image, combining seemingly unrelated objects to produce a simultaneous abundance and lack of semantic meaning, an effect akin to Freudian free-association. Charging poetry with the power of Freudian psychoanalysis, Breton created a new mode of expression. This clash of meanings, producing a questioning of the relationship inherent in the order of things, and the need to reconcile this subjective experience to ordinary experience, is the goal of Surrealism. In the subjective experience of the world as if art, in modes reminiscent of dream and other inherently personal interpretations, we begin to be more aware of our own sense of things, the order by which we adapt ourselves to the outside world. By understanding our unconscious mental operations, the Surrealists believed we could go about the work of adapting society to the needs of the individual rather than the opposite. In Breton’s world, every artist, and increasingly everyone in the society, was equated to the neurotic. And the new religion was Freudian psychoanalysis.

In their quest to portray the antagonistic interplay between consciously experienced external reality and the subjective world presented by the unconscious, the Surrealists eventually came to the medium of film, its formal properties inherently sympathetic to the movement’s aesthetic sense.

Even on the surface, film seems well suited to Surrealism. It activates the dialogue between the objective and subjective by presenting illusions we perceive as real. Primarily a visual medium, it is capable, like many Surrealist paintings, of violating the dictum “seeing is believing.” The element of montage creates a visual experience equivalent to Surrealist poetry and by utilizing images in juxtaposition, in a more immediate, lifelike way than obviously manufactured paintings, which also flatten time artificially. With its versatility, film is more capable of emulating the narrative structure of conscious and unconscious thought, capable of providing both naturalistic and fantastic imagery. Its overall coherence and episodic, narrative format, combined with its ability to utilize drama to grip an audience, and evoke emotions of fear and sadness make it the closest manufactured analogue to dreams, and thus the perfect Surrealist medium.

The films viewed by Breton and company were the product of a still emerging, and as yet unrespected industry. However, this fact did not stop the Dadaists, who attempted to turn taste on its side and usher in an era of “anti-art, ” from including film among their subjects of critical deconstruction. And despite the awkwardness of their cinematic experiments, their films reveal the general enthusiasm the young Avant-Garde apparently had for the medium. With the precedent of Dada film behind them, the more complete union of Surrealism and film seemed only natural, as Surrealism attempted to rebuild precisely the areas the Dadaists had destroyed with their cultural scorched earth policy. Dada films were completely unpredictable, unhampered by any rules of style or form, and completely free. They blatantly advertised the seemingly unlimited possibilities of expression the medium could accommodate in the range from Charlie Chaplin to Man Ray.

Mirroring levels of conscious experience, film could function as series of visual objects, narrative story, or both, and unlike the painting or the novel, its vocabulary was still being invented and the audience was open and willing to experience it, roped in by the novelty of the new technology.

“Genuine” Surrealist Films

Due to the limited number of substantial (remaining/remembered) experimental “artists’” films from the 1920s, one can easily follow the main points of the formal discourse from the Dada films to the final significant Surrealist film, L’Age D’Or (1931). Viewing each of these films from the perspective of an inquisitive observer, and attempting to reconcile them to both the Surrealist movement and the conventions of later films, it become clear that like the works of Surrealist painters, these few films cover a wide range of styles that now seem sometimes captivating and brilliant, sometimes awkward and unconvincing. If Surrealist film is not a style, and the only thing uniting the various Surrealist films is the idiosyncratic, time specific ideology of the artists, how can a contemporary film be specifically surrealistic?

In fact, one could argue that the Surrealist discourse described earlier did not end with L’Age D’Or. Rather, Surrealism took on a new life and a more and more highly specialized and effective role as a trend in films, prompted by further attempts to work out the themes of the limited number of “genuine” Surrealist film examples. The implications of this shift from ideology to style/process are immense, but before they can worked out, a brief description of the most salient similarities and differences between the Surrealist films is necessary.

Dada Film

Man Ray’s Emak Bakia and Rene Clair’s Entr’acte are often grouped with the other Surrealist films despite the fact that have more to do with the Dadaist movement. However, as major experimental films created by basically the same general group of avant-garde artists in the 1920s, they extended stylistic influence on the later experiments and represented two different possible directions to follow.

Viewed today, these two films couldn’t seem more different. And yet, they both were made with similar Dadaist goals in mind, revealing “disgust[4] ” and “displaying the most violent humor”[5] as the only artistic responses to the apparently false order of logic, which offers no better solutions. In the “Dada Manifesto” of 1918, Tristan Tzara declared, “Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It draws the strings of ideas, words, along their formal exterior, toward illusory extremes...Its chains kills, like an enormous centipede stifling independence.” In her book Languages of Revolt, Inez Hedges paraphrases the Dadaist response: “If rationality and European high culture had led to such a result, the dadaists argued, then the only cure for man was irrationality.” Dada attempted to take the repressive order, in its various guises, and reduce it to nonsense. In literature, this is easily done (as evidenced by Tzara’s “recipe for a Dada poem”: cutting up a newspaper and selecting words randomly). In film, the answer was not so obvious.

Man Ray’s Emak Bakia is totally uncompromising and inexplicable, a slap in the face of all conventions, and therefore may seem to be the perfect example of Dada film. It consists of a “hodge-podge of realistic shots and sparkling crystals and abstract forms,[6] ” containing no narrative structure, but instead content to dazzle the eye, incapable of revealing anything other its own illusionistic trickery. Rayographs make an appearance as frenetic energy patterns, breaking in and out without warning. The Paris night is transformed into a field of faint pinhead lights. Men’s collars dance. Eventually, it ends with a metaphor for film itself as a model reveals eyes painted on her eyelids. What does one make of this film?

It is clearly a joke. Spinning its wheels, hopelessly, this is a film whose only point is its own lack of point. Man Ray makes no attempt to engage conventions of film narrative. Instead, he is content to simply show his audience a series of bizarre visual effect, a photographic portfolio set in motion. Utilizing images of shattered mirrors and eyes seeing through a complex of twisted lenses, Man Ray shows us that the technology of film is inherently illusionistic and can easily be commandeered by Dada into vexing meaninglessness, a scrap by-product of industrial age. In this sense, Emak Bakia is a success. However, like much Dada art, Emak Bakia seems like a stylistic dead-end. Negating film’s narrative potential completely for its own sake was perhaps a self-defeating enterprise, and Emak Bakia is a historical fragment by a unique artist who would later move on to greener pastures. By reducing film to a moving collage, he created a film involved in its own inner-life, but difficult to relate to, and easily dismissible as self-indulgent. Viewing Emak Bakia within the context of Man Ray’s oeuvre, it can easily be concluded that he agreed with this censure, since he never again made a film like Emak Bakia, instead translating the dazzling Panopticon of his montage into visual poetry, engaging the viewer in a strikingly visual discourse on the ambiguity of semantic meaning and its relation to the image.

One must be aware of order in order to understand lack of order. Analogously, being able to take any stylistic direction is the same as having no direction at all. Watching Emak Bakia is tedious because it fails to engage the viewer in the same way that most film does. And even as an exercise in abstraction, Emak Bakia falls short. The novelty of the special effects is scarcely revolutionary nowadays, and despite all of the activity and noise, there is nothing else behind it.

On the other hand, Entr’acte provided an important stylistic precedent. The films both utilize sarcasm, but in different ways. Whereas Emak Bakia is ceaseless in its insistence that it is not a film, Francis Picabia enlisted the talent of a commercial filmmaker, Rene Clair, to direct Entr’acte, which utilizes a standard film vocabulary of mise en scene and montage. Therefore, the problems created by Emak Bakia’s lack of formal elegance are negated. Whereas Emak Bakia can only hope to succeed in alienating an audience by providing only amateurish trickery, Entr’acte ropes the audience in and then violates its sense of order, allowing the Dada sensibility to assert itself.

An absurd comedy, Entr’acte features no plot as such, but is rather a series of strange and disconnected scenarios, similar in tone to silent Hollywood’s slapstick comedies, all set in and around the city of Paris. What separates this film from normal comedies is the extreme foolishness of the proceedings, taken far past the point of absurdity to complete nonsense. Various society types cavort around foolishly, seemingly oblivious to the lack of order around them, before finally being wished away by a magician’s magic wand. A funeral procession, featuring such non-sequiturs as a camel, passes through an amusement park, as the film alternately speeds up and slows down, completely negating rules of time and space.

Rene Clair said, “Entr’acte doesn’t believe in much, in the pleasure of living perhaps; it respects nothing unless it be the desire to bust out laughing.”[7] As such, the prevailing mood of the film is one of insurmountable absurdity and irrationality, a continual dismantling of the logic of narrative film which eventually results in the film’s complete dismantling, paralleling Dada’s dismantling of other forms of language into nonsense, and the eventual dismantling of Dada itself.

Utilizing a seasoned director took the Dada/developing Surrealist discourse down two interesting roads. Clair’s knowledge of the language of film meant that he knew the appropriate ways to subvert convention, deconstructing narrative in a thoughtful way. Also, by portraying a wide variety of bizarre scenarios in endlessly creative means, Entr’acte is as positive as it is negative, and the fantastic imagery, descending from such early precedents as Mélies, is suggestive of the dream emulation the Surrealist were looking for.

L’Etoile de Mer

It is unsurprising that when Man Ray returned to film, this time attempting a Surrealist film with L’Etoile de Mer, his style had changed significantly, now utilizing both dream emulation and more traditional gestural elements. Although featuring a story, the film was inspired by the Robert Desnos poem of the same name, and it is similarly strange and obscure--a stark puzzle box. Intertitles are utilized, and they reinforce the poetic, free association feel.

Symbols appear, predominately the titular starfish, which appears to hold a fetishistic place in this odd story of a man who follows a woman up to her room, watches her undress, and then departs. Despite the continued formal naïveté of the work, which admittedly is an improvement from Emak Bakia, Man Ray is able to convey a subtly dreamlike atmosphere, charged with a sense of importance, and thus simulating the Surreal moment, somewhere between conscious and unconscious experience.

In “the Surrealist Situation of the Object” (1925), Andre Breton described the Surrealist experience of “objective chance,” “That sort of chance that shows a man, in a way that is still very mysterious, a necessity that escapes him, even though he experiences it as a vital necessity.” Surrealist works attempt to replicate and provoke this experience, sparking memories of the unconscious by depicting a seeming melding of conscious and unconscious modes. Thus the goal of Surrealist film is obvious. It should present a clash between dream and waking life, encouraging acknowledgement of the unconscious in conscious thought, even temporarily revealing reality as if a dream.

In the Romantic language of Surrealists, a Surrealist film would have an even loftier goal: it should encourage an audience toward an altered state of consciousness--a heightened sense of awareness of things, which will provoke active interpretation of the world rather than passive acceptance. Taken one step farther, this experience will allow one to take control of his psyche, and become able to address the objects of the world in conscious dialogue, treating them as crystallized symbols of pent-up desire. Of course, the importance the Surrealists placed on psychoanalytic technique seems strange nowadays.

Rather, from a contemporary standpoint, it seems that the ideal Surrealist film would merely present a form of super-realism, capable of integrating elements of the unconscious, and the powerful effect it seems to have on otherwise mundane experience in the form of objective chance, deja vu experiences, slips of the tongue, etc. L’Etoile de Mer appears to rip a hole in the “reality” represented by conventional film by interpenetrating a film narrative with dream symbols, and providing the audience with a confusing clash of interpretive possibilities.

Stylistically, L’Etoile de Mer attempts to emulate dreams by distorting the “everyday experience” of narrative film. Customary situations are shattered and broken into a collection of interchangeable gestures. These gestures continually reappear, echoing the deja vu phenomenon. Faces are distorted (the whole film is transformed by a gelatin filter). And, as in Entr’acte, the characters seem oblivious to the chaos around them. They act like complacent and subdued Victorians as their desire flies around them in the form of odd symbols, which recall myth and superstition.

While L’Etoile de Mer addresses the favorite Bretonian theme of amour fou, it does so by addressing the Freudian element of displacement--the modern inability to come to terms with desire. Like Emak Bakia, it’s stark, distorted black and white photography feels alien and distant--the whole enterprise appears a strange, sanitized version of desire. It doesn’t break a sweat.

Un Chien Andalou

By contrast, the other important Surrealist film of 1927, Un Chien Andalou, has became synonymous with the passionate feeling of unhinged desire Breton provokes in the closing line of Nadja: “Beauty must be compulsive or not a all.” Breton, who also famously declared “The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot of random,”[8] viewed Surrealism as a total program for violent revolution against all oppressive institutions, and Luis Buñuel combined the twin themes of passion and violence onto the revolutionary engagement with form begun in the earlier experiments. Not content to simply portray this already incendiary subject matter, he integrated these complex, psychological themes into the very structure of the films themselves, creating some of the “most successful attempts in Surrealism to recreate the dream experience.”[9]

Luis Buñuel, who was not directly involved with Breton’s Surrealist movement at the time of Chien Andalou’s creation[10], nevertheless had a general knowledge of popular psychoanalysis, which was amplified by his partnership with Salvador Dali, a neurotic who seemed obsessed with certain obvious Freudian symbols. The two, united by a desire to find a creative outlet for dreams, decided to collaborate on an experimental film influenced by dreams and dream-like scenarios, utilizing brainstorming methods similar to automatic writing.[11]

Despite the fact that the two Spanish natives were far removed from the now advanced methodology of the Surrealist movement, with its many manifestoes, Buñuel more than made up for this ignorance with practical skill, creating films that Breton unreservedly claimed as Surrealist works. While Dali was a painter and writer, Buñuel had experience working with the avant-garde filmmaker Jean Epstein, and also had natural feel for direction. As a creative and natural director with a daydreamer’s disposition and a radical political agenda, he seemed like the new prophet of Surrealist film, able to create revolutionary movies that were successful both as art and film, as evidenced by a representative Breton statement of 1933, “This film [L’Age D’Or] remains up to today the only enterprise exalting love as I envisage it” and, of course, the constant discourse he has spurred in the history of film as a medium, continually referenced by filmmakers of the past century.

Why are Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or so successful as Surrealist films, and how are they able to so strongly “put across the omnipotence of desire?”[12] Simply put, they took many of the same directions as L’Etoile de Mer, but like Entr’acte, utilized a visually stunning photographic style predicated by the mise en scene of narrative film. As such, they are similarly engaging. The story of Un Chien Andalou is the story of all romantic passion, but unlike L’Etoile de Mer’s treatment of displaced desire, Un Chien Andalou is a portrait of a world in which desire can explode at any moment in unpredictable and frightening ways.

While L’Etoile de Mer utilized a few mysterious symbols in an attempt to emulate Freudian dream interpretation, Un Chien Andalou is overpowered with these outrageous manifestations of desire, which accumulate throughout the film, representing the constant psychic load one carries around in the unconscious. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the scene in Un Chien Andalou in which the “protagonist,” faced with the object of his desire, begins pulling ropes, dragging behind him a series of pumpkins, priests and eventually grand pianos filled with rotting donkey carcasses and excrement.

It is worth noting that Salvador Dali, who was soon to become famous for his use of creative symbols in a dream-like environment, contributed this and many other intriguing but difficult symbols from his own dreams. Other memorable symbols include the ants which infest the protagonist’s hand in a tense moment, a severed hand lying in the street, and a fetishistic placement of hair in the place of a mouth.

Buñuel combines these diverse poetic elements into his portrayal of the super form of desire which compels the male character, and he complicates the matter by interchanging elements of the eros and thanatos--combining images of Romantic love and carnal passion with images of violence and death. In his autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel discusses his fascination with the “secret but constant link between sex and death.”

I’ve tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in Un Chien Andalou when the man caresses the woman’s bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask.

(My Last Sigh, pg. 15)

This move charges the Romanticism of L’Etoile de Mer with the revolutionary, world-changing power of Breton’s increasingly politicized Surrealist doctrine, which attempts violent revolt by submitting to the calls of subjective desire.

However, Un Chien Andalou is more than just a powerfully emphatic portrayal of desire, it also is a great advancement over the other films in its ability to engage the audience in the film’s structure and create a strong personal response. If the goal of the ideal Surrealist film is to provoke the audience to actively interpret the world as if a series of symbols, L’Etoile de Mer can only hope to achieve this goal indirectly. In its affected portrayal of dream, it is capable of reminding an audience of the dream state and the effects of this temperment on waking life, but its dream distortions are so fundamental that its relation to conscious life are faint at best and easily “othered”by the rational minds of the audience that daily attach little importance to the scare remanants of the previous nights’ dreams.

Un Chien Andalou attempts not only to recall “dream”, but also to engage the audience in a conscious hallucination. It comes closer still to achieving this goal by placing its phantasmagoria of beautiful and captivating symbols within the context of a deceivingly continuous, narrative fashion, which invites interpretatioon.

Like L’Etoile de Mer and Entr’acte, Un Chien Andalou utilized, and subverted, the general gestural and compositional language of film, creating “allusions to the conventions of the silent movie drama, ridiculing its pantomime...stylized gesture.”[13] However, in addition, Un Chien Andalou used the principle of montage as a tool of narrative coherence instead of a force of discontinuity. Whereas the earlier films ignored the conventions of plot, alternating between unrelated images in strikingly different contexts, Buñuel stressed continuity, thematically connecting strings of images in the context of a primitive and nonsensical plot, which, nonetheless appears to cohere upon the first several viewings due to its strict adherence to standard film vocabulary of narrative structure, even utilizing intertitles with such false keys as “Five years earlier” and “In the Spring.”

In her critique of Surrealist film, Figures of Desire, Linda Williams addresses this aspect of Buñuel’s work, which she equates with the “secondary revision” of dreams.

[There is] a semblance of narrative coherence that can be compared with the secondary revision of dreams, in which the radical incoherence of the dream is covered up by a superficial and false appearance of intelligibility.

(pg. 110)

A representative sequence from Un Chien Andalou shows such a strong lack of actual plot. First, we see a girl’s armpit hairs on a sunny beach. In the next shot, we see a close up of a spiny sea urchin. This is followed by a crowd of people attempting to storm a police line. Finally, an aerial shot reveals a severed human hand in the middle of the excited crowd. Removed from the context of the film, these juxtapositions appear bizarre and foolish, but in the film they appear in the middle of a seemingly coherent narrative involving two recurring characters, and they have a semblance of order, although an unconventional order.

Watching the film, we continue to identify the actors as characters in a story, following them through the obstacle course of bizarre symbols Buñuel has set. Because the characters somehow are able to exist in this strange atmosphere, we come to accept these inherent irrationalities with the false hope of somehow “understanding” the narrative, and in the process attempt to comprehend and reconcile the strangely disparate elements to each other and to our own ordinary experienece. In the end, however, the apparent narrative structure is only a surface attribute, the plot nothing more than the sum total of the subtly connected dream symbols, which are inherently meaningless from an objective standpoint. Thus, whatever insight is gained from the process of viewing the film is a personal insight--the accumulation of subjective meaning.

Buñuel after Un Chien Andalou

Although Un Chien Andalou seemed to be a perfect example of Surrealist film, Buñuel continued with L’Age D’Or, which took the underlying principles of the earlier film and expanded them, making the a film simultaneously more and less coherent. Severing ties with Dali for the most part, Buñuel focuses less on spotlighting Dali’s dazzling symbols, and finding creative ways to link them, and instead works out a structure that is more unified as a whole.This is achieved by breaking the fifty minute film into five distinct sections which maintain a more meticulously detailed sense of symbolic order, but melt into each other, requiring the audience to make substantial leaps of faith in order to follow the “progression” of the film.

A documentary on scorpions feeds into a fantastic narration of an attempted assault by a group of rebels, which is transformed into an abstract narration about the founding of a city, and then finally the story of two lovers kept apart by the oppressive force of the society. Eventually, in a final bid to offend all parties and spark controversy, it ends with a coda section comparing the Marquis de Sade to Christ.

L’Age D’Or was the last genuine Surrealist film of the period, and in many ways, it acts as a culmination of the lessons learned from the earlier experiments. Primarily, however, it functions as a larger scale version of Un Chien Andalou, containg a wider variety of themes, and thus setting Romantic desire in its place among the established institutions of rationality and morality. The effect upon the viewer of the multiplicity of related narratives is to continually reveal deeper, underlying truths lying just below the surface of the last, beginning with the most objectively real in the form of a nature documentary, and eventually leading the audience to the path of all-out heresy.

In his autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel revealed the intent behind L’Age D’Or, which was a bitter indictment of all culture, and the last film he made until he was well into his middle-age. Although Un Chien Andalou was an unqualified cinematic success, with a overwhelmingly positive general reception, he felt it had failed.

Buñuel had intended Un Chien Andalou to be a completely shocking experience, inciting something equivalent to mass hysteria. In the opening scene, a girl’s eye is sliced by a razor, a terrible image that upsets like the sight of all violent and destructive acts, but also warns of the psychic rape that is to come. In fact, it turned out that Buñuel had misjudged the modern Parisian tolerance for the grotesque, as his film was an unqualified success, people eagerly attending in search of a cheap thrill. It seemed as if his attempt to violently disturb the sense of mundane was as easily dismissed as L’Etoile de Mer, rationalized away precisely because of its reliance on the grotesque. Buñuel asked,

What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press and the inane herd that saw beauty and poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate call for murder?

(The cinema of Luis Buñuel, pg. 9)

L’Age d’Or, which contained more narrative unity in its individual sections, but apparently less overall unity, was an attempt to correct the stylistic mistakes he had made with Un Chien Andalou, and it seemed to work at the time, judging from the genuine outrage it promoted (in fact, in Paris, it was banned until the mid 1980s). Still, Buñuel realized that the degree of the film’s stylistic novelty, an outgrowth of Surrealism’s attempt to emulate aspects of the unconscious, held a precarious balance with the film’s ability to truly engage the full attention of the audience and act as a catalyst for the Surreal moment. Later films reveal a new strategry: the vivid dream symbols that invaded the world of his early films, and so captivate the audience on an artistic level are eliminated in order fulfil the greater goal.

So, although L’Age d’Or was his last obviously Surrealist film, utilizing the fantasic style he had formulated with Dali, it was not his last film with Surrealist goals and attitudes underlying the creative process. In fact, each of his mature films revolves around ways of putting forth his revolutionary agenda, encompassing a wide stylistic spectrum of possibilities between moments of total chaos and scenes with are completely normal-seeming and innocuous. In Él (1952), he portrays one man’s descent into madness, utilizing a totally normal, Hollywood film style, but interrupting it with scenes of strange violence (poking a needle through a peephole) and eventually breaking into all-out hallucination.

“[Buñuel] preferred to bury his explosives blandly beneath the surface of an apparently traditional style, rather in the same way as Magritte is often able to suggest a quite extraordinary sense of mystery by making almost imperceptible distortions in a painting that is otherwise academic.”

(The cinema of Luis Buñuel)

When Buñuel returned to a more experimental trilogy of films late in his career (The Milky Way (1968) , The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and The Phantom of Liberty (1974)), he attempted to some senses to re-create L’Age d’Or, but with the renewed vigor of an elegant personal style that did not rely on the novelty of visual absurdity.

The films center around the lives of several high-class bourgeois types, played by a semi-regular troupe of actors, who continually find themselves in odd situations and try their best to cope. Instead of grappling with pianos filled with the carcasses of rotting donkeys, however, their concerns are relatively mundane, and thus evoke the dreams described in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the “hangups” of earlier middle class. The plot, for instance, of The Discreet Charm centers around a group of socialites who attempt to have dinner together over the course of the movie, but each time some strange occurance, each one stranger than the next, prevents them. At first there is a disagreement over the time, then they go a restaurant in which the owner dies, then to a restaurant that is out of food, and so on. This “naturalistic” style still feels artificial, as it obviously relies on manipulated and contrived situations, but it works, partially because it makes the audience question this underlying factor in most films, and also because it is truly reminiscent of conscious phenomena like deja vu and the feelings that Surrealists called objective chance, which feel like subtle rips in the fabric of reality rather than a true hallucinatory state. In these later films, personified desire does not bang violently on the door. Rather, the possibility of total irrationality is just barely visible beneath the surface.

The narrative structure of these films emulates L’Age d’Or in that they rely on an audience’s ability to thematically connect strikingly different episodes, some of which are obviously depicted as dreams, some of which appear more or less “real”, and many of which straddle the border. Strikingly, the dreams are depicted in the exact same way as reality, paralleling the earlier film’s melding of the two environments, but in way that unsettles and confuses the viewer by refusing to inform the viewer which bits are real and which are imagined.

This primary confusion, which had not been previously achieved in Surrealist film to this extent, seems to undue many of Breton’s arguments against realism in the Surrealist Manifesto, affectively creating a form of “realism” that did not ignore, but was rather infused with dreams and fantasy, both conscous and unconscious at the same time. In this way, these films appear to be the best example of surrealist film, seemingly strengthening conventions only to undermine them in a more clandestine way.

Thus, it seems that the most successful attempts to create films that operate in surreal ways did not take place in the 1920s, when the movement was active as an artistic force, but rather at a time when film could “catch up” to the complexity of the previously established media of poetry and paintings. If Surrealism is not then, a simple “catch-all” term for the experimental films of the Surrealists (Buñuel had long since been dissociated with the group by the 1960s), then what factors contribute to the “surreality” of a film? Observing the primary areas of formal discourse from Dada to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, it appears that at least seven attributes can be isolated.

1) A surrealist film attempts to upset the expectations of the viewer, jarring complacency with a sense of intruding irrationality.

2) A surrealist film challenges conventions of social order.

3) A surrealist film reflects notions of the unconscious and the subjective, and attempts to determine true relationship between the subjective and “reality.”

4) A surrealist film utilizes powerful visual symbols as objects for contemplation, in a form of meta-narrative, or simply as confusing elements of discontinuity.

5) A surrealist film attempts to portray desire, echoing, for instance,¬†Breton’s amour fou theme.

6) A surrealist film does more than depict notions of the unconscious. It is a conscious fusion of the unconscious and waking life, and produces a surreal experience in the audience.

7) A surrealist film is a part of an ongoing critique of stylistic convention, concerned with the language of conventional film, and its own special place in this equation.

With these elements isolated, it is now possible to see how well other films fit these criteria.

surrealist films (with a small s)

Evaluating the vast range of films designated as “surreal,” it becomes clear that many cannot claim to adhere to these seven criteria. Fundmentally, is not enough for a film to be “dreamlike.” Fantasy has a long history in cinema from Mélies to Fellini to Terry Gilliam. Fundmentally, these are whimsical endeavors, a form of entertainment. Nor is it enough to be preoccupied with Freudianism. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, which revolves around a psychological theme, and even features a collaboration with Dali, is clearly not a Surrealist film, because it separates the scenes of dream and waking so strongly, they appear like two separate films.

What about filmmakers that staddle the border between experimental and commercial film, somewhat like Buñuel? Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films El Topo (1971) and The Holy Mountain (1973), which are commonly described as surreal, and follow the lead of early Buñuel by populating a confusing environment with a multiplicity of outrageous and shocking visual symbols, can no longer be called truly surreal. Instead of genuinely attempting to undermine the social order, these films run down a catalogue of stylistic cichés , and ultimately do not hint at the power of Un Chien Andalou, which was revolutionary for its time. By contrast, the American David Lynch, who like Luis Buñuel, softened and adapted an outrageous visual style to subtly inch his horror of the society in the vocabulary of commercial Hollywood films, creates films which appear to more or less create the same reactions as Buñuel’s late films, constantly adapting the possibilities of style to the cutting edge of the surreal, working equally well in the media of film and televison.

Lynch’s primary theme is repression. Echoing sentiments that go back as far as Dada[14] , Lynch reveals the violent repression against individuality occuring in even the social order of the average American town, even in the family. In The Grandmother (1970) and Eraserhead (1977), Lynch portrays nightmare dreamscapes, surrounding rudimentary plots revolving around the desire to destroy the family, both as a dissatisfied son (in the former) and father (in the latter). Despite the more revolutionary aspects of these films, one may have the same complaints of stylistic novelty as Jodorowsky. However, Lynch’s recent films have a much more naturalistic feel, and they subtly incorporate elements of desire and irrationality into a mixture of intriguing story and an intriguing visual style that has more to do with the best elements of 40s and 50s Hollywood then Chien Andalou. Many feel an immediate affinity for Lynch’s films, and he is one of the most popular film directors today. However, his films are also very disturbing, pointing to the dark underbelly of culture that Hollywood usually ignores, most prominently in Blue Velvet (1986), a story of crime and sexual perversion in a small town, which famously begins with a sequence depicting a man in a well-maintained suburban yard collapse mysteriously to the sound of an uncaring sprinkler microjet, the camera then plummeting into the grass to reveal the machinations of insects, performing a mysterious dance in fast motion, accompanied by a horrendous roar.

In his recent film, Mulholland Dr., Lynch has combined themes of repressed desire and his idiosyncratic visual style with an unconventional narrative form that emulates Buñuel’s late Phantom of Liberty, but simultaneously functions even more as both a coherent narrative (only with an inquistive predisposition and several viewings) and a secondary revision of itself, inviting the possibility that there is no truly clear story to interpret.

The film begins as a stereotypical Lynch film, presenting elements of conventional melodrama in an over-the-top way, utilizing the conventions of film and television by tempting the audience with familiar dramatic structures, actors, and character “types.” The exposition of plot begins simply, like any other film. A woman wandering out of a car after an accident on Mulholland Drive, stricken with total amnesia. However, due to the obvious relish the director takes in performing these trademark devices, it is clear that a meta-level of discourse is in full effect. The audience is thus pulled in two directions. First, they accept the conventions and are intrigued by the film’s elements of mystery, attempting to “solve the case” themselves. Additionally, they are intrigued by what the director will do next, sensing that he is sending “hidden clues” in the sometimes awkward dialogue and increasingly bizarre situations portrayed. Sometimes, we seem to have left the story completely, focusing on different characters whose words we interpret as having some bearing on the original story.

In a restaurant, two characters who appear to have a therapist-patient relationship discuss the patient’s “godawful feeling.” “There’s a man in the back of this place,” the patient says, who he feeling is “controlling him.” We now feel as if we have entered the dream space of Buñuel’s mature films, but who’s dream is it? Going around to the back of the restaurant, the man is caught off-guard by a terribly disfigured vagrant (presumably the man in his nightmare), and he collapses in fear. The next sequence features a strange, disabled man in a stark office, the proverbial “man behind the curtain,”making important decisions about other people’s lives. Then, we encounter the story of a film director whose casting decisions are being mysteriously blocked by strangely influential Hollywood forces.

Is the “man in the back” a personification of the control of unconscious desire or simply Lynch himself, toying with the expectations of the viewer? There isn’t time to speculate, as we are suddenly swept back into the initial plot, the amnesiac woman having been discovered, hiding in a Hollywood apartment.

With all of the film’s already adventurous structural experimentation, it sets the viewer a precendent that it then completely violates two-thirds through the movie, as the whole structure undergoes a complete metamorphosis. The previous “plot” is “revealed” to be the dream of a passionate woman who has ordered the murder of her lover, with all of the characters of the previous story slightly changed real-life identities. The portrayal of this transformation is very confusing, and only fully understandable after several viewings, but after several additional viewings, even this interpretation begins to fall apart. Many elements don’t add up, and the style is the second half, though sometimes seeming more “real” by utilizing an extremely anguishing dramatic performance, nevertheless does not seem any more real the supposed dream. Even if we follow Lynch’s apparent conceit and admit the first half as a “dream,” the second half contains more truly bizarre fantasy elements, characters appearing and disappearing, bizarre special effects, and overall greater use of montage to create discontinuity. The signs of the film are so contradictory, the viewer can’t even begin to determine what is real and what is an illusion.

Thus, it seems we are genuinely deceived by the film, forced to consciously utilize the phenomenon of secondary revision to rationalize an inherently irrational source. The plot we are made to construct, with its many ins and outs, powerfully puts forth the themes of both social repression and the power of Romantic passion, and it play on our knowledge of revolutionary Surrealist tendencies. As such, the film eventually avoids the clichés these cultural references seem to represent by utilizing our knoweldge of them to completely subvert all of our attitudes, toward both film and Surrealist film. In a sense, by making a film about the impossibility of Surrealist film in contemporary thought (at least with the same Romantic goals as Un Chien Analou), he created the most up-to-date treatise on the clash between the objective and subjective, utilizing the seven criteria of surrealist film in varying levels of opposition.

Should Mulholland Dr. be classified as a surrealist film if it does not agree unflinchingly with the manifestoes of increasingly out-of-touch historic movement? Emphatically yes, because surrealism continues to refer to an ever-changing methodology, trying to dig beneath the surface and question all facades; “aim[ing] to redue...the contradictions between sleeping and waking, dream and action, reason and madness, conscious and unconscious, individual and society, subjective and objective.”[15]

Bibliography

Buache, Freddy. The cinema of Luis Buñuel. International Filmguide Series, Tantitvy Press, London: 1973.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor: 1969.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism?: selected writings. Monad Press, New York: 1978.

Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Random House, Inc., New York: 1983.

Cohen, Paula Marantz. Alfred Hitchock: the legacy of Victorianism. The University Press of Kentucky: 1995.

Hammond, Paul, ed. The Shadow and its Shadow: surrealist writings on the cinema. BFI, London: 1978.

Hedges, Inez. Languages of revolt: Dada and surealist literature and film. Duke University Press: 1983.

Hughes, David. The Complete Lynch. Virgin Publishing Ltd., London: 2001.

Kuenzli, Rudolph E., ed. Dada and Surrealist Film. Willis Locker & Owens, New

York: 1987.

Lippard, Lucy R., ed. Surrealists on Art. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1970.

Matthews, J. H. Surrealism and Film. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: 1971.

Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A theory and analysis of surrealist film. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1981.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Seattle: 2000.

[1] Many of these are published together in the collection The Shadow and Its Shadow, which includes articles about the fantastic French serials that so took Breton as well as Hollywood films such as King Kong.

[2] Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924.

[4] a word often used by Tristan Tzara in “Dada Manifesto 1918” and “Lecture on Dada,” as in “The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for three thousand years have been explaining everything to us.”

[5] J. H. Matthews in his discussion of Entr’acte in Surrealism and Film, pg. 77

[6] Man Ray, Self Portrait (Boston and Toronto, 1963), p. 270

[7] cited in J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film, pg. 76

[11] A main point of emphasis in Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh, is the lack of conscious effort on his part to create Surrealist films, although this may be an attempt to remove himself from the negative associations of the movement. In any case, it seems that L’Age D’Or must be an exception to this rule, as it was created while Buñuel himself belonged to the group. Of course, this all may be a moot point, considering the general lack of rigor in most Surrealist technique. After all, Surrealism is not a coherent philosophy, despite itself. Instead, for all practical purposes it is a vague ideology predicated on the changing beliefs of one man: Andre Breton.

[14] Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” “very product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada. The whole being protested inits destructive force with clenched fists: DADA”

[15] Franlin Rosemont, “Introduction” to What is Surrealism?pg. I