Breton’s Cinema

 

“The cinema? Three cheers for darken rooms!”

André Breton was the fonder of the surrealist movement which as evolutionary step from Dadaism. Surrealism was (and still is) a product of the unconscious, the dreamlike states and automatic writing. Surrealist worked consisted of writing, painting, and sculpture. Notable surrealist were Salvador Dali and Rene Margtte.

In this research paper I shall be investagating the impact of Breton has had upon cinema though what can described as Breton's movement, surrealism. But I wish to focus on the film aspect of this movement in which element can still been seen in today’s cinema. I will be looking in detail at the methods used in cinema, such as repetition. I shall refer to number of sources including work from the earlier experiments of cinema to present times. I want to look at the knowing and unknowing use of surrealist imaginary used in cinema and what is a definition of surrealism in film?  I will be including a film list with this paper, including mainstream and independent film. Purposely I will refrain from using term surrealist film as Breton talks of art in Surrealism and painting, no piece of work is surrealist by default, it is made surrealist, I plan to situate surrealism into film and cinema and not as a surrealist film. I also wish to look lightly at the strange relationship between film and art, and when a film is a piece of art.

These days the use of the word surrealist is used loosely in the same way as words such as weird, strange. In Surrealism and Cinema (2006), Michael Richardson discusses that there is elements that make a surrealist film. That dreams provide surrealist with a sense of otherness and that cinema provides another senses of otherness, a projection of that dream.
According to Richardson surrealism is exclusively for the cinema theatres/art space, not for television. “…Admitted to a darkroom, in which images made of light were projected on a screen in front of a group of physically passive spectators, was infinitely conducive to reverie even for the least imaginative” , is there not evidence of surrealism in such television series like The prisoner (1967) though to Six feet under (2001)? Looking away from the film what about television adverts? Television adverts duplicating the same effect as André Breton and Jacqués vache on their journey from one cinema to another leaving when bored to walk half way into another film. An element that destroys this argument is chose. The viewer has the chose to change channels not only that but the lack of the dark room, the dream state which is fundamental in terms of surrealism.

One the early works from those dark rooms is La Coquille Et Le Clergyman, (The seashell and the clergyman, 1924) directed by Germaine Dulac and written by Antonin Artaud. Artaud is well documented for his theatre of cruelty than for his involvement in the surrealist movement. Breton was known to have been sceptical of Artaud’s chaotic nature and if his madness was genuine. In his tale, La Coquille ET Le Clergyman (1924), this unrestrained attack on religion in favour for the flesh and has the reflection of Artuad’s madness regarding how the film was completed. In many eyes this film has been considered to the first surrealist film, but is regarded by Richardson as part of the “avant garde, not surrealism.”  

Breton comments on cinema being the age of cinema, a comment that he said as a past tense, Breton’s interest in going to the cinema just simply to walk out and travel in other cinema half way though a feature without consisting a listing was motivated from boredom and the desire for disorientation. From this I get a sense Breton enjoyed this dislocation, this idea for being lost in film(s), perhaps the same as reading a novel or when lost in one’s thought. The way that the age of the cinema could be translated is from silent film to films with sound. In the wood, a by essay Breton talks of “super dislocation” from which a lesson is learned from the film in a way that teaches one how to receive it.

Breton discusses elements of French acting and script writing, which can see for its extreme exteriorisation (comical effect). Directors such as Luis Buñuel and Jean-Pierrie Jeunet films can seen for having examples of this effect. Jeunet’s Amelie (2001) contains the same romantic story as describe by Breton’s book Mad love (1937). In which Breton descibes his encounter of love with a woman in a flea market, this echo’s, Amelie in which her object of love is a man whom collects passport photos. (The collection of meanness objects, which are given a mean.) In the fail attempts in catch her lover, she always fails until in she catches him in the end. Amelie (2001) contains multiple stories with in one film
The use of multi layered meanings, though the use of film, another form of poetry from the use of the moving picture. Luis Buñuel comments on cinema as a reflection though the cinema screen. In response I think that surrealism in cinema could be described as reflection reality passed through a broken lens on the cinema screen, resulting in Surrealism in the film. Buñuel talks of cinema as “ …equivalent to closing eyes. Then begin on the screen and within the man, the incumison into the night of the unconscious…” in other words the screen portraying the dreams of man. In a collaborative work with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) portrays an array of what seem shocking images, one after each other, empty of any sort of story but a general theme. Perhaps an automatic film, this film has all the traits with the lack morals for example, the scene in which a woman’s eyeball s cut open. 

 

As there is a romantic side to surrealism in film there is also the dark side, from which elements such as anxiety and fear are played up on. With Breton, “death is a dissonative principle, not a surrealist one, and it must opposed to surrealist love-that is to say, it must be distanced from it .” This comment is interesting because even if Breton’s love is too cancelled out death, there is still is evidence in of death from the work of Buñuel and more recently, David Lynch.  Perhaps if one were to think of death as a metamorphosis instead of an end would this not be a surrealist way of thinking?  The surrealists were not interested in the use of psychoanalysis as a science but as to “use psychoanalysis to clarify their own intentions and to help achieve them.” The surrealists were intent on looking at the fundamentals of psychoanalysis, condensation, displacement and symbolization.  According to Breton “In the field of art, a work can be considered surrealist only in proportion to the effects the artist has made to encompass the whole psychophysical field…” this is to say that not any piece of work can be classed Surrealist without the use of psychoanalysis.

David Lynch is celebrated for his art and film work, primary his film work. Automatism is a core element of surrealism, giving birth to the uncanny in which I see the same in Lynch’s film, Eraserhead. “This return of the repressed render the subject anxious and the phenomenon ambiguous. And this anxious ambiguity produces the primary effects of the uncanny.” Eraserhead touches upon these parameters of surrealism, the repetition and the repressed resulting in the fusing of the real with the unreal. In the interview with Lynch talks of the importance of symbolism in his work, for example, in The elephant man (1980), Lynch’s compares smoke to the disfigured elephant man. But Lynch still shows a hint of the romantic Bretonian surrealism in his responses to the stars, referring to The elephant man (1980); Lynch talks of the stars as being of remains of life after death.  And also showing signs of regression in childhood memory, the uptioan America in the starting titles of Blue Velvet in which the slowing for frames is purposely to give the effect of a dream, which echo the themes of children’s books like Good Times On Our Street (1950) with the uncertainly of being a dream. This can better described by Sigmund Freud that “it is true that the writer (director) creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into the a purely fantastic one of his own creation. ”

Ado Kyrou discusses the tearing up of restrain of cinema and its hierarchies, saying “a freedom of thought is often present in these popular productions, films that don’t address themselves to pretentious pseudo-intellectuals.” Having being voted the worst director of all time I think that it is more than needed to discuss the work of Edward Wood. In an issue of Artforum (1994), Andrew Hultkrans talk of wood being “a true surrealist (in his ability to deliver the uncensored unconscious to the screen with a directness that an intellectual like Luis Bunuel could never manage) but that he was a radical-avant-garde filmmaker, unpacking the hidden ideology of film by revealing its apparatus.” This true as in the case of Wood’s semi-biopic, Glen or Glenda (1953), with its badly and sometimes complete irrelevant stock footage. The story unfolds on to the story of glen who is due to get married but has not told his soon-to-be wife that he likes to wear women’s clothes. The film includes a dream sequence that leaves the viewer somewhat confused and dislocatied to what and where we are in this film. There is no clue to the viewer that we regressing into a dream or that we are coming out of the shores of a dream, it only after the experience do we know we stand with in the film. In other words it is the unknowing of what is real and what isn’t real. The uncanny. According to the Tim Burton Biopic, Ed Wood (1994), Wood was know to only take single takes, and that mistakes in the film making were include in the his film, one could say an act of realism

Chris Marker’s film, la jetee (The pier, 1962) is a piece of work created with the use of black and white still shots, only still shots. A story of a man who is to travel back in time to save the future, only to witness his own death though the eyes of a small boy. In a avenge film you are continuing being bombard with moving images; with La Jetee (1962), you are confronted with a series of black and white stills or photographs going back and forth in time accompanied with a indescribable soundtrack and a narration of the story. The over all feeling from the film is one that is bleak and cold. A mechanism is used and abused by the director, going back, going forward, and stopping. In another form of dislocation though the use of time. The transit of the dislocation more subtle than other film I have seen because of the filming methods, what differs is that lack of clues from what you view about our character travelling though time; one is relying heavily on the narration which is a rare commodity these days.

 

 I would have been interested what Breton’s view would have been on contemporary cinema. And that if surrealism in Breton’s eyes would still be a worthy course to fight for in these present times. I think that Breton would have been interested in the works of Lynch and more recently, the newly ordained surrealist directors; Guillermo Del Toro and György Pálfi
There are still films of the uncanny surrealism nature can still be seen, for example, el laberinto del fauno (Pan's labyrinth, 2006), in which the combination of mythology and film. The film looks similar to what Max Ernst would have dreamed up if he had been let loose with the director’s chair.
 A still image from Taxidermia (2006)
Another example is Taxidermia (2006), a film what carries the themes, colours of a new Bunuel film. In my eyes, Taxidermia (2006) could be mistaken as a sequel to Buñuel film, Le Fantôme de la liberté (The phantom of liberty, 1974). Both these films deal with the functions of the body, Taxidermia (2006); the body being a living being becoming an object for admiration, not too dissimilar to what is described in Freud’s essay, The uncanny. While Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974) deals with the human rituals, reversing them, a poet sniper shooting people from a rooftop, only to go to court, admits his crimes and walks free from court. Or another example is scene in which two couples sit round a dinner table and defecate together but eat their dinner privately.

A still image from Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974)

Looking at the current trend, film has taken over the use of traditional method such as painting, but has not replaced. The task of film making being similar to producing a painting, editing, cropping, adding to frames. In stead being used to document works of art (performance, installation art) and used as a piece of art. For example, Nathaniel Mellor’s work, The Time surgeon using the Chris Marker filming methods but subject being painting instead of photography and on the side of Buñuel, his successor György Pálfi. Film is used as another tool in the artist toolbox as paint and presented in less formal ways than in Breton’s time. Film is now not exclusive to the cinema or even to the television, people can access this media from websites like Youtube, where people can broadcast their own films and watch others. Breton was noted for commenting in an interview with Andre parinarad the resetting of surrealism, back to the “automatic writing and the sleeping fits- and counting blindly on the eventual results.” If this is what came of surrealism, is this what will happen to cinema? Will directors throw their digital cameras and revert back to the Super 8 cameras and go back to black and white? How painting has helped people how to understand the world, this is what surrealism has done for the unconscious.  Nothing is sure of the future but what is sure is that cinema will continue to be a medium to be enjoyed, thought about in a whole host of different ways. “I ask you, learn to go and see the ‘worst’ films; they are sometimes sublime.”

 

 

 

Sources

Manifestoes of surrealism
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969
André Breton (translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane)

Mad Love: (L'amour fou)

Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987
André Breton (translated by Mary Ann Caws)

Surrealism and Painting

Macdonald and Company 1972
André Breton (Translated by Simon Watson Taylor)

Antonin Artaud: a critical reader
André Breton with André Parinaud, Pp11-13
London: Routledge, 2003
Edited by Edward Scheer

Surrealism and cinema

Oxford: Berg, 2006
Michael Richardson

The shadow and its shadow: surrealist writings on the cinema

In the wood, André Breton, Pp. 80-85
The Marvellous is popular, Ado Kyrou, Pp.77-79
Cinema, Instrument of Poetry, Luis Buñuel, Pp. 117-121
Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991
Edited by Paul Hammond

The Uncanny

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/uncan.htm
Sigmund Freud, translation by Alix Strachey

 

The interpretation of dreams (3rd ed. rev)

London: Allen & Unwin, 1937
Sigmund Freud, translation by A.A. Brill

Freud and the humanities

Psychoanalysis and surrealism, S. Dresden, Pp.110-129
London: Duckworth, 1985
Edited by Peregrine Horden.

Scene by scene interview, David Lynch with Mark Cousins

http://www.stage6.com/Cinema-School/video/1286184/Scene-By-Scene---David-Lynch

 

Compulsive beauty

Beyond the pleasure principle? Pp.7, Pp.14
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993
Hal Foster

Look back in angora - Tim Burton's film on filmmaker Ed Wood

Artforum, December 1994

Andrew Hultkrans

A Parkett inquiry: (Why) Is David Lynch important?
Parkett 28 1991
Edited by Jean-Pierre Bordaz and Miriam Wiesel

 

Images

Taxidermia: -

www.phonetica.net/phonology/taxidermia.html

Le Fantôme de la liberté: -

www.jahsonic.com/Fantome.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filmography

 

La Coquille Et Le Clergyman (The seashell and the clergyman)
1924
Directed by Germaine Dulac

Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog)

1929
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The discreet charm of the bougeoisie)
1972
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Cet obscur objet du désir (That obscure object of desire)

1977
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Le Fantôme de la liberté (The phantom of liberty)
1974
Directed by Luis Buñuel

La Jetee (The pier)
1962
Directed by Chris marker

Sans Soleil

1982
Directed by Chris Marker

Eraserhead 

1977

Directed by David Lynch

The elephant man

1980
Directed by David Lynch

Blue velvet

1986
Directed by David Lynch

Glen or Glenda

1953
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr

Ed Wood

1994
Directed by Tim Burton

Taxidermia
2006
Directed by György Pálfi

El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)
2006
Guillermo Del Toro