One of the earliest, most popular and notorious surrealist movies is the 20-minute short "Un
Chien Andalou" made shy of 100 years ago in 1929 by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
It's a collection of uncanny imagery dissolving into the next with the faintest of story threads
holding them all together.
Unbothered by logic, place, or time.
But more notorious is the film's first segment.
A man sharpening a razor, a woman's eye being opened and a cloud slicing through the moon
as the man does the same with the woman's eye.
Provoking feelings of discomfort, marvel, and most of all... confusion:
"What exactly is all this about?"
This question tends to resurface when watching a surrealist movie.
Strange, odd, peculiar, and absurd dreamlike depictions that are short of any answers.
But this representation is not made only for shock value.
Much like the opening scene of Un Chien Andalou, one shouldn't perceive the violent action
as an amputation but as a provocation to open the inner eye into the shared dream state
of cinema.
These days, one could be mistaken to call any movie with trippy imagery as being surrealist
or even interchange that term with "Lynchian" (a place holder descriptor for anything weird).
But Surrealism started out as a group of artists (painters, writers, filmmakers) in the early
1920's in France and uniquely positioned in between two world wars.
They weren't looking to start a new trend, but a movement
The members may have been from differing nationalities but shared a unified rejection of the oppression
of modern society.
With their work, Surrealists looked to obtain an external and personal freedom.
And the growing possibilities of the cinematic medium became an important tool for that liberation.
As Andre Breton penned in his first Surrealism manifesto, they strived for:
"Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -verbally, by
means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from
any aesthetic or moral concern."
Andre Breton and the rest of the group wanted to unleash the imagination from the rigidity
of social, religious, and moral norms.
Allowing a free flow of thought.
They felt society restrains us from the pursuit of our desires and dulls the full use of our
faculties.
Followers of psychologist Sigmund Freud's theories about the unconscious mind, they
would try to unleash the subconscious not by psychoanalysis, but by instigating an unedited
and unfiltered stream of thought.
To create what could induce others into a dreamlike state by seeing the subconscious
laid bare and provoke their own dormant social unconscious.
Welcome to the Screened film club I'm your curator Moises and today we will take a look
at the recuring patterns of early surrealism and how we can recognize certain of its lasting
and derived appeal.
I will mention some movies that are considered surrealist mixed in with movies possessing
surrealist elements.
Some spoilers will follow.
And today's video is kindly sponsored by Surfshark but more on that midway.
There is a strong sense of strangeness in a Surrealist movie.
As if you've stumbled upon a foreign world.
The nature of what is expected is altered and their meaning is challenged.
The images and actions are purposely disorienting...to remove logic from reality.
This can be explored by juxtaposing conflicting images, concepts or even actions like a man
eating his own clothing while starving at a restaurant.
Or exaggerating reality like in the pale deadpan static portraits of the Living Trilogy by
Roy Andersson.
Or the use of incongruous situations like in the movies of the Spanish director Luis
Bunuel (the co-director of Un Chien Andalou) where he would ensnare his characters in preposterous
scenarios.
In The Exterminating Angel, the wealthy guests at a dinner party are incapable of finding
an exit.
They are left to their own devices as their etiquette quickly devolves.
In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie six friends' desire to eat together is constantly
stymied by increasingly unrealistic reasons.
Or in That Obscure Object of Desire where the main character's efforts to consummate
his relationship with an elusive young woman (played by two different actresses) is blocked
at every turn.
Stories of frustrated desires harking back to the surrealist search for liberation.
"Bunuel's work can be seen as an exploration of the tension raised by the contradiction
between desire and social order."
That's why to disrupt this order, the Surrealists strived to release the known from its original
meanings to create a new perspective free of constraints.
One of those ways was by ridiculing their nature until it became absurd.
Which is a contrast to what we usually associate the surreal with.
Instead of hallucinatory imagery that causes shock, here the use of the irrational causes
humour.
Not surprising that many surrealists where admirers of the antics of Buster Keaton, Charlie
Chaplin, and the like.
The way they would satirize reality into a cartoonish portrayal where objects lost meaning
and could transform into the nonsensical.
Random haphazard irrational stories mirroring the absurdity of modern society.
"Surrealism does not presuppose a link between intelligence and reason in the target of its
humour and, indeed, uses humour to prove their dissociation."
It's a way to see things under a different light, the flaws in our systems we fail to
recognize.
Like in Terry Gilliam's satirical exaggeration of the rigid bureaucracy of the British establishment
in Brazil.
Where everything goes nowhere slowly, fault is never acknowledged, blame is passed down
and desire is also obstructed.
The Czech surrealist Jan vankmajer also carved his own unique brand of artifice mixing both
real life with stop motion animation.
Juxtaposing or even fusing the animate with the inanimate.
Common household items turned into living things and rendering the living into almost
an object.
It's humorous and yet a slightly eerie.
Again, we see known meanings be tempered with to create a new one.
A man can be a food dispenser.
A table can be eaten.
A shoe can be sharpened.
Sure, this might seem odd but it's a way to illustrate what a miscommunication between
two people can look like.
This manner of juxtaposition comes from Jan vankmajer's efforts to recapture an old but
necessary perspective.
That of the imagination of a child.
"[...] he sees the child (as did Freud) as having a different (or an other) system of
wisdom which it is important for us as adults not to lose contact with.
To go back to a time, when we were unaffected by the definitions around us that in turn
defined us as well.
A blank slate where the possibility of creating new associations seemed possible.
Where our own self wasn't stifling our imagination with the weight of reality.
"Thanks to surrealism, it seems those opportunities return."
The seemingly irrational can be fertile ground for new meaning.
Andre Breton mentioned that dreams should have the same importance as reality.
Not something we just remove from ourselves as we wake up.
"Thus the dream finds itself reduced to a mere parenthesis [...]"
"Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree
of consciousness which is daily more acute?
Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?"
When we tell people about our day, we usually just talk about the events that occur to us
and prefer to filter out our daydreams, our recollections, and flashbacks.
Even as I was writing this my mind had on several occasions wandered into a daydream,
but we constantly edit these out of ourselves because they are seen as unimportant or interruptive.
Although, as meandering as they may appear wouldn't you agree that they are still a part
of our day?
Paradoxically, wouldn't the removal of these instances be considered an unrealistic portrayal?
In a surrealist movie the narrative (if it has one) embraces the dream state.
In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie director Luis Bunuel fills the seemingly straight story
of six bourgeois friends trying to eat with random supernatural flashbacks and dream recollections
from secondary and even tertiary characters.
The narrative itself gets confused inside the characters dreams to the point that we
are no longer sure of what is really happening.
A dinner party they go turns into the stage play.
The second attempt of the same dinner party ends in a deadly duel.
When they finally get to sit down and eat the house gets attacked and it ends in a massacre.
This sort of thing can be seen in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2.
Dream logic is used to bring to life the main character's anxieties and how he escapes from
reality by revisiting his childhood memories or deviating into a fantasy.
In Tarkovsky's Mirror, it's used to blur the lines of memory and time.
We see a man recalling a past, but the events shift as a free flow of thoughts mixing together
memories, world events and dreams.
In Satoshi Kon's Paprika the limits of animation are tested in this visual exploration of the
malleability of dreams.
Their fluidity is respected in the use of changing perspectives, angles, personas, places,
and symbols.
It really captures the unstable mess of our dreams that don't follow a logic...unlike
Inception the movie it visually inspired.
The film rationalizes the irrational by giving the dream-world rules and structure which
is an admirable feat but would go against the surrealist ideal of the free flow of thought
to which Paprika better represents.
As the surrealists first intended, the use of dream logic was to connect with our subconscious
to blur the lines between contradictions: past, present, living, dead, waking and sleeping.
"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly
so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality,"
Recreating a place where we can explore the hidden parts of ourselves, our desires without
scrutiny and judgement or correction from all types of external logic.
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Now we return to the show.
For surrealists, movies where the closest way to recreate a waking dream.
You find yourself in a dark room and subjected to a stream of imagery erasing the world around
you and like in a dream you are more of a viewer then a participant, which can become
distressing when the dark side of dreams appear.
Where the familiar can become distorted and turn into the uncanny.
"[...] the "uncanny" is that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to
us, once very familiar."
Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny refers to the eerie feeling that comes up when the
distinction between imagination and reality is disturbed.
He gives the examples of when you feel a random coincidence like a pattern repeating, doubling
back in an unknown place, or seeing a doppelganger.
He links this to the subconscious.
A return of the repressed.
A trauma undigested and left buried in our inner world along other truths and desires
we'd rather not admit to ourselves.
But this darker side is in fact something a lot of filmmakers with surrealist tendencies
gravitate towards.
In Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock uses the uncanny by way of the double to represents a past
that the main character is unable to escape from and obsesses over.
Being led by his dark desire.
In Eraserhead, David Lynch creates a black and white nightmarish world of disturbing
imagery to manifest the main character's anxiety and how he sees his surroundings.
Everything feels alien to him, the outside world, his relationships, interactions, conversations,
being a parent, taking care of a baby.
"Lynch's Surrealism represents more a response to what he sees as the bizarre and nonsensical
nature of everyday life."
Another extreme example of apprehension brought to life can be seen in David Cronenberg's
Videodrome.
This follows another type of liberation.
David Cronenberg shows how our dark repressed desires can be indulged by technology and
how it leads to a transgressive and transformative connection where he literally fuses the human
body with the digital and mechanical.
As he demonstrates with the main character inserting himself into the embrace of the
TV screen.
But technology acts as a trojan horse that ultimately liberates him from his own human
nature making him into its extension.
Contradictions fused together distorting the recognizable but showing David Cronenberg's
worries about our increasing relationship with technology.
How far we are ready to let this connection continue.
Fears made flesh.
All movies in a way are surreal.
They are all to some extent a person's dream or representation of a collective unconscious.
Surrealists are just very upfront about it and willing to over share their inner selves
cinematically.
That's why it can feel uncomfortable, shocking or awkward because you are looking into someone's
intimacy, their trauma, fears, unprocessed mess of emotions and desires.
Filled with contradictions and questions they don't even have answers to.
A reality you can only make sense of in a dream.
Well, I have to admit watching all those Surreal movies sure does a number on your dreams.
I hope you enjoyed this video and If you are looking for more information on the subject
(because there is a lot) you should read The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film.
It was a helpful research book.
Next week we will give you a non-spoiler list of movies we recommend you should watch but
we also want your opinion.
So, let us know down in the comments what are your favourite Surreal movies and why!
And your comment might be featured in the video.
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The trippy music was made by Eduardo Gonzalez, if you liked what you heard then check his
information down in the description.
See you next week at the Film Club.