Surrealist Film Movement Overview
Surrealists revolutionized cinema with new approaches that freed it from traditional story-telling, transforming the medium to reveal the subconscious mind.
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The Art Story
Summary of Surrealist Film

Surrealism revolutionized the art of cinema with new techniques and approaches that freed it from traditional story-telling, transforming the medium into one that could explore, reveal, and possibly even replicate the inner-workings of the subconscious mind. Surrealist films often leave us with shocking images that lodge themselves into our psyche and deprive us of easily legible narratives, while at the same time prove compelling in their deep, ultimately neo-romantic expressions of desire. The movie screen becomes a portal through which the viewer can journey where the traditional common constructs can no longer be reliable guides, from a clergyman's sexual dreams to a poet's quest through a mirror, from an obsession with a starfish to a wound that emits live ants.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Surrealist films created a revolution in cinema by dispensing with linear narratives and plots, thereby freeing cinema from a reliance on traditional story-telling borrowed from literature. Surrealism creates the possibility of cinema itself as an independent and unique visual art form.

Surrealist films do not merely retell dreams or stories but replicate their very processes through illogical, irrational disruptions and disturbing imagery, uncensored by normal wakeful consciousness or morality. Surrealist filmmakers found new techniques to convey the atmosphere and incongruous states of dreams. Like dreams, many Surrealist films resist interpretation. As in actual dreams, characters in Surrealist films display a lack of will, even a certain impotence. There is a forfeiting of control and a complete submission to the dream state.

Surrealist films often use shocking imagery that jolts the viewer, imagery that had not been seen in films prior to 1928. This challenges the notion of cinema as mere entertainment; the viewer can no longer be passive or complaisant. Surrealist film attempts to change cinema so that audiences experience more than the standard visuals.

Surrealist films often assault traditional institutions in society, such as religion, family, or marriage, exemplified in Luis BuÃ±uel's attacks on the Catholic Church or David Lynch's depiction of a married couple with a deformed child, thus changing a traditional mode of mass entertainment into one full of revolutionary potential at the social and political level.

Many surrealist films are driven by strong feelings of longing, love, and sexual desire, what the founder of Surrealism, AndrÃ© Breton called "insane love," amour fou. This love or desire, while appearing self-destructive or illogical to the rational world, leads characters in surrealist films - and viewers in real life - to realizations they may not have otherwise had.

Unlike Surrealist poetry, which ultimately could only create abstract linguistic metaphor, Surrealist film could show even the most incongruous or absurd images as visual, concrete facts. It could show the marvelous or uncanny as real---the material strangeness of reality. And though Surrealist paintings could depict dream-like scenes, they were still single, frozen illusions, while Surrealist cinema could show actual objects in motion, as they move in dreams, the paradoxical realism of Surrealism.

Artworks and Artists of Surrealist Film

Beginnings of Surrealist Film

The Start of Surrealism

The first expressions of Surrealism took place in the early 1920s not in painting or cinema but in the poetry of AndrÃ© Breton, Paul Eluard, Philip Soupault, and Louis Aragon, all of whom explored automatic writing (writing in an almost hypnotic state, without the filtering of traditional poetic forms, morality, or rational meaning).The first to use the term "surrealist" was actually the older innovative poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, as a subtitle to his scandalous 1917 play, The Breasts of Tiresias. Apollinaire, who had been a major figure in the Cubist movement and had perished in World War I, was much admired by the younger poets, and so they named their movement "Surrealism" in his honor. Interestingly, one of Apollinaire's last projects was the screenplay for a movie, which was never produced, titled The Breton Girl (1917).

In their poems, the Surrealists sought the secret links between disparate objects and realities, the "conducting wire" between the subconscious and conscious life of humanity. Desire and love - even insane love, amour fou - were, like dreams, among the keys to unlocking the true mysteries of life itself. Poetry would liberate language from meaning, common sense, and traditional images - "No word will ever again be subordinated to matter," wrote Paul Eluard. Some years later, Antonin Artaud, who wrote the screenplay for what many consider the first authentic Surrealist film, The Seashell and The Clergyman (1928), would seek the liberation of images from language: "We must find a film with purely visual sensations ..."

Pre-Surrealist Cinema: Early Films That Inspired the Surrealists

The founders of Surrealism were passionate movie-goers. Their favorite films were adventure serials, such as Fantomas (1920), the tale of a ruthless thief, a master of disguise, and a sadistic killer. They also loved the adventures of Judex (1916), a shadowy crime-fighter whose headquarters were in the lower depths of a castle, equipped with the most modern crime-fighting technology. Breton's personal favorites included F.W. Murnau's erotic vampire classic, Nosferatu (1922), and the films of the actress known as Musidora, whom the Surrealists considered "indeed the modern woman."

Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) included a proto-Surrealist character named Cesare, a young man who lives in a state of permanent hypnosis - a state idealized by the Surrealist poets as liberating and revelatory. Wiene's movie ends in an insane asylum, where it is revealed that the entire story has been the imaginings of a lunatic patient. In the first Surrealist manifesto, Breton praised the insane for "their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them."

The early Surrealists, and indeed, future Surrealist film-makers such as Luis BuÃ±uel and Salvador DalÃ­, also loved American screwball comedies such as the Max Sennett's Keystone Cops, the films of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and above all, Buster Keaton. It is not difficult to see why: these comedies embody the energy and chaos of modern life but are sympathetic to the plights of their luckless, hapless, lower-class heroes, who are inevitably caught in a confusing and dehumanizing world of new expectations and relentless mechanization. In the majority of these films, authority figures, especially the police, are ridiculed. The Surrealists lauded the absurd plots and situations in these movies, such as Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock dial several stories above the bustling city. But in many of the films of Buster Keaton, the absurdity is raised a notch. Everyday objects are transformed in "surreal" ways - a cigar becomes a nail; a banana a gun; a two dimensional coat-hook painted on a wall actually serves to hold a real hat; a mannequin becomes an unemployed worker in a bread line; a clay horse melts and is dismembered. In Keaton's 1920 film, One Week, a portable house becomes an askew, Cubist-like structure into which Keaton attempts to pull a piano with a rope, destroying the floor. One cannot help but think of the scene in Un Chien Andalou, nine years later, in which the male figure pulls two grand pianos with a rope into the apartment, destroying walls and floorboards. In the 1921 feature, The High Sign, the Keaton character is described as the ultimate outsider, "who came from Nowhere - he wasn't going Anywhere, and got kicked off Somewhere."

The Rise of Experimental Film

The horror, crime, and comedy films were part of the popular culture of the 1920s, but these years also saw the emergence of experimental cinema, particularly in Germany and France. In 1921, Hans Richter created the first abstract film, Rhythmus 21, followed in 1924 by Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony. 1924 was also the year of Entr'acte, directed by Rene Clair, and starring some of the pivotal artists of the Dada and proto-Surrealist movements, such as Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Because of its absurd episodes, Entr'acte is often mistaken for a Surrealist film, but its whimsical nature makes it far more akin to Dadaism, without Surrealist cinema's underlying sense of desire, shock, and oneiric passivity. The same can be said of two other important experimental films: Fernand Leger's Ballet Mechanique (1924) and Marcel Duchamp's seven-minute Anemic Cinema (1926) ["Anemic" almost "Cinema" spelled backwards], although the latter has some affinities with Surrealism, with its roto-reliefs, like the spiraling discs of a hypnotist, that mesmerize the viewer, along with spinning phrases full of French puns and alliterations that sound, in their absurdity, like automatic poetry: " Baths of vulgar tea for beauty marks without too much Bengay."

The American photographer Man Ray, working in Paris in the 1920s, also experimented with film with Return to Reason (1923) and Emak-Bakia (Give Peace) (1926) His film L'Etoile de Mer (The Starfish) (1928), based on a poem by the Surrealist Robert Desnos, creates a true Surrealist oneiric-erotic simulacrum.

Surrealist Film: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, AndrÃ© Breton, the movement's founder, defined Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." He added: "Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream..." By this definition, true Surrealist films are those that create a simulacrum of dreams, of oneiric automatism, that replicate the very mechanics of dreams, in which the dreamer has no will and in which images and actions are freed from logical filtering, traditional functions, linear sequences, and from stylized, aesthetic beauty. Rational reality gives way to the "superior" reality of dreams and uncensored desire. Surrealist films, like Surrealist paintings and Surrealist poetry, explore juxtapositions of discordant images that would not, in "normal" reality, ever interact or be associated, such as a cloud and a razor, a piano and the rotting carcass of a donkey, Jesus Christ and sexual sadism.

The Building Blocks of Surrealist Film

Surrealist films share fundamental traits: first, an interest in, and replication of, the dream/nightmare state with characters who are often acting free of moral or logical restraints, or who display the passivity and impotence that humans experience in actual dreams; second, a dislocation of logical narrative sequence or plot; third, a transformation of the daily world into one in which normal objects are made alien, strange, and displaced from their traditional functions and environments or put in association with other, incongruous phenomena. Added to this is an interest in shocking imagery that awakens intense physical/optical horror, jolting the viewer out of passivity.

Surrealist Film on Politics and Social Constructs

While many Surrealist films seem to unfold in a world far from the realities of politics or societal issues, some Surrealist movies attack, disparage, or mock societal values and institutions (e.g. religion, family), particularly the films of BuÃ±uel. Many Surrealists, including Breton, had earlier on been associated with the Dadaist movement. Dadaism had also attacked society relentlessly, especially concepts such as religion, patriotism, and capitalism. Dadaists were deeply embittered by World War I, and used mockery and absurdity to ridicule the established order but in the process also lost faith in the redeeming quality of art itself, creating "anti-art" and "anti-poetry." Surrealism inherited aspects of Dada's social criticism, but it rejected Dadaism's nihilism. Surrealists believed in the power of romantic love, in the enduring relevance of poetry and art, in salvation - personal and societal - through liberation of the subconscious. While Dadaist films extoll a kind of whimsical chaos, Surrealist films tend to eschew any but the darkest humor, and explore more dangerous zones of the human psyche. When they attack society, they do so through dislocation of society's symbols, making them look absurd or even horrifying, such as the Crucifix in BuÃ±uel's L'Age d'Or to which female scalps have been nailed. Surrealism attacks through distortion and incongruity and the debasing of symbols.

Surrealist Films on Beauty and Aesthetics

The Surrealists viewed traditional concepts of beauty with the same contempt they felt for traditional morality. According to Breton, Surrealist practice in all the arts must take place "outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." Surrealism did not wish to be merely another movement in the arts like Impressionists, Cubism, or Symbolism; it sought social transformation as well, which is why it took active roles in left-wing politics and in psychoanalytic research. Yet despite Breton's rejection of formal aesthetic beauty, a certain stylized, lyrical, aesthetic look or feeling infuses many Surrealist films, from Man Ray's works of the 1920s, with their graceful sculptural objects and reflective surfaces, to the Neoclassical elements in The Blood of a Poet (1930), or the sartorial perfection of Last Year at Marienbad (1961). In the 1940s, Surrealism's influence reached the world of high fashion, to Breton's horror, with designers like Elsa Schiapirelli collaborating with Salvador DalÃ­ and Jean Cocteau on strange but exquisite clothing for the wealthy. Man Ray himself was a successful fashion photographer for Vogue magazine. On the other hand, films such as Un Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age d'Or (1930), and David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) express their goals in uncompromising, aggressively unaesthetic images and scenes.

Surrealist Films on Myth and Storytelling

Myth is as important to Surrealism as it was to Freud and Jung. Myths after all are part of the collective unconscious, which individuals re-enact in the compulsions of their lives. The ultimate handbook of myths in Western civilization is Ovid's poem The Metamorphoses (8 AD). The majority of these myths show the ability of the gods to transform themselves and the world around them - a man becomes a swan, a woman a laurel tree, an egotist a flower. Surrealists were fascinated by this power of transformation, which shows the fluid and magical nature of reality. When Surrealists used ancient myths, they attempted to revive them in contemporary settings and emphasize the transformative or magical in the stories, such as in the story of Narcissus or Orpheus, yet, at the same time, these mythical stories are liberated from their linear narratives, while preserving the fantastic elements. Beginning with Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930), Surrealist films often allude to the Orphic myth. We find this in such films such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Orpheus (1950), Last Year at Mariendbad (1961), and even the American low-budget horror flick, Carnival of Souls (1962). American filmmaker Willard Maas created his extraordinary Narcissus in 1956, mixing the surreal aspects of the myth with contemporary scenes from New York's bohemian and gay underground.

Later Developments - After Surrealist Film

In the United States, the Surrealist movement was given an extended life during World War II. AndrÃ© Breton, Salvador DalÃ­, Luis BuÃ±uel, Max Ernst, and many other European Surrealists found refuge in New York City. Charles Henri Ford, the truest Surrealist poet in American literature, introduced American readers to Surrealism through his lavish journal View, which ran from 1940 to 1947. Ford acted as a link between his generation and the 1960s Pop world, inspiring Andy Warhol to experiment with filmmaking; Ford produced his own surrealistic film Johnny Minotaur (1971). During the 1940s, even mainstream cinema absorbed aspects of surrealism, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), featuring sets by Salvador DalÃ­, or Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), in which a detective (Dana Andrews) experiences amour fou for a woman he thinks is dead; the second half of the movie is possibly nothing more than the detective's dream.

American Abstract Expressionist painters of the late 1940s and early 1950s were profoundly affected by Surrealism, as were the young writers of the Beat movement and the scores of young filmmakers in the wake of Maya Deren, such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Willaard Maas, and Jonas Mekas. In Europe, the official Surrealist movement had more or less petered out by the 1960s, though its influence on film persisted, as can be seen in Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker's La JetÃ©e (1962). Some original Surrealist filmmakers, most notably Luis BuÃ±uel, continued making films into the 1970s, all of which preserve elements of his Surrealist heritage, such as disjointed plots, unusual eroticism, attacks on religion, and amour fou. Additionally, Surrealist imagery was revived with great power by David Lynch in Eraserhead (1977).

Useful Resources on Surrealist Film