Surrealist Cinema
Film Art
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Surrealist Cinema
At the end of the 1920s, Surrealism proposed an avant-garde cinema that experimented all the time as any surrealist discipline does: by liberating the unconscious.
That is why in these films, which usually do not reach the length of a full-length film, we find dreamlike atmospheres where strange, disturbing, and at times delirious scenes follow one after the other, without any connection between them.
The liberation of the unconscious in creation is what is called “psychic automatism.” Surrealism was defined by André Breton, who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, as “pure psychic automatism,” which consists of letting the psyche, the soul, flow automatically, without thinking at all, without allowing reason to intervene The images impact, provoke, shake the viewer, and usually make sense on their own. They do not necessarily have logical continuity, a sequence. They are not necessarily ordered along the lines of a plot.
That is why it is said that, making a comparison with literature, if a traditional film tells a story like a novel, then Surrealist cinema is a poetry of images.
There is an ideological stance that leads surrealist artists to place themselves outside of reason, aesthetic principles, moral principles, and any order: their provocative and at times scandalous art is a slap in the face of a decadent bourgeois society, from which individuals must free themselves (just as the unconscious must free itself from the trap of reason).
In conclusion, we may say that Surrealist cinema artists aim to represent the inward significance of things and not their outward appearance. And this brings us back to the most famous image of Surrealist cinema (the one we have chosen to illustrate this publication), which was in fact a dream of Buñuel’s and in which we see Simone Mareuil and her eye being cut with a razor: we are in front of a symbol of the cinema that “wants to see what is behind the eye.”
Image: Simone Mareuil in the most famous scene of the Surrealist filmmaking (An Andalusian Dog, 1929, Luis Buñuel)
Representative films:
The Starfish (Many Ray and Jacques-André Boiffard, 1928)
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928)
An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel, 1929)
The Golden Age (Luis Buñuel, 1930)
The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930)
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