# data[].attributes.body
Surreal narratively and visually, but a dominant political statement. This use of surrealism contradicts the manifesto.

# data[].attributes.body
Perhaps the most enticing thing about Lynch's surreal masterpieces are his explorations of mystery, drawing the audience along and allowing different interpretations.

# data[].attributes.body
Modern day surrealist - perhaps the future?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Arrested Development: The Visual Style of Wes Anderson - The Focus Pull Film Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wes Anderson is a polarizing figure in contemporary cinema. On one hand, many admire his ability to wear his influences on his sleeve while maintaining a unique voice and style, however, others claim his films are overly stylistic and lacking in substance. While Anderson's films are undoubtedly stylistic, the substance is informed and enhanced by ...

# data[].attributes.body
Modern surrealism? or just surreal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Madison Brek · Published on March 15th, 2018

In 2006, David Lynch took to the streets of LA with a cow (yes, a real live cow on a leash) and some posters. One of which read "Without cheese there wouldn't be an Inland Empire." The stunt was Lynch's chosen method of campaigning for an Oscar nomination for long-time collaborator Laura Dern. When prompted for an explanation on the sign and the cow, his answer was: "cheese is made from milk." Unfortunately, this effort for Dern's nomination was unsuccessful. This moment, though was reflective of what's always been at the heart of Lynch's career: things that don't always initially appear to make a whole lot of sense.

Ultimately, I think this is the beauty of Lynch's 40-years of filmmaking. His works are not only unified by a theme but by their tendencies to appear impenetrable and often frustratingly tricky to decipher. Likely, for this reason, the majority of Lynch's work has been relegated to the status of cult classic. He has die-hard fans who, for the most part, love anything he does, but the nature of his work makes it hard for his movies to find broad appeal.

Lately, in film culture, you can't turn anywhere on the internet and not find a think piece or video essay titled something like "that specific plotline of that specific movie explained!" There are hundreds of the sort solely dedicated to the significance of the purposely mysterious spinning top at the end of the movie Inception. The norm for viewers now seems to be to search for and demand universal answers about anything ambiguous. Works that don't provide a specific brand of closure no longer seems to satisfy. However, Lynch has never bought into this idea, and seemingly, this is what's made a lot of his work polarizing.

I think that anything Lynch creates can be best enjoyed when you come at his work from a different angle. Lynch's artistic vision has always been one that supports ambiguity and deprives viewers of concrete resolutions. He never wraps his work up in a neat little bow. I think his films are most engaging when viewers are open to this in a way that not many movies require. His career trajectory demonstrates that a willingness to deal with confusion and to derive one's own meaning from what's transpired on screen is what Lynch has always tried to evoke in viewers.

Lynch's first feature, 1977's Eraserhead, gave us the first glimpse of this. The film was independently financed on a shoe-string budget, so Lynch had no one to answer to regarding his creative vision. One of the film's financiers was Catherine E. Coulson, who went on to play The Log Lady in Twin Peaks. She was making donations to help with funding from her salary as a waitress because she genuinely believed in Lynch's vision. Thanks to independent unwavering support from people like Coulson, Lynch flourished in creating Eraserhead, and he subsequently made a name for himself.

In Eraserhead, nothing was off limits. This is evidenced by the film's deformed baby that has haunted my dreams ever since my first viewing. Shot in black and white, the film is the first showcase of the surreal, nightmarish quality that would become a staple of Lynch's work. Lynch has repeatedly named writer Franz Kafka, author of "The Metamorphosis," as an influence. Nothing shows this influence off better than Eraserhead. These ideas would go onto permeate all of his future work to varying degrees.

After Eraserhead, Lynch was offered to direct The Elephant Man (1980). The film sticks out amongst Lynch's filmography because The Elephant Man is much more straight-edge and traditional in a narrative sense than most of Lynch's films. Simply put, The Elephant Man is probably the only Lynch film that you could show to a child. This made perfect sense for his first mainstream success. After The Elephant Man, Lynch was offered Dune (1984). To give some perspective on the path his career was headed after his first two films, Lynch was also offered to direct The Return of the Jedi at this time. Dune was a critical failure, and in retrospect, Lynch has said he considers his decision to direct the project selling out.

With these two films and Wild at Heart that would follow in 1990, Lynch was in the adaptation phase of his career. He wasn't directing projects based on his original screenplays. These films were a bit tamer in the sense of traditional story-telling (though, not in subject matter). Lynch's creativity seemed a bit bogged down by the source material. As adaptations, he could only go so far in the way of the indecipherability he would later be known for. The standout from this 10-year period would be 1986's Blue Velvet. The film was his first to be based on an original screenplay since Eraserhead. Blue Velvet sowed the seeds for his return to the vision he'd had with his debut.

Next came Lynch's foray into television with Twin Peaks in 1990. Co-created with Mark Frost, Lynch and his writing partner struggled with ABC to take the series in the direction they wanted. In fact, Lynch famously never wanted to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer's killer. But the network pressured him to do so. This struggle alone is indicative of Lynch's perspective on his work.

Most Twin Peaks viewers were eagerly waiting for answers each week. Curiosity about Laura's fate is what made people watch the show. But to Lynch, that's not what Twin Peaks was truly about. He wanted to focus on the array of campy characters they'd created and his surreal portrait of the insidious underbelly of small-town America that he had previously visited in Blue Velvet. Was finding out the identity of Laura's killer satisfying? Incredibly. But, would we perhaps have been better off not knowing? Based on how passionate Lynch is about his work and his original persistence that they never resolve that storyline, perhaps we would have been.

In 2017,Showtime revived Twin Peaks for a third season. With Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch directed and co-wrote every episode with Frost. With complete creative control, Lynch and Frost took the show in an entirely different direction than the original. I can't help but laugh at this scene from the first episode of the revival wherein a character says this nonsensical sentence to Cooper: "Remember: 430. Richard and Linda. Two birds, one stone." To which Cooper deadpans: "I understand."

Of course, unlike Cooper, viewers did not understand. Though, in Lynch's defense, the show eventually offered some explanation for this. Regardless, this moment set the scene for The Return. These 18 episodes had arrived to ask more questions than they were going to answer. Popular complaints of the revival were that the series had focused too much on what some deemed irrelevant scenes and characters instead of spending more time with old series regulars like Audrey Horne. However, this has always been the point of Lynch's work. Not to answer questions but to raise them, and not to reveal his meaning to us, but to force us to create our own. In a post-The Return finale interview, Lynch said this about how the show concluded:

"What matters is what you believe happened. Many things in life just happen and we have to come to our own conclusions. You can, for example, read a book that raises a series of questions, and you want to talk to the author, but he died a hundred years ago. That's why everything is up to you."

This is what Lynch has always wanted from viewers. The other works from the latter half of his career, before The Return but after the original run of Twin Peaks, are very in keeping with this. Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006) -all directed by Lynch with original screenplays he'd penned- were beautiful, ambiguous nightmares. These films, along with The Return and Eraserhead, are where Lynch's surrealism and Kafkaesque influences come through the most.

Like Kafka, Lynch excels at making viewers feel both connected and alienated at the same time. In Mulholland Drive, many of the scenes are incredibly intimate, but their baffling randomness cements a disconnect. This balance is what makes Lynch's films so intoxicating. This type of work is where Lynch shines, and I believe that this is where he always wanted to end up artistically.

Upon release, the critical response to Mulholland Drive was a bit divided. However, today, the film's difficult to navigate mystery has not prevented critics and viewers from hailing Mulholland Drive as a classic. But still, after seeing the film, many wanted answers and sought out "explanations." My favorite scene from Mulholland Drive is the one in the Winkie's diner. The scene is one of many that features neither main character and is admittedly extremely random. However, there's something incredibly unsettling and intense about the 5-minute scene, and it's difficult to put your finger on why. Scenes like this make me care less about how certain plot points fit into the overall narrative and more about how well they succeed at what I believe was their intention.

This isn't to say that Mulholland Drive, or the Winkie's scene, or Lynch's entire filmography should not be subject to rigorous analysis - quite the contrary. Good art demands analysis and discussion. What I argue is that the goal of said analyses and discussion is better off reframed when aimed at Lynch's work. Instead of searching for universal truths to his stories, I think viewers are better off seeking to create their own interpretation of the films. Finding something within Lynch's movies that rings true to your own experiences is what matters.

This doesn't mean that I don't think Lynch has all the answers. In fact, I'm certain he does, at least in an overarching sense. Effective storytelling can only be so effective when the one doing the telling has mostly everything figured out. However, this doesn't mean we need -or should even want, for that matter- to know what they are. By creating your meaning from his work, Lynch's movies can take on a life of their own. The brilliance of films that create this effect is that you can take away a brand new meaning upon each viewing depending on how you're feeling that day or where you're at in your life. In an interview for Sky Movies, Lynch had this to say about how he hopes viewers feel after watching his films:

"When things are concrete, there's very few variations and interpretations... but the more abstract the thing gets, the more varied the interpretations. But people still know, inside, what it is for them. And even if they don't trust their intuition, I always say that if some girl named Sally, she comes out of the theatre, 'I don't have a clue what that means,' she goes over with Bob and Jim to get a cup of coffee. Bob starts talking about what he thinks it is because he knows exactly what it is. He starts talking. Five seconds later, Sally is saying "No, no, no, no. It's not that,' and then all these things come out of Sally. So Sally really did know, for herself. That's the beauty of it. It's just like life. You see the same things, but you come up with many, many different things as you go along as a detective."

The other important aspect of Lynch's artistic vision is the experience. He wants you to be scared and uncomfortable and to fully experience the surreal. If you watch Mulholland Drive, or any of Lynch's films, paying stark attention to each small background detail and "easter egg," you'll miss out on part of the intended experience. I view Lynch's work as set out to prove that, in film, a feeling can be more powerful than infallible understanding. Lynch crafts the dream-like atmospheres of all his films so meticulously. Feeling like you're living in these worlds for two-hours is just as important as understanding what happened to Laura Palmer, who the hell Diane Selwyn is, or why in god's name Frank Booth has such an aggressive affinity for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

So if you hate David Lynch, try giving one of his movies another go with these things in mind and see if you can't find something to love. I think each of his films truly has something for everyone if you look in the right places.

Related Topics: David Lynch, Opinions, Twin Peaks

Recommended Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Key to Understanding David Lynch is Being Okay With Not Understanding David Lynch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Madison Brek · Published on March 15th, 2018 In 2006, David Lynch took to the streets of LA with a cow (yes, a real live cow on a leash) and some posters. One of which read "Without cheese there wouldn't be an Inland Empire."

# data[].attributes.body
A response to the seashell and the clergyman. Recognised as still one of the most influential, shockingly surreal films ever made.
Had less of a narrative and many different interpretations, deeming it the first actual surrealist film made to some critics.

# data[].attributes.body
Took a surreal environment and gave it a narrative.

Modern day Surrealist

Perhaps the original surrealists would not agree with this being classed as surrealism?

# data[].attributes.body
The cremator

Valerie and her week of wonders

Daisies

-a reaction to the reign of communism in Czechoslovakia
-took inspiration from the surrealist movement but fuelled with narrative and politics

# data[].attributes.body
The larger issue here is whether avant-garde aesthetics or ideas can ever be incorporated into a commercial mass medium without some sort of compromise. In one obvious sense, the notion of ‘commercialisation’ seems inappropriate in regard to the New Wave: were not these films produced within an entirely state-controlled film industry that protected filmmakers from the vulgarising pressures of the marketplace?

# data[].attributes.body
New wave (American and French) came after the surrealist period, adapting a more marketable style of filmmaking, but nevertheless was a stance against Hollywood.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Preface: This talk is intended merely to introduce you to the context of film developments - in both theory and practice - that dominated the 20th century. It is not a detailed history of film. Rather it is an overview of the main developments in film and film theory, contextualised with the relevant aesthetic, technological and cultural histories that frame these developments. We expect you to use these talks and the accompanying pdf (for a copy, mail me at bobcotton@mac.com) as a tool to explore these films more thoroughly in your own time. From Surrealism to New Wave
The development of Film as a medium of self-expression, narrative story-telling, and communication, is intricately bound up with the broader cultural, technological and historical context in which it exists, so our talk about the period from Surrealism to the Sixties New Wave begins with a brief overview of this context. There are strong links between the two periods (the 1920s and 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s), separated by a world war and thirty-odd years...The ferment of cultural activity that marked the New Wave in the 1960s echoed the Surrealist period in that they both engaged artists, scientists, poets, musicians, writers and film-makers, and both periods bred a generation of artists working in mixed media. New technologies were making the cinematographic arts more accessible to individual artists during both these periods. And war - the recovery from, preparation for, and the actuality of - underpinned both periods.
Surrealism
The surrealists began to coalesce officially in 1924 with the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton. Surrealism brought together many ideas, tastes and theories, cemented by methods for exploring the unconscious mind (psychology, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, ethnology, primitive art, Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Automatic Writing, collage, free-association, the Exquisite Corpse, Marxism, Giorgio de Chirico, DADA, psychic automatism, stream of consciousness, spontaneity, the writings of Marquis de Sade, chance and coincidence, mystical states, the art of the insane, children's art, free sex and spiritual ecstasy) - these 'psychic probes' were the underpinning and the glue of Surrealism.

Luiz Bunuel, himself a new conscript, introduced Salvador Dali to the Surrealist group after the screening of Le Chien Andalou (1928). In his autobiography, My Last Breath (1982), Bunuel describes his collaboration with Dali on this iconic surrealist film: "When I arrived to spend a few days at Dali's house in Figueras, I told him about a dream I'd had in which a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor-blade slicing through an eye. Dali immediately told me that he'd seen a hand crawling with ants in a dream he'd had the previous night. 'And what if we started right there, and made a film?' he wondered aloud. Despite my hesitation, we soon found ourselves hard at work, and within less than a week we had a script. Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why." Luiz Bunuel: My Last Breath 1982 Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali: Le Chien Andalou (1929).

A good general introduction to Surrealism - and other movements in modern art of the 20th century - is Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New - a book and series of television documentaries made in Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New 1980 Episode 5 The Threshold of Liberty (Surrealism)

Man Ray: Lee Miller (1929) ￼ Max Ernst and Paul Eluard: Les Malheurs des Immortelles (the Misfortunes of the Gods) 1922 ￼ Giorgio de Chirico: Nostalgia of the Infinite (1914) ￼ Giorgio de Chirico: Melancholy and Mystery of the Street (1913) ￼ Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonte ( A Week of Kindness) 1934

Robert Florey: The Love of Zero 1927 http://videolog.tv/762071

The idea that a film-maker, working on their own or with a small crew, could work outside the burgeoning Studio System (centred mostly on Hollywood), on work that was experimental, personal, not in hock to remediating plays, novels and existing stories, was new in the 1920s, and began to be revisited in the 1940s-1950s as a precursor of the New Wave (USA), La Nouvelle Vagu e (France) and Free Cinema (UK).
Early American Avant Garde.
Of course, in the 1920s, the experimentation with cinematography was prolific in America as well as in Europe. The emergence of an avant garde - specifically a tradition of movie-making that was led by non-conventional film-makers, including photographers, artists, dancers, dramaturges...

Amongst the earliest were: ￼ Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand: Manhatta aka New York the Magnificent (1921) Together they made the first in a new genre of films ' City Symphony Movies' that were hymns of praise to the modern city, and that characterised avant garde approaches to documentary for a decade or more. Other ' City Symphonies' movies included two iconic avant garde films: Walter Ruttman's Berlin-Symphony of a Great City (1927), and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler: Manhatta (1921) was the first.
Paul Strand: Under the Dark Cloth Melville Webber and James Sibley Watson: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) Melville Webber and James Sibley Watson: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
Watson and Webber's Usher is a veritable catalogue of experimental visual effects - an essay on avant garde film-style, all in 13 minutes. Watson made several other avant garde films: notably Tomatos Another Day (1930), and Lot in Sodom (1933), his collaborator Melville Webber also made Rhythm in Light (1934) - an abstract reflection of what goes on in the mind of a person listening to music... ￼
Bolex H-16 (1960) and Bell & Howell 16mm Filmo.
The availability of relatively low-cost cine cameras, like Bell & Howell's Filmo (from 1927), created the technical conditions within which the avant-garde film was possible. This. plus the wave of interest in film, attested to by the growth of film clubs, societies and lecture/talk networks during the 20s and 30s, in which film-makers could meet and talk, in which fans, critics, practitioners, artists found fellow-travellers, collaborators, financiers, and fans created the conditions for a flourishing avant garde, independent industrial (studio) film-making sector.
The Birth of Digital But before we continue, we must first recognise the birth of what will become (by our 21st century) our dominant, world-embracing media culture - the 1930s marked the very beginnings of digital media - in the landmark development of the ideas for a digital computer.
Probably the most significant waypoint in this back-story of where we are now, was the English mathematician Alan Turing's paper On Computable Numbers published in 1936, where he describes in detail a possible digital computing machine that could theoretically simulate the operation of every other computing machine - this was labelled by others the Turing Machine or Universal Turing Machine. It was the conceptual model for all digital computers, and spurred the invention and development of digital computing during the 1940s.
Mike Davey: Turing Machine Simulator Alan Turing: diagram of a Turing Machine￼ Why is a film student being introduced to Turing Machines?
In the 1990s Mike Davey built a working model of a Turing Machine, describing in its actions the processes of writing to, reading from, and erasing from memory, calculation by addition, etc... these simple operations can be used to solve any computable problems.
Digital Media is Software. All mass media today (films, books, news, records, games, magazines) are digital - and when it comes down to it, they are all strings of zeros and ones - they are all software. The digital computer takes all these strings of data - all these zeros and ones - and uses them to simulate the media they encode, whether it is a picture, a film, a newspaper, a song-recording, a cartoon.... Media becoming Software has several implications, among which are: * content is mediated by a computer or processor-powered device * content is infinitely copyable without degradation * content can be manipulated by code and by the user - it can be interactive * content can be published online - it can be compressed and reformatted for any digital device * content can combine several media - multimedia is a concomitant of digital.
Because we live in an age of digital media and software.

And the Turing Machine was the conceptual model for digital computing. Of course the 1940s and 1950s saw the wartime development of digital computers, based on the English mathematician Alan Turing's 1936 paper in which he described a universal computer - the Turing Machine became the theoretical model for the digital computers developed at Bletchley Park, and Manchester in the UK, and in Germany and the USA in the 1940s.

In parallel with these digital developments, the ideas and theories that eventually inspired the Internet and the Web (in the 1960s and 1980s respectively) were published in the 1930s: HG Wells' World Brain in 1938, and the Belgian Informatics/Librarian Paul Otlet's Mundunaeum four years earlier.
Paul Otlet: The Mundunaeum 1934 1938 HG Wells' World Brain

A member of the socialist Fabian Society, and a supporter of the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations), Wells was a techno-optimist in his belief that the technology of information science and communications could save the world. (This belief still drives many of us engaged in the new media now - it is the belief that has a basis in the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of the Kropotkin, and more directly the Documentarists of European Information Science (including Otlet). According to a modern iteration of the World Brain, the brilliant Wikipedia: "The essay " The Brain Organization of the Modern World" lays out Wells' vision for "...a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (p. 49) Wells felt that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilized towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica." (p. 54)
So as you can see, during this mid-20th Century period, most of the essential ingredients of modern digital media: computing and the development of the transistor; Broadcasting; Telecommunications networks; and modern content (music records, film, television, etc) had been developed.
A similar view of an automated system for making all of humanity's knowledge available to all had been proposed a few years earlier by Paul Otlet, one of the founders of information science.
Why is the classification of knowledge still a really important issue now? What is microfilm and why was it then seen as the future of information-storage? ￼ Paul Otlet: The Mundunaeum (1934) New Genres of Movie in the 1930s
Content-media can be traced to their pre-digital roots in the C19th and early C20th - that is, to the invention of electronic media ( Radio from 1900, public broadcasting from the early 1920s, Television from the 1930s) - and of course optical media like the Photograph (1840), and Cinema (1895). By the late 1940s all these ingredients had been reinforced by the publication of the essential theories of Global Information Systems (Otlet and Wells mid 1930s), Computation (1936 Turing), Digital Computers (Zuse 1936, Turing 1941), Computer architecture (1945 von Neumann), Communications Theory (1948 Shannon), Games Theory (1944 Morgenstern and von Neumann), and Cybernetics (1948 Weiner), and of course Vannevar Bush's ideas about how all this could come together in an electronically-interlinked document-storage system or 'Memory-extension machine' he called the Memex (In a 1945 article, ' As We May Think '). ￼
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3410886681/
Several new genres emerged in the 1930s as older genres were refined. In an era of economic depression and widespread social hardships - soup kitchens were widespread in UK and USA and many Western countries affected by the stock-market crash of 1929. People looked for entertainment that would make them laugh (comedies, cartoons ( Betty Boop, Popeye, etc), slapstick (Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers), the rom-com screwball comedies - ( Bringing Up Baby ), thrill them (crime ( Scarface 1932), , adventure, Westerns, and horror genres, including Dracula and Frankenstein - both 1931), transport them in fantasy (Disney animated features, Wizard of Oz etc) or Religion and the classics ( Ten Commandments, Cleopatra 1934, and dazzle them with beauty and wealth (musicals, Busby Berkely dance spectaculars, etc). Some like the rags-to-riches or poor little rich girl meets working class hero ( Sullivan's Travels 1941, It Happened One Night 1934, My Man Godfrey 1936)

Just before the War, Joyce finally published the book he had been working on for 27 years, his masterpiece Finnegan's Wake. This was and is, without a doubt, the most revolutionary book of the 20th century, a mythopoetic 'novel' set around a funeral wake, a stream of consciousness composed in multi-lingual puns, with polymathic references, quotes and allusions: ￼ James Joyce started work on his last novel Finnegan's Wake in 1922, and it was published in 1939. It is his most controversial work, as the book-cum-novel seems to dispense with plot, with logic, and often with language.

Developing his prose style from Ulysses (1922), it is this attempt to render a condition of 'mythic dreamtime', through the process of a seeming stream of consciousness, and through a text that contains multi-lingual puns, literary allusions and metaphors, and that is very interesting in terms of the history of media innovation. Several authors of this period experimented with stream of consciousness - the unedited, uninterrupted flow of words tapped as it were from the deep consciousness or sub-conscious mind. Henry Miller successfully interpolated such passages in his otherwise narrative novels ( Sexus, (1949) Plexus (1963) etc) , (describing these passages as somehow channelled through him, direct to his fingertips) and the Surrealists experimented with Automatic Writing.

Later in the 1950s both Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs used these techniques in landmark books like Kerouac's The Subterraneans (1958), and Burroughs Naked Lunch (1959). To enjoy Finnegan's Wake you either have to make a deep study of it using the various plot-interpretations of scholars like Anthony Burgess or Joseph Campbell (or the several concordances and hypertext examples on the WWW) - or alternatively either read it aloud to yourself, enjoying the tongue-twisting orality of the words, which can envelope you like a richly textured and figured tapestry - or listen to one of the several audio-book versions. ￼ Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake (1944) gives some idea of the depth and complexity of Joyce's master work, as does Moholy-Nagy's schematic above. ￼

- 'literary criticism in a diagram' In the 1990s, the Rave theorist Terence McKenna, had this to say about Finnegan's Wake
"Another theme of the Wake [Finnegans Wake] that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys (double-meaning by linking two-words) dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy."
In the 1960s, the electronic media guru Herbert Marshall McLuhan was fascinated by Finnegan's Wake:

Herbert Marshall McLuhan: From Cliché to Archetype (1970) (my emphasis)
Film developments in the 1940s But lets continue our focus on innovations in film in the 1940s: Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
How relevant this is now in the 21st Century! When we have access to all the cultures of the world at the click of a mouse, or the swipe of a finger... How is McLuhan's insight in From Cliche to Archetype relevant to the mediascape now?

Curtis Harrington: The House of Harrington - documentary reminiscence on movies inc Harrington's The Fall of the House of Usher 1942 8mm short feature.

Like Deren, Harrington explores waking-dream states, the unconscious, the trance state of consciousness, evoking the surrealist films of Bunuel and Dali ( Le Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or) ￼
http://www.previewfilms.com.au/movie-fires-were-started-(1943)-160.htm
1943 Humphrey Jennings: Fires Were Started.
What do you think a 'pure' documentary would be? Is Reality TV a documentary? Think of all the documentaries now showing every night on Television - do they use reconstruction? Jackson Pollock: The Key 1946
This film by Jennings is about the firemen who were fighting fires in the London Blitz - the intense German bombing of London in 1940-1941. It is a 'documentary' in that it uses real firemen, not actors, but Jennings uses extensive reconstruction - the re-enactment of actual scenes - thus perpetuating the ethical debate on the Documentary that had started with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922). Should documentary be a 'silent witness' of true life? How far can a documentarist interfere in real-life in order to tell a coherent story? Can a documentarist use reconstructions and re-enactments in order to tell a more 'truthful' story? These are the issues discussed since Flaherty used reconstructions to tell the story of the Esquimo he called Nanook, in 1922.
Willem de Kooning: Two Women with Still Life 1952 Jackson Pollock: No8 1949 ￼
Jackson Pollock: Jungian Unconscious, archetypes and spontaneous gesture - abstract expressionism ￼ Jackson Pollock: The Key 1946 The younger generation of American painters - at first influenced by European artists like Picasso, and the Surrealists, during the 1940s developed a style of work that was later to be called 'abstract expressionism' and hailed as the new American art, evangelised by US Government agencies around the world during the early Cold War as examples of American freedom, creativity and self-expression (by implication, an art not possible in the USSR or China). Most representative of the Abstract Expressionists was the painter Jackson Pollock. His early 1940s work is still dominated by an interest in Jungian archetypes and surrealism, but by the end of the decade he is painting vast iconic abstract paintings, dispensing with brush and wall-mounted canvases: Jackson Pollock documentary clip 1951:￼

As you can see, the 1940s was a very interesting period for media-innovations (amplified by the technological accelerator of the second world war!), with coeval developments of free-form bebop jazz, Disney's Fantasia, abstract expressionism, Meya Deren's experimental films, digital computers, communications theory, cybernetics, propaganda radio, the emergence of auteur films from Hitchcock, Preston Sturges and others, the protest songs of Woody Guthrie (the beginning of the modern American folk tradition), the emergence of Rock'n'Roll, the Electric Guitar, Long-player vinyl records, Electronic Blues and Rhythm'n'Blues, the development of Crime Noire as a distinctive genre, the mythopoetic films of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Carne, Orson Welles' iconic Citizen Kane and other films, genius comic heroes (Batman, The Spirit, Captain America), the invention of the Atomic Bomb and Atomic Power, the invention of penicillin, development of blood plasma, helicopters, jet engines, the popularisation of Television, development of integrated RADAR and telecoms systems (British Chain Home System), and much more besides.

Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis et al: Bebop Jazz ￼ Bebop jazz was probably the first iteration of 'modern jazz' - it was the first non-dance jazz genre, characterised by improvisation, assymetric phrasing, solo instrumentals, scat singing, and intricate, 'non-linear' melodies. Bebop is associated with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Cannionball Adderley and Thelonius Monk. Later in the 1950s and 1960s, variants of Bebop like Cool Jazz, showcased by Chet Baker, Milt Jackson, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck became very popular. The individual - the solist - takes personal control of the shape of a piece of music, themically linking it to a base tune or melody, but freely improvising around that basic theme. An inspirational model for creative innovation....

My favorite post-Bebop saxophonist is the great John Coltrane: John Coltrane: My Favorite Things (1964) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG2dsXV5HI ￼ Bebop had its own distinctive 'cool' graphics ￼ BlueNote Records with sleeves designed by Reid Miles and photographs by BlueNote co-founder Francis Wolfe, set a distinctive style in graphics, effectively defining the style of jazz albums thereafter. ￼ Frank Sinatra - publicity still 1944 The first mass-media 'stars' of musical entertainment (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, etc) emerged in the mid 1940s as Record producers discovered the synergies possible with US Radio stations, Juke boxes, concert performance, and record sales. In 1944 during a period when he was performing at the NY Paramount, Sinatra was attracting 25,000 fans to a 2000-seater theatre, and earning $4000 a week. (the average wage in US then was less than $1000 a year). ￼

Arthur Fellig (WeeGee): Sinatra Fans 1944 (called bobby soxers because of their youth - the word teenager had not been coined yet. Arthur Fellig was famous as a photo-journalist covering NYPD call-outs in the 1930s. Later he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on short films. ￼

Fellig would listen in to police radio transmissions, sometimes travelling with the police to the scene of a murder, thus scooping the first reactions, and photographing the victims bodies. (He was nick-named WeeGee because his prompt arrivals at crime scenes seemed magical - as if he was using a Ouija board to foretell the crimes). ￼
George Rodger: Female SS guards bury dead at Bergen Belsen Death Camp 1946
The Atomic Age - post Auschwitz and post-Hiroshima

Mavis Tate MP on Buchenwald Extermination Camp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wu5PAtj5Ds

I'm trying to give you a collage of the cultural history of the 1940s and 1950s, decades dominated by World War 2, the apocalyptic dawning of the Atomic Age, the horrors of the Nazi Death Camps, the Nuclear Arms Race, post-war reconstruction (the National Health service, and Social Security in the UK), McCarthyism and rabid anti-communism in the US, and the Cold War. These were the global and generational factors that underpinned our life, art and culture in the decades following WW2. The revelations of the horrors of Nazi extermination camps (1945) and the news of the first Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) were to have a global cultural impact. Some of the effects of these atrocities were the emergence of Existentialism, the Anti-War movement, CND, Anti-Fascist movements, in Britain the Angry Young Men (the writers John Osborne, John Wain, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Colin Wilson, etc. Novels by many of these writers became famous as the kitchen-sink-realism feature films of the 1960s - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Billy Liar, The L-Shaped Room, A Taste of Honey, Up the Junction, etc). ￼
Harry Everett Smith: A Strange Dream 1948
By the end of the war, the American avant garde, kick-started in the mid 1940s by Maya Deren and Curtis Harrington, really got started, spawning talents such as Kenneth Anger, Harry Everett Smith, and others featured in Frank Stauffacher's Art-Film Club at San Francisco Museum of Art. Hollywood discovered a new source of innovation - B movies developing the Crime Noir genre - films based on the great crime writers of the period - Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ed McBain. Look at the innovative first-person perspective of Robert Montgomery's T he Lady in the Lake (1947).

While outside US we see Roberto Rosellini's neo-realist, documentary-style Rome Open City (1945)
￼ Jean Cocteau: La Belle et La Bete (1946) http://www.criterion.com/films/177-beauty-and-the-beast
1945 ￼-1948 Harry Everett Smith: A Strange Dream and Early Abstractions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wYJ51nSXRQ ￼

Smith is a much revered film-maker and innovator in camera-less film - painting and drawing frame-by-frame on the film itself.

SMITH ON SMITH Filmmaker, musicologist, ethnographer, bohemian, and occultist, Harry Smith was one of the most original artists and unusual thinkers in postwar American culture. While living at New York's Chelsea Hotel during the 1970s, Smith was part of a milieu of underground artists, musicians, and writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. It was there that he also met the visionary poet and singer Patti Smith, who remained a close friend and colleague until Harry Smith's passing in 1991.

In 1946 Jean Cocteau was in recovery from opium addiction, working in war-torn France, struggling to find film-stock and equipment to shoot this, his filmic-poetic recreation of the traditional fairy-tale The Beauty and the Beast, first published in a book in 1740. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (1947): "La Belle et la Bete is a "priceless fabric of subtle images,...a fabric of gorgeous visual metaphors, of undulating movements and rhythmic pace, of hypnotic sounds and music, of casually congealing ideas"; according to Crowther, "the dialogue, in French, is spare and simple, with the story largely told in pantomime, and the music of Georges Auric accompanies the dreamy, fitful moods. The settings are likewise expressive, many of the exteriors having been filmed for rare architectural vignettes at Raray, one of the most beautiful palaces and parks in all France. And the costumes, too, by Christian Bérard and Escoffier, are exquisite affairs, glittering and imaginative." ￼Jean Cocteau: Orphee 1949 http://www.criterion.com/films/610-orpheus One of my favorite films, Orphee retells the story of Orpheus and the Underworld (Orpheus and Eurydice), recast in small French Mediterranean town in the late 1940s, and centred on the Poets Cafe. This is a mythopoetic metaphysical drama, the scene set with the poet Orphee tuning his car radio to catch cryptic messages from the underworld (Cocteau was inspired by the cryptic BBC messages broadcast to Resistance fighters in WW2). Cocteau has no money for optical special effects (requiring expensive laboratory-printing), so he uses simple in-camera effects throughout (slow motion, reverse footage, mirror-imagery etc). 1953 Charles and Ray Eames: A Communications Primer http://laughingsquid.com/a-communications-primer-1953-by-ray-charles-eames/ ￼ This is an important development in filmic media - its the first film I know of to combine graphics, animation, voice-over, music and sound-effects, stills and cinematography in a way that we can recognise today as 'motion graphics'. Charles and Ray Eames were an eminent architect/designer/film-maker team whose work from the mid-1940s onwards made an important contribution to the world of design and communications. This film is also important because it is a remarkable exposition of a fairly complex mathematical paper by the American researcher and mathematician Claude Shannon (then at Bell Telephone Labs)- a paper that was to have great consequences for the design of digital telecommunications systems. Shannon's central idea is that of the communications channel - from the Source or SENDER of information to the RECEIVER and Interpreter of that information, through a CHANNEL that includes: SENDER (IDEA)>SENT MESSAGE>CHANNEL>RECEIVED MESSAGE>RECEIVED IDEA Shannon proved that there are issues of of semantic encoding and decoding at the SENT MESSAGE and RECEIVED MESSAGE stages (how well the original idea is encoded into a MESSAGE and finally decoded into the RECEIVED IDEA), and also that the CHANNEL itself is prone to distortion due to technical and physical NOISE (like the poor shading in this diagram below): ￼ Shannon's Theory had been published in 1949, so the Eames' film was the first attempt to explain and illustrate a theory then only four years old. But the Eames' do not only rely on abstractions (clear animation and diagrams) to illustrate Shannon's ideas - they also poetically interpret the ideas (using metaphor and analogy, contextual imagery, music and sound effects). Francois Truffaut: A Certain Tendency in French Cinema (Cahiers du Cinema, 1954) "'A certain tendency in French cinema' was the title of the article in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, in July 1954, in which Truffaut proposed what he called 'la politique des auteurs'. The article was a polemical attack on the current state of French cinema, written by a young man anxious to start his own film career, and opposed by wehat he took to be the orthodoxy of his native film industry. This feeling was shared by other writers on the magazine whose enthusiasm, knowledge and ambition led them to argue that what they valued most in cinema, especially American cinema, was the product of a unified and organising vision. The vision embodied in the films was, they argued, that of its author, or auteur, the director. The implication of their critical practice was that some individuals, exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock, could transcend the constraints of the industrial practices of Hollywood and make films which explored recurrent pre-occupations in distinctive ways. "... Andrew Sarris, an American film critic and translator of Cahiers, translated la politique des auteurs as 'auteur theory'. Sarris had his own polemical purposes: he wanted to argue that films produced within an industrial system could have artistic qualities that were conventionally accorded to films from Europe." Philip Simpson: Authorship in Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (ed E Pearson and P Simpson Routledge 2001) Auteur-Structuralism The Truffaut/Sarris early iteration of 'Auteur Theory' hardly deserved the title of 'theory'. Truffaut's article was a polemical comment. Sarris did not ground his approach in any explicit theory of how 'texts' (films, books etc) were understood. Neither did he describe a methodology; nor take into account how films were shaped by genre, by the marketplace, by the studio system, etc. These 'structural' aspects of film production were side-lined by an over-emphasis on the role of the director/auteur. But by the latter 1960s, two works appeared which developed the notion of authorship more widely: Geoffrey Newell-Smith's Visconti (1967), and Peter Wollen's series of articles: Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (1966-72). Wollen suggests that we shouldn't use Art Cinema models as the basis of a critique of Hollywood films. ￼ avant garde auteur model ￼ Studio auteur model ￼ promotional poster for North by NorthWest 1959 Alfred Hitchcock: North by Northwest (trailer) 1959 (Robert Burks DP, Production Design Robert ~Boyle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfmTpmIUwo Hitchcock's individual film style was exemplified by several characteristics, including: his personal (ex-plot) appearance in many of his films, a story structure based upon The Thirty-Nine Steps cool sense of modernism in composition music by Bernard Herrman Blonde female protagonist The Thirty-Nine Steps meta-plot: innocent man is blamed for a crime he is pursued by villains and by police he is helped (at first reluctantly) by a (blonde) woman he survives several close shaves with the villains he eventually is recognised as innocent and (with the blonde, who has fallen in love with him) he helps capture the villains usually on some famous national monument/building/statue ￼ 2007 Martin Scorsese: Key to Reserva - tribute to Hitchcock, Bernard Herrman, Saul Bass etc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5nAxzH4OPs How many of Scorcese's references to Hitchcock films can you detect? Alfred Hitchcock: North by Northwest: Titles Sequence by Saul Bass http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIlqatMQSgI To give you some idea of just how fast the movie-titles-design sector was moving post Saul Bass' earlier work, In Britain Bernard Lodge (Dr Who), Robert Brownjohn (From Russia with Love) and Maurice Binder (Dr No) were the designers to watch - all three of them setting the styles for the James Bond and Dr Who brand titles for years to come. Maurice Binder: Dr No titles 1962 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYw_vVxw8tg ￼ Robert Brownjohn: From Russia with Love titles 1963 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y952TRNBvDw ￼ ￼ 1963 Bernard Lodge: Dr Who titles - with Ron Grainer's electronic score, created by Delia Derbyshire at BBC Radiophonic Workshop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4 1950 Fred Waller: Cinerama ￼ The increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to introduce numerous technological innovations in order to compete for audiences. The most successful of these innovations were widescreen and 3-D formats based, ironically, on experiments conducted since the 1890s. The first widescreen process of the 1950s, the triptych Cinerama format used for This Is Cinerama (Merian C Cooper, 1952), was directly inspired by the Polyvision system used in the 1920s, though it added a curved screen to provide a feeling of immersive depth. 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen format, based on Henri Chretien's Hypergonar system, soon replaced the more cumbersome Cinerama. ￼ ￼ 1953 20th Century Fox: Cinemascope In order to fully demonstrate the panoramic potential of the new widescreen formats, a number of biblical epics of the 1920s were remade in widescreen Technicolor, including Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (William Wyler, 1959; a remake of Fred Niblo's 1925 original) and Cecil B DeMille's remake of his own 1923 The Ten Commandments in 1956. (They were dismissed as 'tits and sand' films by the industry, for their over-reliance on exoticism.) Since the 1950s, ultra-wide formats have only rarely been utilised for narrative films, relegated instead to novelty attractions such as Imax (Tiger Child by Donald Brittain, 1970). These audience-engulfing, large-screen and multi-screen formats were initially proposed by Stan VanDerBeek in his 1966 manifesto "Culture:Intercom" And Expanded Cinema: A Proposal And Manifesto. There were other quite radical experiments, including Morton Heilig's Sensorame - a coin-op multi-sensory simulation device: ￼ Morton Heilig: Sensorama 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSINEBZNCks Stan Vanderbeek radio documentary 2011 https://soundcloud.com/agnes-duchamp/camh-director-bill-arning ￼Vanderbeek had studied at Black Mountain College, where he met the radical architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the experimentalist composer John Cage. In the early 1960s he built an inflatable studio-theatre - the MovieDrome - at his home at Stony Point NY, worked with 'Happenings' creator Allan Kaprow and artist Claes Olderberg, and in the mid-60s developed some early experimental computer-generated films with CG pioneer Ken Knowlton (see Poemfield 1964-67). He is an exemplar of the 'intermedia' artist circa early 1960s. 'Intermedia' was a label coined by the American Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. In 1995 he produced this retrospective diagram, his Intermedia Chart: ￼ STATEMENT ON INTERMEDIA Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies. However, due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio, our sensitivities have changed. The very complexity of this impact gives us a taste for simplicity, for an art which is based on the underlying images that an artist has always used to make his point. As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done. The art which most directly does this is the one which allows this immediacy, with a minimum of distractions. Goodness only knows how the spread of psychedelic means, tastes, and insights will speed up this process. My own conjecture is that it will not change anything, only intensify a trend which is already there. For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world. Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? If we assume, unlike McLuhan and others who have shed some light on the problem up until now, that there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn´t it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work? Could it be that the central problem of the next ten years or so, for all artists in all possible forms, is going to be less the still further discovery of new media and intermedia, but of the new discovery of ways to use what we care about both appropriately and explicitly? The old adage was never so true as now, that saying a thing is so don´t make it so. Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first steps. Dick Higgins New York August 3, 1966 ----- Published in: Wolf Vostell (ed.): Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6, Typos Verlag, Frankfurt - Something Else Press, New York, July 1967 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Science Friction (1959) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rvmXDeNGy3s Stan Vanderbeek: Breathdeath 1963 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiqsa9VTzc Vanderbeek has been vastly under-rated, as Amid Amidi points out: " It's a disservice to label VanDerBeek (1927-1984) merely a filmmaker because he was so much more than that. He was a multimedia artist years before the term even existed. He was constantly getting his hands dirty with new technologies and trying to figure out artistic and educational applications for them. This included creating huge murals via fax machine, projecting film onto steam, and designing interactive multi-screen TV shows. No surprise that VanDerBeek was also a computer animation pioneer who starting experimenting with CGI in 1965. His short films-often surreal, often funny, and always a visual free-for-all-combine animation, collage, cut-out, photography and video, with manic cutting that looks more contemporary than ever. Terry Gilliam has said in interviews that it was VanDerBeek's cut-out films, and specifically Breathdeath (which will be shown in Ottawa), that inspired his animation style for Monty Python. I've personally been influenced by VanDerBeek's work since I first saw it last year, and I recommend you check him out in Ottawa later this week. The screening will include examples of his analog and CG films, as well as rare film clips of VanDerBeek at work and at play." Amid Amidi, Toronto International Animation Festival 2009 http://www.cartoonbrew.com/events/stan-vanderbeek-retrospective-in-ottawa-17261.html ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Breathdeath 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiqsa9VTzc ￼ John Stezaker: collage c2005 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: MovieDrome (1963) ￼Lumiere Bros: Photorama at Paris World's Fair, 1900 ￼ Lumiere Bros: Photorama projection-head 1900 Trend towards Immersion Its interesting, and I think indicative of the future of film, that the movies literally began with experiments in immersive-projection, in the tradition of Daguerre's diorama and panorama and the Lumiere's 1900 Photorama, and that these experiments are iterated in the evolving story of experimental film: from the Cineorama to Morton Heilig's Sensorama, from Anaglyptic (red/green) 3D to Hologrammatic theatre, from Gance's Napolean to the Videowall - from multi-screen and Drive-In to Moviedrome - all these are attempts to evoke this essentially immersive engagement with filmic experience. Recently HD, IMax, BlueRay and 3D are also techno-aesthetic attempts to provide an enhanced immersive experience for the audience. You could argue that Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, projection-mapping and increasingly large flat-screen technologies also attempt to enlarge the immersive experience. Locative imagery (like the Walking with Dinosaurs A-R app) - by providing the means to superimpose movies on reality (eg dinosaurs superimposed on Isle of Wight beaches) also fosters immersion, as well as reinforcing the sense of living within a hyper-mediated environment. The Counter-Culture Film-maker and Multi-media And the Sixties was a period much given to creative manifestos, stemming from the dawning realisation that contemporary artists had access to tools previously the monopoly of the large corporation mass media. This was generally true throughout the range of mass media - offset litho magazines and journals (Whole Earth Catalog (1968), International Times (1968), OZ magazine 1967 etc), golfball typesetting (IBM Selectric Typewriter1961), low cost cameras (from 1880), cine-cameras for 8mm and 16mm (new models 16mm from 1960, Super8mm electric cine-cameras from 1965 ), portapak video camera(1967), hifi multitrack tape recorders (Ampex Reel-to-Reel multitrack recorders from 1948) etc. With access to professional media tools, and to new networks of art cinema, home movie clubs and film societies, the new avant garde produced new magazines, new types of printed publications (like Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and Bob Crumb's Underground Comics), artists could create new hybrid or intermedia forms of art, create loose-knit organisations based upon intermedia (Fluxus 1962, EAT - Experiments in Art and Technology 1966), and promote their work through new forms such as happenings (Alan Kaprow 1959, Jean Tinguely 1960), performance (from DADA and Bauhaus, to inflatables (Moviedrome 1963), and even the new discotheques and emerging club scene (Warhol: the Exploding Plastic Inevitable 1966, Hopkins and Boyd: Underground Freak-Out (UFO) 1966) ￼ Hoppy Hopkins and Joe Boyd: UFO Club 1966 with Live Liquid Lightshow by Marc Boyle and Joan Hills At the same time, musician and artist collaborations, including work by John Cage, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Al Hanson, Yoko Ono, David Tudor etc etc), film and video installations (Vanderbeek, Paik etc), dance and traditional theatre (Living Theater, Peter Brooke at RSC, Le Grande Magic Circus, etc). ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Culture:Intercom manifesto 1966 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Culture:Intercom manifesto 1966 Free Cinema and New American Cinema Group Jonas Mekas in a Film Culture editorial in 1960, summarised the impact of the New Wave and the English Free Cinema (the early short films of Anderson and Reisz),.He emphasised their themes closely related to the contemporary generation, the evasion of the polite, slick old plots, the 'personal' style, the move towards an increased realism, the documentary aspect, the changing attitude to camera style.In the same article he drew attention to the 'New American Cinema' with the same characteristics and strengths. ￼ Second Independent Film Award April 26th 1960, New York. To point out original and unique American contributions to the Cinema FILM CULTURE is awarding its second Independent Film Award to Robert Frank's and Alfred Leslie's film Pull My Daisy "(The first Independent Film Award' (Jan 1959) was given to John Cassavetes film Shadows.) "Looking back through our last year's film production, we have found a sad and infested landscape, with our official cinema still perpetuating long dead styles, and long dead subjects. Our official cinema is completely out of tune with the times. We however believe that no art in modern times has any value if it is not modern. Only modern art can be creative, and only modern art can be moral. Since it does not place obstacles of cliches of life between man and the immediacy of life. PULL MY DAISY has all these qualities Its modernity and its honesty, its sin cerity, and its humility, its imagination and its humour, its youth, its freshness, and its truth is without comparison in our last year's pompous cinematic production. In its camera work, it effective ly breaks with the accepted & 1000 years old official rules of slick, polished, Alton & Co cinematographic schmaltz. It breathes an immediacy that the cinema of today vitally needs if it is to be a living and contemporary art." Jonas Mekas: The Brig (1964) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=382In_SQcDg Mekas was a Lithuanian. Attempting to escape Nazi occupation in 1944, he spent some time in a German prison, eventually reaching America in 1949. He bought his own Bolex 16mm camera and discovered avant garde film, curating his own screenings in galleries in NY. He founded the journal Film Forum in 1958, collaborating with Andy Warhol, Nico, Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, and FLUXUS founder George Maciunas, to create his own personal experimental films. The Brig - his film of the Living Theatre's dramatisation of Kenneth Brown's autobiographical play about his imprisonment in a US Marine Corps military prison, is probably Mekas' best work. ￼ Jonas Mekas: The Brig (1964) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=382In_SQcDg Mekas films the Living Theatre's production of Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig - a relentlessly brutal dramatised documentary of life in a US Marine Corps Military prison (the Brig) in the late 1950s. An award winner at Cannes in 1964. Counter culture film-makers were producing movies that could not possibly have been made by the Hollywood studio system. Films like The Brig did the rounds at art-house cinemas, film festivals and Film Clubs at the time. I saw this in the mid Sixties at an all-night BFI screening in Covent Garden. Stan Brakhage: Mothlight 1963 Another great innovator and film-maker during this 1950s-1960s period is Stan Brakhage: ￼ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA Brakhage made Mothlight by gluing the wings of dead moths to exposed 35mm film, then sandwiching this with un-exposed film, and contact-printing their patterns, ready for editing and composition. Screening Room film on Stan Brakhage 1973 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PGGDCp3VM ￼ Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac: Pull My Daisy 1959 http://vimeo.com/55668342 In many ways Robert Frank was the 'beat' photographer. In the mid-1950s he too had gone On the Road, just a Kerouac and his buddies Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg had done earlier in the decade. Kerouac's novel On the Road was written in the early 1950s, but was not published until 1959. So their collaboration on Pull My Daisy was a prescient celebration of young America - the life-styles and patterns, abstract and otherwise, of a generation that, within a few years, would celebrate the new Wave in film, Pop Art and Rock music. ￼ ￼ ￼Robert Frank: photographs from The Americans 1958 With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank received his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, then embarked on a two-year journey across America during which he took over 28,000 images. Just 83 made it into the groundbreaking monograph The Americans. RockaBilly, Skiffle and Rock'n'Roll Do-it-Yourself pop music, counter-culture films, and Pop Art. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the popular music scene was radically transformed - first by the growing popularity of Country & Western and Rockabilly, then by do-it-yourself music like Skiffle, then Rock'n'Roll, and the British discovery of Black American Blues music, followed by the iconic blues and rock bands of the Sixties - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Manfred Mann, The Kinks (etc) who reintroduced Black music into the United States. ￼ The early iterations of black music included Fats Domino: The Fat Man (1950), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICq9lEqj4cI ￼ Jackie Brenston's and Ike Turner's Rocket 88 (1951) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbfnh1oVTk0 ￼ Lonnie Donegan Grand Coulee Dam (1957) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js Donegan popularised the work of Woody Guthrie and other American folk singers in the UK in the 1950s... His skiffle technique used home-made instruments inspired by the Jug Bands, black country blues and working-class white folk singers in the 1920s and 1930s. Charting musicians like Donegan and the jazz-band leader Chris Barber were responsible for bringing black musicians and folk-singers to the UK in the 1950s - the early fuel for the British Blues boom of the 1960s.. ￼ Maddox Brothers and Rose: Rockin Rollin - Hillbilly to Rockabilly 1937-56 Fuzing Hill-billy-style country and western with rhythm and blues, the Maddox Brothers and Rose explored the fusion of music styles that gave birth to Rock'n'Roll in the early 1950s. Pop Art in UK and USA ￼ Richard Hamilton: Just What is that Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appealing? 1956 ￼ Eduardo Paolozzi: page from a sketchbook 1956 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: Look Mickey 1961 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: Thats the Way it Should have Begun...1963 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: I Don't Care... 1962 ￼ Robert Rauschenberg: Estate 1963 ￼ Robert Rauschenberg: Signs 1970 The Beats, Angry Young Men, and Existentialism ￼ Kerouac: On the Road 1957 The Beat writers and poets - Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Neil Cassady, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (etc) were working for a decade or so before the publication of Kerouac's On the Road in 1957. The Beat view of life (anti-capitalist, bohemian, poetic, mystical) chimed with teen-rebel movie stars like James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray 1955), Marlon Brando (The Wild Ones, Lazlo Benedikt 1953) and Montgomery Clift (The Misfits, John Huston 1961) The New Wave ￼Jules Dassin: Rififi 1955 In Europe, one of the directors blacklisted by the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities and its chair Joseph McCarthy, had moved to France and eventually overcoming considerable opposition from the CIA and US Government, made his most famous film Rififi in 1955. Jules Dassin: Rififi (1955) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlvomt_1955-du-rififi-chez-les-hommes-aka-rififi-jules-dassin_shortfilms Jules Dassin Rififi 1955 (production designer Alexandre Trauner - Les Enfants du Paradis 1945) - for Marcel Carne) Truffaut called this 'Out of the worst crime novel I ever read, Dassin has made the best crime movie I ever saw' and "Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect." ￼ Godard, Belmondo and Seberg during the making of A Bout de Souffle (1960) A Bout de Souffle: Godard 1960 (Breathless or 'end of breath') http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2hDR_e1o1M 1965 Godard: Alphaville - Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine) from the series of Lemmy Caution films based on Peter Chaney's fictional character) WeeGee: Naked City (1945) Diane Arbus Robert Frank: The Americans (1959) "There is one thing a photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment." Herbert Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media 1963 ￼ McLuhan's primary 'message' is that the development of media technologies has had a greater social effect than the content of media. Thus 'The Medium is the Message'. He also argued that electronic media (radio, television, telecoms etc) would collapse spatial and temporal distances between people, thus creating a 'global village'. Furthermore electronic media (because they are lower definition - he was talking about analogue television like the NTSC and PAL TV standards) encouraged passive or cognitive audience participation - the audience had to work to complete the messages carried by the media. McLuhan called electronic media 'cool media' and high-resolution media 'hot media'. 1957-1963 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Dewline Early Warning System - After a decade-long development, SAGE, the first nation-wide integrated computer-radar-telecoms network, was completed in 1963. Modelled on the WW2 British Chain Home System (which integrated telcoms, and RADAR with Operations Centres in SE England, SAGE introduced computers to deal with the processing of potentially hundreds of simultaneous incursions into US air-space. The prototype for SAGE, the Cape Cod System, completed in 1953, was a proof-of-concept exrecise, demonstrating that the interlinking of RADAR stations, air-RADAR, Air-bases, telecommunications networks and Radio was viable. The Cape Cod System verified that the new core-based machine was fast enough for use in SAGE, and an industrial effort was started in order to mass-produce the AN/FSQ-7 (Whirlwind2) computers for this role. RCA was a front-runner, but IBM was eventually selected instead. They started production in 1957, along with a massive construction project to build the buildings, power and communications network needed to feed the SAGE systems with data. map of SAGE coverage in USA ￼ video of SAGE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06drBN8nlWg ￼ SAGE integrated radar-computer-telecoms network completed 1963 ￼ The genesis of Dr Strangelove Like SAGE, Kubrick's idea for a nuclear movie - a movie about the weird cold-war policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) had been in gestation for a decade or so. Fascinated by the fact that, without any public debate at all, the US 'military-industrial complex' (Eisenhower's expression) had constructed a system designed to semi-automatically respond to a nuclear threat or invasion (by bombers, not missiles in those days), with massive reprisals (a nuclear counter-attack). The system was so complex and so prone to accident, coup, or the kind of psychotic malfunction envisaged in Dr Strangelove, that is was a miracle our generation survived. In America, such was a rabid anti-communism of the post-war years, that any public debate on the logic, sanity, or morality of MAD was simply not possible. Kubrick had studies everything he could get hold of concerning the nuclear stand-off, a subject replete with ominous Orwellian terms like 'overkill', megadeaths, escalation, zero-sum, pre-emptive strikes, games.. Kubrick read Jaynes Military Aircraft, airforce manuals and magazines, technical data on hydrogen bomb developments, anything he could get hold of. In London he came across a pulp novel by Peter George (an ex-RAF pilot), called Red Alert and began to work with George on a screenplay. But the book was too earnest and melodramatic for Kubrick: "My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came when I was trying to work on it. I found that in putting the meat on the bones, and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving things out of it which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny, and these things seemed to be very real. Then I decided that the perfect tone to adopt for the film would be what I now call nightmare comedy, because it most truthfully represents the picture." Kubrick, quoted in Lee Hill: A Grand Guy - the Art and Life of Terry Southern 2001, p112 Kubrick calls in Terry Southern, the hipster comic writer of Flash and Filigree, The Magic Christian and Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Stories. 1963 Kubrick/Pablo Ferro: Dr Strangelove film trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gXY3kuDvSU ￼Stanley Kubrick and Ken Adam: Pentagon War Room from Kubrick: Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) John Berger: The Success and Failure of Picasso 1965 ￼ ￼ John Berger: Ways of Seeing (1972) http://vimeo.com/51354092 Like Jean Luc Godard, Berger was a Marxist critic. He made this BAFTA-winning documentary in 1972. In this book and documentary, Berger questions the class and gender assumptions behind traditional oil painting and modern advertising. Berger is essential reading for those engaged in the visual arts. New Journalism: Tom Wolfe to Hunter S. Thompson Ken Kesey New Wave: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind (Peter Biskind, looking back on the 1970s....) "When all was said and done, these directors (Peter Bogdanovich, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, John Boorman, Peter Yates..etc...) created a body of work that included...The Last Detail, Nashville, Faces, Shampoo, A Clockwork Orange, Reds, Paper Moon, The Exorcist, Godfather part 2, Mean Streets, Badlands, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Cabaret, Klute, Carnal Knowledge, American Graffiti, Days of Heaven, Blue Collar, All that Jazz, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Carrie, All the President's Men, Coming Home and Star Wars.." (you should also include MASH, Bonnie and Clyde, Barry Lyndon, Rosemary's Baby, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, 5 Easy Pieces, The French Connection, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider, Performance, Insignificance, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Deliverance, Point Blank, Women in Love, Don't Look Now, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Good, the Bad and the ugly, Once upon a time in the West, Once upon a time in America, etc...) "The new power of directors was legitimised by its own ideology, 'auteurism'. The auteur theory was an invention of French critics who maintained that directors are to movies what poets are to poems. The leading American proponent of the auteur theory was Andrew Sarris, who wrote for the Village Voice, and used this pulpit to promote the then novel idea that the director is the sole author of his work, regardless of whatever contribution the writers, producers and actors may make." Biskind: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls 1998

Arthur Fellig (WeeGee): Sinatra Fans 1944 (called bobby soxers because of their youth - the word teenager had not been coined yet. Arthur Fellig was famous as a photo-journalist covering NYPD call-outs in the 1930s. Later he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on short films. ￼ Arthur Fellig (WeeGee) Their First Murder (1936) Fellig would listen in to police radio transmissions, sometimes travelling with the police to the scene of a murder, thus scooping the first reactions, and photographing the victims bodies. (He was nick-named WeeGee because his prompt arrivals at crime scenes seemed magical - as if he was using a Ouija board to foretell the crimes). ￼ WeeGee: Dressing room at a New Orleans Burly-Que 1950 The Atomic Age - post Auschwitz and post-Hiroshima Mavis Tate MP on Buchenwald Extermination Camp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wu5PAtj5Ds I'm trying to give you a collage of the cultural history of the 1940s and 1950s, decades dominated by World War 2, the apocalyptic dawning of the Atomic Age, the horrors of the Nazi Death Camps, the Nuclear Arms Race, post-war reconstruction (the National Health service, and Social Security in the UK), McCarthyism and rapid anti-communism in the US, and the Cold War. These were the global and generational factors that underpinned our life, art and culture in the decades following WW2. The revelations of the horrors of Nazi extermination camps (1945) and the news of the first Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) were to have a global cultural impact. Some of the effects of these atrocities were the emergence of Existentialism, the Anti-War movement, CND, Anti-Fascist movements, in Britain the Angry Young Men (the writers John Osborne, John Wain, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Colin Wilson, (novels by many of these writers became famous as the kitchen-sink-realism feature films of the 1960s - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Billy Liar, The L-Shaped Room, A Taste of Honey, Up the Junction, etc). ￼ George Rodger: Mass grave at Bergen Belsen 1945 ￼ ￼ George Rodger: Female SS guards bury dead at Bergen Belsen Death Camp 1945 ￼ 1948 Harry Everett Smith: A Strange Dream and Early Abstractions http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wYJ51nSXRQ ￼ Harry Everett Smith: A Strange Dream Smith is a much revered film-maker and innovator in camera-less film - painting and drawing, frame-by-frame on the film itself. SMITH ON SMITH Filmmaker, musicologist, ethnographer, bohemian, and occultist, Harry Smith was one of the most original artists and unusual thinkers in postwar American culture. His Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of early folk and blues, was a seminal text in the folk revival movement, and has gone on to inspire countless generations of musicians and roots music fans. While living at New York's Chelsea Hotel during the 1970s, Smith was part of a milieu of underground artists, musicians, and writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. It was there that he also met the visionary poet and singer Patti Smith, who remained a close friend and colleague until Harry Smith's passing in 1991. Please join Patti Smith and friends for a night of film, live music, and remembrance as we celebrate the publication of Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular. ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE. Tickets are required, and are available at the Billy Wilder Theater Box Office one hour prior to start time. Limit one ticket per person on a first come, first served basis. Hammer members receive priority seating, subject to availability. Reservations not accepted, RSVPs not required. HARRY SMITH (1923-1991) Harry Smith was an artist whose activities and interests put him at the center of the mid twentieth-century American avant-garde. Although best known as a filmmaker and musicologist, he frequently described himself as a painter, and his varied projects called on his skills as an anthropologist, linguist, and translator. He had a lifelong interest in the occult and esoteric fields of knowledge, leading him to speak of his art in alchemical and cosmological terms. Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith's grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry's parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life. Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life. It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the "Art in Cinema" screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement. ￼ Jean Cocteau: La Belle et La Bete (1946) http://www.criterion.com/films/177-beauty-and-the-beast In 1946 Jean Cocteau was in recovery from opium addiction, working in war-torn France, struggling to find film-stock and equipment to shoot this, his filmic-poetic recreation of the traditional fairy-tale The Beauty and the Beast, first published in a book in 1740. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (1947): "La Belle et la Bete is a "priceless fabric of subtle images,...a fabric of gorgeous visual metaphors, of undulating movements and rhythmic pace, of hypnotic sounds and music, of casually congealing ideas"; according to Crowther, "the dialogue, in French, is spare and simple, with the story largely told in pantomime, and the music of Georges Auric accompanies the dreamy, fitful moods. The settings are likewise expressive, many of the exteriors having been filmed for rare architectural vignettes at Raray, one of the most beautiful palaces and parks in all France. And the costumes, too, by Christian Bérard and Escoffier, are exquisite affairs, glittering and imaginative." ￼Jean Cocteau: Orphee 1949 http://www.criterion.com/films/610-orpheus One of my favorite films, Orphee retells the story of Orpheus and the Underworld (Orpheus and Eurydice), recast in small French Mediterranean town in the late 1940s, and centred on the Poets Cafe. This is a mythopoetic metaphysical drama, the scene set with the poet Orphee tuning his car radio to catch cryptic messages from the underworld (Cocteau was inspired by the cryptic BBC messages broadcast to Resistance fighters in WW2). Cocteau has no money for optical special effects (requiring expensive laboratory-printing), so he uses simple in-camera effects throughout (slow motion, reverse footage, mirror-imagery etc). 1953 Charles and Ray Eames: A Communications Primer http://laughingsquid.com/a-communications-primer-1953-by-ray-charles-eames/ ￼ This is an important development in filmic media - its the first film I know of to combine graphics, animation, voice-over, music and sound-effects, stills and cinematography in a way that we can recognise today as 'motion graphics'. Charles and Ray Eames were an eminent architect/designer/film-maker team whose work from the mid-1940s onwards made an important contribution to the world of design and communications. This film is also important because it is a remarkable exposition of a fairly complex mathematical paper by the American researcher and mathematician Claude Shannon (then at Bell Telephone Labs)- a paper that was to have great consequences for the design of digital telecommunications systems. Shannon's central idea is that of the communications channel - from the Source or SENDER of information to the RECEIVER and Interpreter of that information, through a CHANNEL that includes: SENDER (IDEA)>SENT MESSAGE>CHANNEL>RECEIVED MESSAGE>RECEIVED IDEA Shannon proved that there are issues of of semantic encoding and decoding at the SENT MESSAGE and RECEIVED MESSAGE stages (how well the original idea is encoded into a MESSAGE and finally decoded into the RECEIVED IDEA), and also that the CHANNEL itself is prone to distortion due to technical and physical NOISE (like the poor shading in this diagram below): ￼ Shannon's Theory had been published in 1949, so the Eames' film was the first attempt to explain and illustrate a theory then only four years old. But the Eames' do not only rely on abstractions (clear animation and diagrams) to illustrate Shannon's ideas - they also poetically interpret the ideas (using metaphor and analogy, contextual imagery, music and sound effects). Francois Truffaut: A Certain Tendency in French Cinema (Cahiers du Cinema, 1954) "'A certain tendency in French cinema' was the title of the article in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, in July 1954, in which Truffaut proposed what he called 'la politique des auteurs'. The article was a polemical attack on the current state of French cinema, written by a young man anxious to start his own film career, and opposed by wehat he took to be the orthodoxy of his native film industry. This feeling was shared by other writers on the magazine whose enthusiasm, knowledge and ambition led them to argue that what they valued most in cinema, especially American cinema, was the product of a unified and organising vision. The vision embodied in the films was, they argued, that of its author, or auteur, the director. The implication of their critical practice was that some individuals, exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock, could transcend the constraints of the industrial practices of Hollywood and make films which explored recurrent pre-occupations in distinctive ways. "... Andrew Sarris, an American film critic and translator of Cahiers, translated la politique des auteurs as 'auteur theory'. Sarris had his own polemical purposes: he wanted to argue that films produced within an industrial system could have artistic qualities that were conventionally accorded to films from Europe." Philip Simpson: Authorship in Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (ed E Pearson and P Simpson Routledge 2001) Auteur-Structuralism The Truffaut/Sarris early iteration of 'Auteur Theory' hardly deserved the title of 'theory'. Truffaut's article was a polemical comment. Sarris did not ground his approach in any explicit theory of how 'texts' (films, books etc) were understood. Neither did he describe a methodology; nor take into account how films were shaped by genre, by the marketplace, by the studio system, etc. These 'structural' aspects of film production were side-lined by an over-emphasis on the role of the director/auteur. But by the latter 1960s, two works appeared which developed the notion of authorship more widely: Geoffrey Newell-Smith's Visconti (1967), and Peter Wollen's series of articles: Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (1966-72). Wollen suggests that we shouldn't use Art Cinema models as the basis of a critique of Hollywood films. ￼ avant garde auteur model ￼ Studio auteur model ￼ promotional poster for North by NorthWest 1959 Alfred Hitchcock: North by Northwest (trailer) 1959 (Robert Burks DP, Production Design Robert ~Boyle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfmTpmIUwo Hitchcock's individual film style was exemplified by several characteristics, including: his personal (ex-plot) appearance in many of his films, a story structure based upon The Thirty-Nine Steps cool sense of modernism in composition music by Bernard Herrman Blonde female protagonist The Thirty-Nine Steps meta-plot: innocent man is blamed for a crime he is pursued by villains and by police he is helped (at first reluctantly) by a (blonde) woman he survives several close shaves with the villains he eventually is recognised as innocent and (with the blonde, who has fallen in love with him) he helps capture the villains usually on some famous national monument/building/statue ￼ 2007 Martin Scorsese: Key to Reserva - tribute to Hitchcock, Bernard Herrman, Saul Bass etc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5nAxzH4OPs How many of Scorcese's references to Hitchcock films can you detect? Alfred Hitchcock: North by Northwest: Titles Sequence by Saul Bass http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIlqatMQSgI To give you some idea of just how fast the movie-titles-design sector was moving post Saul Bass' earlier work, In Britain Bernard Lodge (Dr Who), Robert Brownjohn (From Russia with Love) and Maurice Binder (Dr No) were the designers to watch - all three of them setting the styles for the James Bond and Dr Who brand titles for years to come. Maurice Binder: Dr No titles 1962 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYw_vVxw8tg ￼ Robert Brownjohn: From Russia with Love titles 1963 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y952TRNBvDw ￼ ￼ 1963 Bernard Lodge: Dr Who titles - with Ron Grainer's electronic score, created by Delia Derbyshire at BBC Radiophonic Workshop: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4 1950 Fred Waller: Cinerama ￼ The increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to introduce numerous technological innovations in order to compete for audiences. The most successful of these innovations were widescreen and 3-D formats based, ironically, on experiments conducted since the 1890s. The first widescreen process of the 1950s, the triptych Cinerama format used for This Is Cinerama (Merian C Cooper, 1952), was directly inspired by the Polyvision system used in the 1920s, though it added a curved screen to provide a feeling of immersive depth. 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen format, based on Henri Chretien's Hypergonar system, soon replaced the more cumbersome Cinerama. ￼ ￼ 1953 20th Century Fox: Cinemascope In order to fully demonstrate the panoramic potential of the new widescreen formats, a number of biblical epics of the 1920s were remade in widescreen Technicolor, including Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (William Wyler, 1959; a remake of Fred Niblo's 1925 original) and Cecil B DeMille's remake of his own 1923 The Ten Commandments in 1956. (They were dismissed as 'tits and sand' films by the industry, for their over-reliance on exoticism.) Since the 1950s, ultra-wide formats have only rarely been utilised for narrative films, relegated instead to novelty attractions such as Imax (Tiger Child by Donald Brittain, 1970). These audience-engulfing, large-screen and multi-screen formats were initially proposed by Stan VanDerBeek in his 1966 manifesto "Culture:Intercom" And Expanded Cinema: A Proposal And Manifesto. There were other quite radical experiments, including Morton Heilig's Sensorame - a coin-op multi-sensory simulation device: ￼ Morton Heilig: Sensorama 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSINEBZNCks Stan Vanderbeek radio documentary 2011 https://soundcloud.com/agnes-duchamp/camh-director-bill-arning ￼Vanderbeek had studied at Black Mountain College, where he met the radical architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the experimentalist composer John Cage. In the early 1960s he built an inflatable studio-theatre - the MovieDrome - at his home at Stony Point NY, worked with 'Happenings' creator Allan Kaprow and artist Claes Olderberg, and in the mid-60s developed some early experimental computer-generated films with CG pioneer Ken Knowlton (see Poemfield 1964-67). He is an exemplar of the 'intermedia' artist circa early 1960s. 'Intermedia' was a label coined by the American Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. In 1995 he produced this retrospective diagram, his Intermedia Chart: ￼ STATEMENT ON INTERMEDIA Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies. However, due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio, our sensitivities have changed. The very complexity of this impact gives us a taste for simplicity, for an art which is based on the underlying images that an artist has always used to make his point. As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done. The art which most directly does this is the one which allows this immediacy, with a minimum of distractions. Goodness only knows how the spread of psychedelic means, tastes, and insights will speed up this process. My own conjecture is that it will not change anything, only intensify a trend which is already there. For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world. Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? If we assume, unlike McLuhan and others who have shed some light on the problem up until now, that there are dangerous forces at work in our world, isn´t it appropriate to ally ourselves against these, and to use what we really care about and love or hate as the new subject matter in our work? Could it be that the central problem of the next ten years or so, for all artists in all possible forms, is going to be less the still further discovery of new media and intermedia, but of the new discovery of ways to use what we care about both appropriately and explicitly? The old adage was never so true as now, that saying a thing is so don´t make it so. Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first steps. Dick Higgins New York August 3, 1966 ----- Published in: Wolf Vostell (ed.): Dé-coll/age (décollage) * 6, Typos Verlag, Frankfurt - Something Else Press, New York, July 1967 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Science Friction (1959) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rvmXDeNGy3s Stan Vanderbeek: Breathdeath 1963 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiqsa9VTzc Vanderbeek has been vastly under-rated, as Amid Amidi points out: " It's a disservice to label VanDerBeek (1927-1984) merely a filmmaker because he was so much more than that. He was a multimedia artist years before the term even existed. He was constantly getting his hands dirty with new technologies and trying to figure out artistic and educational applications for them. This included creating huge murals via fax machine, projecting film onto steam, and designing interactive multi-screen TV shows. No surprise that VanDerBeek was also a computer animation pioneer who starting experimenting with CGI in 1965. His short films-often surreal, often funny, and always a visual free-for-all-combine animation, collage, cut-out, photography and video, with manic cutting that looks more contemporary than ever. Terry Gilliam has said in interviews that it was VanDerBeek's cut-out films, and specifically Breathdeath (which will be shown in Ottawa), that inspired his animation style for Monty Python. I've personally been influenced by VanDerBeek's work since I first saw it last year, and I recommend you check him out in Ottawa later this week. The screening will include examples of his analog and CG films, as well as rare film clips of VanDerBeek at work and at play." Amid Amidi, Toronto International Animation Festival 2009 http://www.cartoonbrew.com/events/stan-vanderbeek-retrospective-in-ottawa-17261.html ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Breathdeath 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiqsa9VTzc ￼ John Stezaker: collage c2005 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: MovieDrome (1963) ￼Lumiere Bros: Photorama at Paris World's Fair, 1900 ￼ Lumiere Bros: Photorama projection-head 1900 Trend towards Immersion Its interesting, and I think indicative of the future of film, that the movies literally began with experiments in immersive-projection, in the tradition of Daguerre's diorama and panorama and the Lumiere's 1900 Photorama, and that these experiments are iterated in the evolving story of experimental film: from the Cineorama to Morton Heilig's Sensorama, from Anaglyptic (red/green) 3D to Hologrammatic theatre, from Gance's Napolean to the Videowall - from multi-screen and Drive-In to Moviedrome - all these are attempts to evoke this essentially immersive engagement with filmic experience. Recently HD, IMax, BlueRay and 3D are also techno-aesthetic attempts to provide an enhanced immersive experience for the audience. You could argue that Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, projection-mapping and increasingly large flat-screen technologies also attempt to enlarge the immersive experience. Locative imagery (like the Walking with Dinosaurs A-R app) - by providing the means to superimpose movies on reality (eg dinosaurs superimposed on Isle of Wight beaches) also fosters immersion, as well as reinforcing the sense of living within a hyper-mediated environment. The Counter-Culture Film-maker and Multi-media And the Sixties was a period much given to creative manifestos, stemming from the dawning realisation that contemporary artists had access to tools previously the monopoly of the large corporation mass media. This was generally true throughout the range of mass media - offset litho magazines and journals (Whole Earth Catalog (1968), International Times (1968), OZ magazine 1967 etc), golfball typesetting (IBM Selectric Typewriter1961), low cost cameras (from 1880), cine-cameras for 8mm and 16mm (new models 16mm from 1960, Super8mm electric cine-cameras from 1965 ), portapak video camera(1967), hifi multitrack tape recorders (Ampex Reel-to-Reel multitrack recorders from 1948) etc. With access to professional media tools, and to new networks of art cinema, home movie clubs and film societies, the new avant garde produced new magazines, new types of printed publications (like Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and Bob Crumb's Underground Comics), artists could create new hybrid or intermedia forms of art, create loose-knit organisations based upon intermedia (Fluxus 1962, EAT - Experiments in Art and Technology 1966), and promote their work through new forms such as happenings (Alan Kaprow 1959, Jean Tinguely 1960), performance (from DADA and Bauhaus, to inflatables (Moviedrome 1963), and even the new discotheques and emerging club scene (Warhol: the Exploding Plastic Inevitable 1966, Hopkins and Boyd: Underground Freak-Out (UFO) 1966) ￼ Hoppy Hopkins and Joe Boyd: UFO Club 1966 with Live Liquid Lightshow by Marc Boyle and Joan Hills At the same time, musician and artist collaborations, including work by John Cage, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Al Hanson, Yoko Ono, David Tudor etc etc), film and video installations (Vanderbeek, Paik etc), dance and traditional theatre (Living Theater, Peter Brooke at RSC, Le Grande Magic Circus, etc). ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Culture:Intercom manifesto 1966 ￼ Stan Vanderbeek: Culture:Intercom manifesto 1966 Free Cinema and New American Cinema Group Jonas Mekas in a Film Culture editorial in 1960, summarised the impact of the New Wave and the English Free Cinema (the early short films of Anderson and Reisz),.He emphasised their themes closely related to the contemporary generation, the evasion of the polite, slick old plots, the 'personal' style, the move towards an increased realism, the documentary aspect, the changing attitude to camera style.In the same article he drew attention to the 'New American Cinema' with the same characteristics and strengths. ￼ Second Independent Film Award April 26th 1960, New York. To point out original and unique American contributions to the Cinema FILM CULTURE is awarding its second Independent Film Award to Robert Frank's and Alfred Leslie's film Pull My Daisy "(The first Independent Film Award' (Jan 1959) was given to John Cassavetes film Shadows.) "Looking back through our last year's film production, we have found a sad and infested landscape, with our official cinema still perpetuating long dead styles, and long dead subjects. Our official cinema is completely out of tune with the times. We however believe that no art in modern times has any value if it is not modern. Only modern art can be creative, and only modern art can be moral. Since it does not place obstacles of cliches of life between man and the immediacy of life. PULL MY DAISY has all these qualities Its modernity and its honesty, its sin cerity, and its humility, its imagination and its humour, its youth, its freshness, and its truth is without comparison in our last year's pompous cinematic production. In its camera work, it effective ly breaks with the accepted & 1000 years old official rules of slick, polished, Alton & Co cinematographic schmaltz. It breathes an immediacy that the cinema of today vitally needs if it is to be a living and contemporary art." Jonas Mekas: The Brig (1964) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=382In_SQcDg Mekas was a Lithuanian. Attempting to escape Nazi occupation in 1944, he spent some time in a German prison, eventually reaching America in 1949. He bought his own Bolex 16mm camera and discovered avant garde film, curating his own screenings in galleries in NY. He founded the journal Film Forum in 1958, collaborating with Andy Warhol, Nico, Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, and FLUXUS founder George Maciunas, to create his own personal experimental films. The Brig - his film of the Living Theatre's dramatisation of Kenneth Brown's autobiographical play about his imprisonment in a US Marine Corps military prison, is probably Mekas' best work. ￼ Jonas Mekas: The Brig (1964) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=382In_SQcDg Mekas films the Living Theatre's production of Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig - a relentlessly brutal dramatised documentary of life in a US Marine Corps Military prison (the Brig) in the late 1950s. An award winner at Cannes in 1964. Counter culture film-makers were producing movies that could not possibly have been made by the Hollywood studio system. Films like The Brig did the rounds at art-house cinemas, film festivals and Film Clubs at the time. I saw this in the mid Sixties at an all-night BFI screening in Covent Garden. Stan Brakhage: Mothlight 1963 Another great innovator and film-maker during this 1950s-1960s period is Stan Brakhage: ￼ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA Brakhage made Mothlight by gluing the wings of dead moths to exposed 35mm film, then sandwiching this with un-exposed film, and contact-printing their patterns, ready for editing and composition. Screening Room film on Stan Brakhage 1973 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5PGGDCp3VM ￼ Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac: Pull My Daisy 1959 http://vimeo.com/55668342 In many ways Robert Frank was the 'beat' photographer. In the mid-1950s he too had gone On the Road, just a Kerouac and his buddies Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg had done earlier in the decade. Kerouac's novel On the Road was written in the early 1950s, but was not published until 1959. So their collaboration on Pull My Daisy was a prescient celebration of young America - the life-styles and patterns, abstract and otherwise, of a generation that, within a few years, would celebrate the new Wave in film, Pop Art and Rock music. ￼ ￼ ￼Robert Frank: photographs from The Americans 1958 With the aid of his major artistic influence, the photographer Walker Evans, Frank received his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, then embarked on a two-year journey across America during which he took over 28,000 images. Just 83 made it into the groundbreaking monograph The Americans. RockaBilly, Skiffle and Rock'n'Roll Do-it-Yourself pop music, counter-culture films, and Pop Art. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the popular music scene was radically transformed - first by the growing popularity of Country & Western and Rockabilly, then by do-it-yourself music like Skiffle, then Rock'n'Roll, and the British discovery of Black American Blues music, followed by the iconic blues and rock bands of the Sixties - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Manfred Mann, The Kinks (etc) who reintroduced Black music into the United States. ￼ The early iterations of black music included Fats Domino: The Fat Man (1950), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICq9lEqj4cI ￼ Jackie Brenston's and Ike Turner's Rocket 88 (1951) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbfnh1oVTk0 ￼ Lonnie Donegan Grand Coulee Dam (1957) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js Donegan popularised the work of Woody Guthrie and other American folk singers in the UK in the 1950s... His skiffle technique used home-made instruments inspired by the Jug Bands, black country blues and working-class white folk singers in the 1920s and 1930s. Charting musicians like Donegan and the jazz-band leader Chris Barber were responsible for bringing black musicians and folk-singers to the UK in the 1950s - the early fuel for the British Blues boom of the 1960s.. ￼ Maddox Brothers and Rose: Rockin Rollin - Hillbilly to Rockabilly 1937-56 Fuzing Hill-billy-style country and western with rhythm and blues, the Maddox Brothers and Rose explored the fusion of music styles that gave birth to Rock'n'Roll in the early 1950s. Pop Art in UK and USA ￼ Richard Hamilton: Just What is that Makes Todays Homes So Different, So Appealing? 1956 ￼ Eduardo Paolozzi: page from a sketchbook 1956 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: Look Mickey 1961 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: Thats the Way it Should have Begun...1963 ￼ Roy Lichtenstein: I Don't Care... 1962 ￼ Robert Rauschenberg: Estate 1963 ￼ Robert Rauschenberg: Signs 1970 The Beats, Angry Young Men, and Existentialism ￼ Kerouac: On the Road 1957 The Beat writers and poets - Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Neil Cassady, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (etc) were working for a decade or so before the publication of Kerouac's On the Road in 1957. The Beat view of life (anti-capitalist, bohemian, poetic, mystical) chimed with teen-rebel movie stars like James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray 1955), Marlon Brando (The Wild Ones, Lazlo Benedikt 1953) and Montgomery Clift (The Misfits, John Huston 1961) The New Wave ￼Jules Dassin: Rififi 1955 In Europe, one of the directors blacklisted by the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities and its chair Joseph McCarthy, had moved to France and eventually overcoming considerable opposition from the CIA and US Government, made his most famous film Rififi in 1955. Jules Dassin: Rififi (1955) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlvomt_1955-du-rififi-chez-les-hommes-aka-rififi-jules-dassin_shortfilms Jules Dassin Rififi 1955 (production designer Alexandre Trauner - Les Enfants du Paradis 1945) - for Marcel Carne) Truffaut called this 'Out of the worst crime novel I ever read, Dassin has made the best crime movie I ever saw' and "Everything in Le Rififi is intelligent: screenplay, dialogue, sets, music, choice of actors. Jean Servais, Robert Manuel, and Jules Dassin are perfect." ￼ Godard, Belmondo and Seberg during the making of A Bout de Souffle (1960) A Bout de Souffle: Godard 1960 (Breathless or 'end of breath') http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2hDR_e1o1M 1965 Godard: Alphaville - Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine) from the series of Lemmy Caution films based on Peter Chaney's fictional character) WeeGee: Naked City (1945) Diane Arbus Robert Frank: The Americans (1959) "There is one thing a photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment." Herbert Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media 1963 ￼ McLuhan's primary 'message' is that the development of media technologies has had a greater social effect than the content of media. Thus 'The Medium is the Message'. He also argued that electronic media (radio, television, telecoms etc) would collapse spatial and temporal distances between people, thus creating a 'global village'. Furthermore electronic media (because they are lower definition - he was talking about analogue television like the NTSC and PAL TV standards) encouraged passive or cognitive audience participation - the audience had to work to complete the messages carried by the media. McLuhan called electronic media 'cool media' and high-resolution media 'hot media'. 1957-1963 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Dewline Early Warning System - After a decade-long development, SAGE, the first nation-wide integrated computer-radar-telecoms network, was completed in 1963. Modelled on the WW2 British Chain Home System (which integrated telcoms, and RADAR with Operations Centres in SE England, SAGE introduced computers to deal with the processing of potentially hundreds of simultaneous incursions into US air-space. The prototype for SAGE, the Cape Cod System, completed in 1953, was a proof-of-concept exrecise, demonstrating that the interlinking of RADAR stations, air-RADAR, Air-bases, telecommunications networks and Radio was viable. The Cape Cod System verified that the new core-based machine was fast enough for use in SAGE, and an industrial effort was started in order to mass-produce the AN/FSQ-7 (Whirlwind2) computers for this role. RCA was a front-runner, but IBM was eventually selected instead. They started production in 1957, along with a massive construction project to build the buildings, power and communications network needed to feed the SAGE systems with data. map of SAGE coverage in USA ￼ video of SAGE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06drBN8nlWg ￼ SAGE integrated radar-computer-telecoms network completed 1963 ￼ The genesis of Dr Strangelove Like SAGE, Kubrick's idea for a nuclear movie - a movie about the weird cold-war policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) had been in gestation for a decade or so. Fascinated by the fact that, without any public debate at all, the US 'military-industrial complex' (Eisenhower's expression) had constructed a system designed to semi-automatically respond to a nuclear threat or invasion (by bombers, not missiles in those days), with massive reprisals (a nuclear counter-attack). The system was so complex and so prone to accident, coup, or the kind of psychotic malfunction envisaged in Dr Strangelove, that is was a miracle our generation survived. In America, such was a rabid anti-communism of the post-war years, that any public debate on the logic, sanity, or morality of MAD was simply not possible. Kubrick had studies everything he could get hold of concerning the nuclear stand-off, a subject replete with ominous Orwellian terms like 'overkill', megadeaths, escalation, zero-sum, pre-emptive strikes, games.. Kubrick read Jaynes Military Aircraft, airforce manuals and magazines, technical data on hydrogen bomb developments, anything he could get hold of. In London he came across a pulp novel by Peter George (an ex-RAF pilot), called Red Alert and began to work with George on a screenplay. But the book was too earnest and melodramatic for Kubrick: "My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came when I was trying to work on it. I found that in putting the meat on the bones, and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving things out of it which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny, and these things seemed to be very real. Then I decided that the perfect tone to adopt for the film would be what I now call nightmare comedy, because it most truthfully represents the picture." Kubrick, quoted in Lee Hill: A Grand Guy - the Art and Life of Terry Southern 2001, p112 Kubrick calls in Terry Southern, the hipster comic writer of Flash and Filigree, The Magic Christian and Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Stories. 1963 Kubrick/Pablo Ferro: Dr Strangelove film trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gXY3kuDvSU ￼Stanley Kubrick and Ken Adam: Pentagon War Room from Kubrick: Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) John Berger: The Success and Failure of Picasso 1965 ￼ ￼ John Berger: Ways of Seeing (1972) http://vimeo.com/51354092 Like Jean Luc Godard, Berger was a Marxist critic. He made this BAFTA-winning documentary in 1972. In this book and documentary, Berger questions the class and gender assumptions behind traditional oil painting and modern advertising. Berger is essential reading for those engaged in the visual arts. New Journalism: Tom Wolfe to Hunter S. Thompson Ken Kesey New Wave: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind (Peter Biskind, looking back on the 1970s....) "When all was said and done, these directors (Peter Bogdanovich, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, John Boorman, Peter Yates..etc...) created a body of work that included...The Last Detail, Nashville, Faces, Shampoo, A Clockwork Orange, Reds, Paper Moon, The Exorcist, Godfather part 2, Mean Streets, Badlands, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Cabaret, Klute, Carnal Knowledge, American Graffiti, Days of Heaven, Blue Collar, All that Jazz, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Carrie, All the President's Men, Coming Home and Star Wars.." (you should also include MASH, Bonnie and Clyde, Barry Lyndon, Rosemary's Baby, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, 5 Easy Pieces, The French Connection, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider, Performance, Insignificance, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Deliverance, Point Blank, Women in Love, Don't Look Now, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Good, the Bad and the ugly, Once upon a time in the West, Once upon a time in America, etc...) "The new power of directors was legitimised by its own ideology, 'auteurism'. The auteur theory was an invention of French critics who maintained that directors are to movies what poets are to poems. The leading American proponent of the auteur theory was Andrew Sarris, who wrote for the Village Voice, and used this pulpit to promote the then novel idea that the director is the sole author of his work, regardless of whatever contribution the writers, producers and actors may make." Biskind: Easy Riders and Raging Bulls 1998

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Preface: This talk is intended merely to introduce you to the context of film developments - in both theory and practice - that dominated the 20th century. It is not a detailed history of film. Rather it is an overview of the main developments in film and film theory, contextualised with the relevant aesthetic, technological...

# data[].attributes.body
Surrealism also rejected the Dada disgust with self-indulgent expressionism but returning to individual vision, but the site of this vision was the untapped unconscious mind.  In contrast to the deliberately disruptive and antagonistic tactics of the Dada artists, the Surrealists sought what they called “the Marvelous,” or that magically unexpected encounter when the ordinary suddenly became extraordinary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1916-1920 1924-1939
Although Surrealism supposedly grew out of or outgrew Dada in Paris, the two movements come from very different time periods and cultural contexts. Dada was a wartime movement, founded in the midst of an international slaughter of young men, led by a deluded and incompetent class of elites. Although the Dada artists advertised themselves as being "anti-art," the exiles in Zurich were against traditional art and its vaunted ideals. Far from being opposed to the basic idea of art, the Dada artists strove to find new ways to make new art in a new ways.

Being deliberately anti-authoritarian, Dada could not, by definition, have leaders. The movement had spokespersons but no one took a position of guidance. Aside from philosophy, Dada artists scattered across Europe after the Great War ended. None of the many centers of Dada had a leader and Dada, perhaps as a result, dissolved in a few years into other movements. Surrealism had a leader, indeed, a "Pope," André Breton. It was possible for Surrealism to be led simply because the group was self-contained in Paris. Breton was somewhat iron-fisted for a leader of an avant-garde movement, expelling members who displeased him, but he held the group together for twenty years, an astonishing longevity.

The lack of deference to commanders of any kind on the part of Dada came directly out of a world un-made by the Great War. As Robert L. Herbert pointed out in "The Arrival of the Machine: Modernist Art in Europe," the Great War brought about a belated acceptance of modern technology. After this war, the artists reacted to machines as benign and beneficent. Le Corbusier called the home "a machine for living." But Dada's swerve to impersonal means of making art could be linked to the way in which impersonal machines were killing young people at random. Chance and randomness decided the fate of civilians and soldiers alike-all were at the mercy of a cultural clash between Old World notions of heroism and New World technology. There is a defiance and anger to Dada practices that links the artists and their attitudes to the War.

Surrealism, on the other hand, emerged in a decade of peace and prosperity. The wounds left behind by the War were either ignored-as in the neglect of the surviving veterans-or celebrated-as in the erections of many memorials. Surrealism is essentially a cerebral retreat of survivors who do not want to look back. The Surrealist poets, writers, and visual artists stage an psychological retreat from reality, either past or present, and seek what the late poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, called "sur-reality," or a realism outside and beyond perceived reality. The regressive nature of Surrealism could be understood as healing and reconstructive, replacing an aggressive and public voice with a private exploration into the recesses of the unconscious. Dada was inherently reality-based and overtly political. Surrealism, on the other hand, shifted away from an oppositional stance towards a more theoretical position.

The extent to which the Surrealist artists understood the theories of Sigmund Freud is debatable but their interest in Freud should be distinguished from Dada's anti-rational stance. Although Surrealism supposedly celebrated the irrational, their ideas were based upon Freud's very rational model of the human mind, bisected into the conscious and the unconscious mind and mapped into the id, the ego, and the superego. Surrealism also rejected the Dada disgust with self-indulgent expressionism but returning to individual vision, but the site of this vision was the untapped unconscious mind. In contrast to the deliberately disruptive and antagonistic tactics of the Dada artists, the Surrealists sought what they called "the Marvelous," or that magically unexpected encounter when the ordinary suddenly became extraordinary.

Dada and Surrealism were both movements of writers and poets, with visual artists as being part of the larger intellectual group, but in Surrealism the artists were somewhat less innovative than those in the Dada movement. Paul Delvaux and Salvador Dali and René Magritte all painted in a very traditional manner, using old-fashioned techniques and subverting realism by painting dreams as if they were real. That said, both movements work with Chance. Dada's use of chance was radical, a complete giving over of the artist to the oxymoronic "laws" of happenstance. Whether it is throwing pieces of paper to (not)create a collage by chance or assembling random word and reconvening them as poetry, Dada artists were anarchic when it came to giving up the creative thought process for process itself. In contrast, Surrealist artists deployed a variety of games, from automatic writing or the exquisite corpse, to approach chance from another position.

The Surrealist poets and artists sought a new way of writing "automatically," without conscious control and a new way of finding unexpected images or ideas that would occur with collective group contributions. One could use the term "objective chance" to characterize and distinguish Surrealism because these artists use the already there, the already seen and then de-familiarizes the familiar through juxtaposition and metamorphosis. Note that the Dada photomontage may have used the technique of putting one randomly found image next to another, but the intent was to undermine meaning. Surrealism seeks new meaning, another meaning, an unexpected meaning, a sur-real meaning, but always, Surrealism wants live to mean something. And here it the crucial difference between Dada and Surrealism. For Dada, life has no meaning, no reason, no purpose, and no logic. For Surrealism, life has meaning; one has to find its logic by unlocking visual and verbal codes secreted in the chambers of the unconscious mind where one finds Freud's "uncanny."

The Found Object, or the oject trouvé, was the special domain of Marcel Duchamp who was preceded the Dada artists in his rejection of traditional art. Duchamp's appropriation of anonymous factory made items was narrow and programmatic to his specific intentions, but the Surrealists were more open to the found object. Like Duchamp, the Surrealists bent the concept of a supposedly ordinary item to their own purposes, which was the search for the "Marvelous." For Duchamp, the found object was "encountered" randomly and viewed with detachment and indifference, but for the Surrealists, the found object was the object of passion. Indeed, the object was poetic; implying a metaphor, indicating the item in question meant more or something else--"the Marvelous."

Duchamp's rigorous intellectualism was hermetic but because of the theory of the "talking cure" based on hearing clues and reading codes, Surrealism expected audience participation. Duchamp himself had no aesthetic intentions, even when he "assisted" or "rectified" his Readymades, but the Surrealists returned to the aestheticism of art, making desirous and desiring works to be looked at and into. Although inherently conservative, Surrealism dominated the Parisian art scene until the next war broke out, scattering the already dated movement to distant shores where, like Dada, Surrealism would find a different and new destiny. As André Breton said, "Surrealism existed before me, and I firmly believe it will survive me."
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1916-1920 1924-1939 Although Surrealism supposedly grew out of or outgrew Dada in Paris, the two movements come from very different time periods and cultural contexts. Dada was a wartime movement, founded in the midst of an international slaughter of young men, led by a deluded and incompetent class of elites.

# data[].attributes.body
The Surrealists seek to subvert this “commercialized” filmmaker’s model, as their interests lie in portraying the dream, not reality. Reworking the traditional æsthetic structures of the cinema, they strive to elicit the dreamer’s experience of the unconscious within the cinema-house.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I. Introduction

Within The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton calls for the complete trans-valuation (1) of modern values by way of an artistic, or "Surreal", revolution. Conceiving this idealistic task while witnessing the devastation of World War I, the spawn of the scientific-technological revolution, he seeks to overturn the world view of scientific positivism, exposing the dogmatic conceptions of vision and language, the supposed guarantors of truth and being, as arbitrary, deceptive tools of modernity's oppressive "rational" ideology. Locating the means by which to intuitively grasp reality within the powerful, uncharted drives of the unconscious, Surrealism attempts to integrate these primordial forces into our waking consciousness in hopes of transfiguring and enhancing the manner in which we perceive, communicate and respond to reality.

This essay works to elucidate Breton's position by way of a formal and stylistic analysis of film and the technical apparatus of cinema. Reading two officially sanctioned works of Surreal film, Man Ray's L'Étoile de Mer (1928) and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929), we attempt to explicate the philosophy of surrealism. In line with this project, the following metaphysical and epistemological questions are considered: What is the nature and structure of Breton's superior reality, or "Surreality"? How is it that the all-powerful activity of the dream enhances our knowledge and understanding of the world? Exploring such topics will clarify the Surrealists' position on cinema as the supreme æsthetic means by which to experience and know the world as it really is, in all of its mysterious and inexplicable sublimity, and to subsequently communicate this fragile, intuitive understanding through a "new mode of pure expression" (3).

II. Man Ray's L'Étoile de Mer

Freud locates the content of the unconscious, "the psychologically significant source of the dream", within the material world, within "the events of the day" (5). The mysterious activity of the libido inspires the unconscious, and this repository of latent desires, tensions and unsolved problems recoils on the dreamer as she sleeps. Freud defines the instincts as having biological aims, sources and objects, which manifest through the process of psychoanalysis. According to Freud, the content of the unconscious is explainable scientifically. Unlike Freud, the Surrealists do not seek to quell or "cure" the tumultuously agitated activity of the unconscious, as such a task is impossible. Rather, they look to the unconscious in order to unlock the secrets of the material world, viewing unconscious activity as the interface between the authentic metaphysical grounds of materiality and waking existence. According to the Surrealists, when dreaming, the sublime essence of life speaks by way of the soul's agitation, through the appearance of obsessional, instinctual feelings and desires. As the world's lifeforce manifests, the imagination and memory form significant representations, or artful simulacra in motion. According to the Surrealists, the dream contains meaningful symbolic representations, and its analogical method of communicating truth is best approximated within the æsthetics of film. Thus, the Surrealists embrace the cinema's potential for channelling and reproducing the omnipotent "dreamlike" mysteries of life. Within film, much like the dream, the contradictory aspects of the universe intermingle, as life is at once death, illusion is truth, night is day, and opposites coexist in a state of unified tension, and all this without facing the tribunal of "logic".

The quest for Surreality is depicted within the 1929 film, L'Étoile de Mer, written by Robert Desnos and directed by Man Ray. The film depicts the perennial search for a loving, solicitous relationship. The concept of Love/Eros always contains the menacing presence of death/Thanatos, and thus Ray's film reflects the tension of these two forces. The film is typically read as a study in Freudian psychology. Although accurate, such an interpretation fails to elucidate the film's overtly mystical qualities, the very characteristics which are essential to understanding Breton's conception of the Surreal existence. Within Inez Hedges' fine article, "Constellated Visions", these elements at last receive proper attention. Focusing on alchemy, the occult and signs of the tarot, she explains the meaning of the various incarnations of the starfish, the hermaphroditic creature of the deep, in terms consistent with the Surrealists' aims and ideals. She reasons that the lovers - Un Homme (André de la Rivière) and Une Femme (Kiki of Montparnasse) - strive for an ideal union of male and female in the persona of a single archetype, or artist. Hedges writes:

While this interpretation of the starfish as desired state of Surreality is relevant, reading the film as a modern re-enactment of the ancient alchemist's "Great work", a threefold process of dialectic transcendence is not without problems. For within the alchemist's sacrament, the tension generated by the opposing elements is alleviated within a state of "reconciliation" as a new, perfected element is created, and "in this way, One is made from man and woman" (7). This process resembles Hegel's dialectic, the movement of life in which opposites are taken up into a new unity as their negation is neutralized. According to Hegel, dialectic "supersession" is a process that raises something to a higher level of Being by annulling, suspending or destroying its existing state, while at once preserving certain positive aspects within a new form. Hedges links Surreality with the death of the woman, who is sacrificed to the cult of Surrealism. As the feminine traits are annulled, what remains of her being is taken up into the persona of the male, who extracts her good, or "gold", as it were. (8) However, such a dialectic as outlined by Hedges appears inconsistent with Breton's description of Surreality within The Manifesto of Surrealism, and this text is overlooked by Hedges, whose interpretation emerges from a reading of Breton's novel, Nadja, a story about a sadistic, narcissistic poet and his ill-fated apprentice and lover.

With this understanding, we move beyond Hedges' analysis of the starfish in order to explicate the manner in which the Surrealists envisage the dialectic, or counter-striving phenomenon, between waking and unconscious states. Working to this end, we will analyse the technical and stylistic elements of the film, most specifically Ray's ingenious use of the gelatin-filtered lens. Ray defies the rational authority of the "look" with a subtle technique and powerful effect. L'Étoile de Mer portrays the Surreal phenomenon by way of analogy, depicting the reversal and subsequent resurrection of artistic vision. In order to dissolve the barriers between art and truth, a cleansing of the perceptual faculties is required. In light of this foregoing analysis, interpreting Ray's technical use of the camera, we shall distinguish between: (1) filtered shots, which correspond to the phenomenological "haze" of conventional reality, with its obscuring intellectual preconceptions that preclude authentic understanding, and (2) unfiltered shots, which represent the idea of a transfigured view unto the universe (i.e., Surreality).

Ray is consistent when filming the starfish, for when it appears in the glass receptacle, in Un Homme's hand, as part of a still life with wine and fruit, it remains undistorted by the optical-effect. Conversely, when Un Homme and Une Femme appear, their presence is distorted by the gelatinous lens-filter. This appears to explain the couple's uninspired behaviour throughout much the film. For example, during the bedroom sequence, as opposed to an impassioned interlude between lover and beloved, the spectator instead witnesses a dry, prosaic encounter. She disrobes as if uninterested in making love, and he exhibits no sexual desire toward her. The scene concludes as the man leans to softly kiss the nude woman's hand before bidding, "Adieu". It seems as if the oppressive weight of society's burden is internalised, and works to repress the couple's desires and creative vitality. It is as if the couple is representative of the Surreal movement, or avant-garde art in general, with its creative iconoclastic tendencies rendered impotent, relegated to the outer reaches of culture where they are forced to work against a massively oppressive and dominant politic hegemony as a marginalized and largely ineffectual force.

There is an undeniable tension to the film, which Ray creates through the use of many ingenious, editing techniques; his cut of the film suggests the struggle between the antipodal forces of dream and reality. Rather than striving for continuity, he cuts the film with the intent to disrupt the idea of narrative fidelity and, through juxtaposing objects, locations and camera effects, he disturbs the flow of images to portray the inherent danger within the quest for Surreality. The rapid inter-cuts of images against the narrative's flaccid depiction threaten to tear the film in two directions. For example, Ray includes a tracking shot of a fast-moving train along blurred rails and pan shots of newspapers rapidly blowing about the street. He also incorporates a multiplicity of special effects - e.g., single-frame animation, split-screen and multi-screen presentations - which reveal the starfish whirling, suspended in its glass receptacle. These pictographic disturbances all add a curious energy and disturbing portent of danger to the film.

In the climactic mise en scène, the foreboding transition of the couple into the state of Surreality is portrayed, within a three-shot sequence, as an encounter with Thanatos, for, as Breton states, " Surreality will usher you into death, which is a secret society." (10) There is indeed a death and sacrifice occurring in the film, but it is not a biological death; rather it is a death (and sacrifice) perpetrated in metaphor: both characters die to the venerable ideals of modernity. Much like philosophers of the future, they set sail and venture out into the dangerous uncharted waters of the sea ("La Mer"), leaving behind the terra firma upon which the ideals of science and first philosophy are constructed. As the realm of venerable ideals slowly fades in the distance, both artists are taking on the vital responsibility for their existence, which often comes, as Sartre reminds, at an extremely high price.

The first scene depicts Une Femme's trepidation as she contemplates her potential enlightenment, for there is much that remains uncertain, much that is to be feared in what is promised by way of Surreality. As she crosses over into the dangerous territory, she is confronted with the terrifying reality of the "sacrifice": i.e., an understanding of what she must relinquish in order to become an artist par excellence. As she steps from the bed, placing her foot on what appears to be a text, her actions are cryptically shrouded from the spectator, Ray framing the shot using the filtered-lens. All at once, the screen fades to black. With no change of the angle, the lens opens to reveal a modified setting. Ray removes the filter at this point and presents a transfigured view of things, marking out the female's receptivity to the Surreal experience, and this shot includes the starfish, which is positioned below her foot, next to an open book, which is now clearly revelled as a text of Black Magic, or alchemist's handbook.

Again, from the optically twisted vantage point of the gelatin-filtered lens, the second episode occurs. Une Femme moves up the stairs, to re-enter the bedroom from which she had earlier departed. Clutching a large sacrificial dagger in her hand, representing the sword of the Tarot and the male sex organ, she is poised on the shadowy periphery of the circle of "Surreal" illumination. This scene of foreboding death prompts the following question: Will she perform a sacrifice as a modern incarnation of Isis, or will she instead serve as the sacrificial offering to a higher ideal? As Une Femme continues her ascent, the filter is removed and the second shot of the dual match-cut undoubtedly represents the clarity of "Surreal" vision, which strikes the spectator with force. Ray allows the viewer to see exactly what is transpiring with pristine clarity of focus. As she exits the frame, the camera tilts down and zooms to the starfish in close-up, which is now positioned on the carpeted step. Then, as the action proceeds, Ray cuts back to the woman with the dagger and cleverly engages the filter once again.

The final sequence records what Hedges reads as the synthesis of the alchemical process, the moment when the tension between opposites is resolved. As opposed to interpreting Une Femme on the bed, clutching the dagger, as the sacrificial victim, with her feminine elements broken down and reconstituted within a masculine persona, it is possible to envisage this scene as representing a double-suicide, a dual-sacrifice. This because the frame not only includes the female's death - she lays motionless on the bed with the dagger - but as well suggests Un Homme's demise, for the dagger in her hand certainly intimates his presence by way of absence - i.e., the loss of his manhood through castration. Filmed with the gelatin lens, Ray is perhaps representing what amounts to a double-death. At once, the field of the frame changes and the shot includes the starfish, superimposed over the woman's hand with the dagger, and, with this cut, the filter is disengaged. Ray shows Un Homme, Une Femme and the starfish in a clearly focused shot for the first time in the entire film. This gives the impression that both male and female are taken up into the state of Surreality, and this rebirth into the hermaphroditic biology of the starfish includes a "sacrifice", as previously noted, a death to venerable habits and mores of modernity, which is to suggest the reassessment of gender classifications, or the stereotypical roles that are routinely assigned to the sexes. Ray's impression of the transformation of vision and spirit occurring in the moment of the Surreal consciousness resembles a moment of "rebirth" in which both male and female elements (dream and reality) remain viable and operative.

Man Ray liberates vision within L'Étoile de Mer and concludes the film in an artistic manner; vision is wiped clean, so to speak. However, in order to see, experience and understand the world through the lens of "Surrealism", more creative work is required, and Luis Buñuel's film of 1929, Un Chien Andalou, further attempts to incite the dissociation between culture and politics, between an artistic world-view and a world-view fuelled by scientific optimism, which fosters the misguided belief that scientific progress will eventually solve the world's problems. What is required in order to break the tradition of "devalued" values with empty meanings is nothing less than a brutal, visceral experience of the "uncanny" ( das Unheimlich). The eye, the symbolic and literal organ of the Enlightenment, must be destroyed, for since time immemorial it is allied with the authentic grounding of being, the founding of existence.

However, prior to examining this film, critical issues regarding the cinematic mechanism, along with the meaning of its unique language, must be addressed. The cinema, according to Breton, gains its "immediacy" and power from the "omnipotence of the dream".

III. The Omnipotence of the Cinema

The Surrealists seek to subvert this "commercialized" filmmaker's model, as their interests lie in portraying the dream, not reality. Reworking the traditional æsthetic structures of the cinema, they strive to elicit the dreamer's experience of the unconscious within the cinema-house. Just as Freud believed that dreams require a special understanding and approach in order to decode their cryptic hieroglyphics, so too the Surrealists pursue a form of dream divination through the agency of the cinema. As outlined, Freud believes that dreams are the impetus of the day's residue, "not meaningless, and not absurd, dreams are psychical phenomena of complete validity - the fulfillment of wishes" (12). The Surrealists transcend this meta-psychological approach, for, as we have explained, they define the dream as the harbinger of life's authentic primordial grounds, which sustain the material world. Dreams are never truly decoded, they are intuited perceptually, and the Surrealists hold to the view that the cinema as the most effective way to "mediate" and reproduce the dream in reality, and thus put the artist and spectator in touch with the living forces of the unconscious. Unlike Freud, Breton and the group are not interested in interpreting the dream's content per se. Rather, they are intrigued with experiencing the pure, raw and unbridled "unconscious" powers that underlie the dream. Most particularly, the Surrealists look to the structure of the dream, the manner in which it unfolds, in hopes of adopting this pattern as a model for their inspired cinema.

Immediately questions arise: If such an artistic-intuitive consciousness is possible, why is the cinema considered the superior artistic medium for inducing Surreality? If the dream and reality are opposing domains, how is it possible to unite them and, further, how is it possible to access the unconscious realm without precluding waking consciousness? And, finally, if the state of Surreality communicates truths of a pre-theoretical, pre-linguistic nature - i.e., beyond the grasp of discursive logic, beyond the range of linguistic representation - how is it that these so-called truths are communicable at all? Jean Goudal addresses several of these concerns within the 1925 essay, "Surreal Cinema", a work not only invaluable to the understanding of Surreal filmmaking, but because it provides valuable insights into the nature and structure of the cinema in general.

This is not so with the cinema. According to Goudal, filmic images hold the potential to bypass the mind's discursive functions, the logical grounds of language and to achieve what Breton's poetry cannot. Due to the rapidity with which the film's images strike the viewer's visual field, "the logical mechanism which tries to link the images on the screen, in some way or other, will not have time to be set in motion" (14), and so the logical mechanisms which structure our linguistic understanding are not activated. Cinematic meaning occurs in a manner that differs from the domain of literature, for in the cinema the mind is working automatically, or intuitively, to link the images. As opposed to conceptualising filmic images, a process grounded in language, cinematic ideas are formed through association as the spectator perceives the images on the screen. "The cinema uncannily approximates the associative processes of the mind while being able to avoid the rational structures of traditional linguistic symbolization" (15), thereby avoiding the rules upon which grammar depends. The emotive power and overwhelming immediacy of cinematic imagery thrusts the force of its communication beyond the realm of pure intellection, and the cinema shares this quality with the dream. But, how is it that the cinema represents the dream on the conscious level?

According to the Surrealists, this is due to the unique physical, technical and æsthetic properties of the cinema. First, the cinematic experience creates the dreamer's habitat. Within the darkened cinema-house, a sense of depersonalisation occurs; the outside world is locked out and the spectator's attention is focused on the screen. As described, cinema's pictorial imagery works on the viewer's physiology and psychology, on the processes of cognition, inducing a moment of perceptual insight, in which the spectator is processing imagery by way of association. Second, the cinema presents the stuff of dreams, its emotive simulacra, and the "persistence of these images on the retina, which is the physiological basis of the cinema, claims to present us movement within the actual continuity of the real" (16). The spectator believes in her reality, just as the reality of the dream is accepted. However, while the spectator is certainly swept along by these images, as if moving along the surface of a dream, there is something undoubtedly artificial about the experience that registers with the spectator.

Here we move closer to the notion of the cinema as "conscious hallucination". The whirring of the projector, the flickering strobe-effect of the light beaming from the lens to the screen, the mechanical movements of the actors and the bare mechanism of the cinematic apparatus all contribute to the film's status as illusory. In this way, the spectator's complete belief in the fiction is held in abeyance, "thus leaving the spectator in a confused consciousness of personality" (17). The spectator therefore maintains a simultaneous belief in, and receptivity to, their reality, as in the dream, while at once maintaining the conscious ability to discern their status as cinematic illusion. This phenomenon produces the waking union of dream and reality - the "Surreality" of which Breton writes.

Moving beyond Goudal's analysis, we now attempt to identify the meaningful form of revelation and communication unique to cinema, by examining the poetic mode of analogy (symbolism and allegory). For according to the Surrealists, the "poetic image in the cinema, and its epistemological extension, the analogy, serves as an alternative principle for reordering traditional cinematic discourse" (18). The Surrealists believe that dream images are analogies, they are perceptual representations of the authentic grounds of materiality, and the cinema most closely approximates these forces within representations of its dreamlike imagery. Cinematic representations are analogous to the images that the unconscious inspires in dreams (recall that for the Surrealists, the unconscious is the mediator between the authentic world-force and humanity). The cinema thus recreates what it is "like" to dream and, through analogy, what it is "like" to experience the authentic grounds of reality: "In analogy, one thing is 'like' another, not exactly, but in enough ways to establish a powerful relationship between the two of great significance." (19) This is what the Surrealists mean when they speak of the "immediacy" of film's imagery, and its vast potential for deep meanings and multiple meanings. The cinema's mode of communication is unique among the arts, as its representations draw their energy from the source of the world's sublime metaphysical origins. When expressed on the plane of the analogical, the film's message is experienced by the enraptured spectator in such a way that is always beyond the syllogism, beyond the scientific proof, and beyond any form of pure rational comprehension.

IV. Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou

This film immediately works to undermine the viewer's confident relation to the old, familiar ways of seeing and knowing, in order to pave the way for the spectator's indoctrination into new ways of understanding the world: i.e., the ways in which the Surreal artists perceive the world and, so, Buñuel demands a new form of Surreal "vision". Following the title-card, "Once upon a Time", Buñuel proceeds to destroy the sense organ most closely tied with knowledge: i.e.., the "mind's eye" of rationalism and the "physical eye" of empiricism. Perhaps the "look" of the Woman (Simone Mareuil) moments before she is assaulted by Buñuel, is " Le regard", Jean-Paul Sartre's "look" that turns humans to objects and demoralizes them. To think of her as Buñuel's patient, or experiment, is to understand why he is infamously known as "the surgeon of the 'look'". As an object of science, she becomes a mere thing to be manipulated, a cold biological entity for experimentation. With the "look", humans see only "things", objects of an impersonal nature. The human encounter with the Other is reduced to a process of manipulation and each manipulates the other for selfish reasons. Yet, according to Sartre, as he philosophises within Being and Nothingness, those who do the manipulating are in turn manipulated, the glare works on them as well, and humans become objects in the eyes of the Other. (21) Beyond Sartre's existentialism, this is the disastrous view of humanity that "scientism" establishes and enacts.

If this is true, how is it that this short, two-minute sequence works to move the spectator so profoundly at the roots of her conscience? For the moment Buñuel "cuts", the spectator recoils in horror and the human, all too human, emotions well up from the depths of the soul to exclaim, "She is not a mere object, but another human being!" But, it is too late and the spectator realizes her implication as co-conspirator in this crime, and thus suffers intense guilt. Such is the brilliance of Buñuel as a filmmaker. He has his revenge on society and the moviegoer, who sees only through the depraved eyes of "modern" convention. With this sequence, is Buñuel calling the spectator back to the emotional feeling world, the world of creative æsthetics, which science and religion have so vehemently sought to devalue? Whatever the answer to this question, it is clear that Buñuel is preparing the spectator for an encounter with Surreality, and the violent prologue serves as a necessary prerequisite for sustaining the next sixteen-minutes of the film.

As opposed to Ray's low-budget experimental short, L'Étoile de Mer, Buñuel presumably spares no expense in the effort to capture the slick, professional look and ambience of a large-budget, studio-funded film. In addition, he recreates the illusion of mainstream cinema's narrative "literary" structure. However, the film's so-called "narrative" is in fact no narrative at all, for any belief in the existence of a story-line is quickly dispelled as Buñuel interrupts the realistic, logical portrayal of events with bizarre, terrifying and, at times, humorous imagery, with the explicit purpose of establishing and then destroying outright, the spectator's comfortable relationship with the film: e.g., the spectator's knowledge of, and trust in, the images and events unfolding within the compressed locus of the cinematic time-space continuum. Characters abruptly jump from one location to another, from one vignette to another, in a manner that defies the forces of logical reason. To cite but one important example, the female who was blinded during the prologue miraculously regains her sight, for, as the film begins, she is reading a book, and all this after the film-text informs the spectator that eight years have passed ("Eight years Later") since the horrible incident.

Startled by what appears to be a loud noise coming from the street, the Woman rises from the bed and moves to the window. She spots a Man (Pierre Batcheff), who has fallen off a bicycle and looks to be severely injured. He is lying in the street against the curb, and his mangled bicycle wheel spins aimlessly. Using a series of connecting shots, indicating her movement from apartment to street, the sequence concludes with her caressing the Man's head, moaning and mourning, in an overwrought, melodramatic fashion. The man was her lover, and it appears that he is dead, as if the hand of Thanatos has struck down Eros. Buñuel then whisks the spectator abruptly back to the bedroom with the use of a single transition-shot of a mysterious stripped box superimposed on the street scene. The box appears to contain the Man's clothes or, perhaps, it is his remains. The Woman begins arranging his belongings on the bed. She lays out a tie, a collar and the small striped box, which repeatedly makes its appearance throughout the film. Through the camera effect of single-frame animation, the Man's tie begins to knot itself around the collar, forming a semblance of the lover in memorial, or perhaps it is a ceremony for his resurrection. All at once, the camera frames him standing in the corner of the room, where he is intently contemplating his hand, which is crawling with ants. Buñuel orchestrates this camera-shot in such a way as to give the appearance that the ants are emerging from an open wound in the Man's palm. This entire sequence of bizarre, illogical events is filmed and edited in a traditional manner, thus giving the false impression that the events are somehow linked within a logical chain of causation. Although the spectator attempts to draw the causal thread between these incidents, they refuse to submit to any teleological notions of storytelling, thus blurring the lines between the realms of reality, fantasy and dream.

Buñuel also demonstrates his artistic flair as a filmmaker, within a masterfully edited montage sequence, which again conjures the spectator's struggle between expectation and frustration. For this sequence, which eventually delivers a powerful impact, Buñuel utilizes lap dissolves to give the sequence an attractive æsthetic appearance. The montage begins with the Man's hand covered with ants, this image slowly dissolves to reveal a female's hairy underarm region, which subsequently gives way to a live sea urchin with hair-like spikes swishing gently in the water. Slowly, this shot dissolves into a long-shot (crane-shot) of the street, and the spectator is looking down on a crowd of people gathered around the Man's severed hand, which the last shot brings into clarity. This hypnotically breathtaking sequence concludes with the gruesome, uncanny image of a curious androgynous youngster poking at the dismembered appendage with a stick as it lies in the middle of the street.

Here the stylistic elements of the "montage-dissolve" reflect their use in traditional cinema. The spectator is absorbed in the beautiful, dreamlike forms of the imagery within this elegant presentation. However, the subject matter of the imagery is highly problematic. For these things in the montage are in fact odd and frightening choices to include within a sequence of such apparent beauty. A feeling of repulsion insidiously overtakes the spectator. On one level, she struggles with the immediate pleasure that the "forms" of the images give to the senses; on another level, she experiences the haunting discomfort aroused by their "content". Such sequences are common for Buñuel, for he knows that in the dream, it is quite possible to caress a woman, as does the Man, and to experience the transformation of her breasts into buttocks right before the eyes.

Buñuel also insists on including humour within his films as a tool for disrupting the conventional cinematic order and no spectator can resist chuckling at the wild seduction-chase scene. The Man, who is looking down from the window at his severed hand in the street, watches as a passing automobile runs down the androgynous figure. At one instant, the youth is poking at the hand, and the next he is given the Man's box by a policeman, which contains the severed hand. Longingly caressing the box in an intensely melancholic manner, the youth is surprised by a speeding car crossing through the frame that abruptly mows her/him down. The Man is aroused by this horrific event, an event that he had in fact been anticipating, and begins to chase the Woman around the room. Attempting to avoid his forceful amorous advances, she fights him off with a tennis racket. With lust in his eyes and an anus for a mouth, which has appeared through the optical trickery of Buñuel's camera, The Man is in hot pursuit of the Girl. Then, he halts his steps, and begins pulling on two ropes that are positioned at the level of his feet. These ropes are apparently straining to secure an extremely heavy weight. With this scene, the spectator learns that it is not the threat of physical harm, by way of a blow from the tennis racket, that deters the rape of the Woman, but rather it is the "dead" weight of an entire society that is crushing his ravenous libido, his creative tendencies. As he tugs on the ropes, two prone priests and two grand pianos, each with the rotting corpse of a donkey draped over the front, move through the frame. The animals' eyes are gouged and their teeth grin in such a macabre manner as if to ridicule the white ivory of the piano's keyboards.

Buñuel's disregard for traditional cinema's notion of the compressed temporal-locus is obvious throughout the film, but is most evident during scenes that are clearly marked out as transcending time. Buñuel is not attempting to melt "real-time" within "reel-time", as his characters have no past or future, and appear to stand only within the present moment, and such understanding of time is analogous to the temporality of the dream. Interestingly enough, it is the conventional understanding of language that operates on the spectator, inducing the anticipation of not only a time change - e.g., the inter-title "Sixteen years before" produces the expectation that Buñuel is transporting the spectator back in time, to the past - but, as well, the influence that a change of time will have on the characters. But, of course, no characters age in this film; they remain unchanged, abstain from death (to a point), and their missing limbs and organs are miraculously restored. These characters demonstrate nothing in the way of reflection or reflexivity, and in this sense Buñuel most effectively models "dream-time" within the scene that features the twins, or the duel of the alter egos.

When the spectator learns that the film is moving back in time sixteen years ("Sixteen years Earlier"), the anticipation exists that the director will present two young men, perhaps as adolescents, in a flashback to the days of their youth, which will adequately explain the Man's split-persona as a material presence in the room. Yet, after the inter-title, Buñuel presents the same two men, wearing the same clothes and the same expressions: it is as if neither man has a past and the twin of the Man has just appeared on the scene. The double picks up two writing journals from the table and hands them to the Man. The books that he holds mutate into revolvers, and it seems as if the most Surreal act is in fact not shooting randomly into a crowd, but rather occurs as we face our alter ego in a film-noir style shootout. With the Man brandishing two six-inch, police-special .38s, the mock-duel is enacted in a manner reminiscent of a John Ford Western, or a moody noir detective yarn like Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946). As the Man's twin gestures surrender by raising his hands submissively, the Man mercilessly opens fire on his helpless alter-ego. The fatal shots are fired, the twin is hit and begins to fall, but never reaches the carpeted floor of the room. As subject to the laws of gravity, the spectator expects the dead man to fall to the floor. The principles of physics demand this!

A dissolve carries the twin into a tree-lined park where the Woman is waiting, as she has been mystically transported from the room. Then, just as abruptly, she is transported back into the apartment. Once there, through a series of superimposed imagery, she contemplates the death head's moth as the cold, dark presence of Thanatos closes in. The Man once again appears in the apartment. Buñuel then puts an end to their relationship by way of a brilliantly cut faux-dialogue exchange, all photographed in strict accordance with traditional cinematic guidelines for continuity: e.g., a 30-40-degree camera angle, shot/reverse shot, adherence to the "180-degree rule," and other stylistic techniques built upon established models for capturing seamless and realistic dialogue exchanges. There is an argument between the Man and the Girl, but he cannot speak to verbalize his discontent, and not simply because the film has no soundtrack; rather, it is due to the fact that the Man's mouth has disappeared. Although it is quickly replaced with feminine underarm hair, his emotive communication is restricted to physical gestures. In this scene, the actors' embodied "presence" speaks a physical language of a seemingly "sub-linguistic" nature to convey the seething intensity of the scene, as Buñuel includes no dialogue cards. (22) As the Girl mocks the Man's apparent impotence, sticking out her tongue at him repeatedly, she is obviously telling him off for the last time, putting an end to their tumultuous, dysfunctional relationship.

As the movie draws to its climax, or anticlimax, Buñuel once more teases the spectator with the sign, "In the Spring". There is a pervasive desire accompanied by anticipation that perhaps, at this point in the film, logic will reign supreme and love will win the day. For the Woman has now taken a new lover and, as they walk hand-in-hand along the beach, they pass the Man's discarded belongings, which undulate to the ebb and flow of the waves. This scene has all the trappings of a stylised Hollywood ending, with the proverbial long-shot of the couple and the obligatory "fade to black" conclusion. However, Un Chien Andalou is all about disrupting and frustrating the spectator's expectations. What Buñuel offers the audience instead is a scene in which the couple are dead, buried up their chests in the sand, with their eyes gouged out and their vacant, concave eye-sockets are crawling with insects. And here, for the first time in the film, is Buñuel's "literalism", and this occurs in the portrayal of death, as the ultimate culmination of desire, as the ultimate possibility of the impossibility of being, when all aspirations for a projected future come to an abrupt end. In the blindness of death, within the real world, society's victims, the marginalized, segregated and oppressed (and this includes the Surrealists and the avant-garde culture) do not return from the other side, and no cinematic trick or slight-of-hand can alter this existential fact.

Ray and Buñuel work to cause the disjuncture between the spectator and their expectations of what cinema is "supposed" to be like, and how it is supposed to function. As argued earlier, they seek to rupture the narrative structure that traditional cinema relies on to create meaning, avoiding the so-called Aristotelian "literary route", which appears to foster a privileged "rational" world-view in which the vast complexities of existence are reducible to explanations grounded in the principle of sufficient reason, or the belief in the truth of the logical chain of causality. The films of the Surrealists are analogical representations of the way in which the mind works when dreaming, a filmic record of the way in which the primordial forces of nature move through us. Ray and Buñuel recreate formally the illogical structural mechanism of the dream within their films, attempting to awaken the spectator's unconscious psychical processes, exposing her to a new form of perceptual insight, or potential knowledge of the world, which is a species of truth that is neither formable nor universal in nature. The way in which the spectator's unconscious drives manifest, the way in which the world presences for the viewer, depends greatly on personal experience, and for this reason their films avoid telling a story about what the dream is about: i.e., representing explicitly and definitively the "content" of the dream in narrative. Rather, they focus on recreating the formal and structural characteristics of the dream within their films and, in this way, the film's meaning, or content, emerges within the context of spectatorship, as the viewer (along with his/her unconscious) becomes an active participant in the cinematic experience.

If we recall Goudal's words about the nature of the cinematic apparatus, with its inherent function to instil belief in the imagery it produces, and include to this notion the Surrealists' technique and effect of identification-dissociation, the possibility opens for creating new systems of meaning unique to film through the reinterpretation of the ways in which we process, order and understand our experiences within the realm of our æsthetic encounters. The artistic filmmaker holds the power to augment the cinema's potential to influence the viewer by artistically manipulating the medium with creative and experimental techniques, which further intensify the phenomenon of "conscious hallucination". As we have outlined, the Surrealists are working to de-structure the spectator's conventional understanding of the film, which is rooted in the commercial ideal, by moulding the raw materials of the film, controlling stylistically "how" the film looks and structuring the manner in which it unfolds.

For example, Buñuel seeks to establish the spectator's identification with the filmic world on the screen. Due to Buñuel's use of classic filmmaking techniques - e.g., optical realism, editing for continuity, standard lighting, traditional camera angles and shot-framing - the spectator is lulled into the fiction, for he portrays reality on the screen in a familiar way. Then, in an attempt to break and then forge new patterns of meaning, he disrupts the viewer's identification with the film in an unexpectedly shocking manner. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, in Dada and Surrealist Film, reasons that this technique "temporarily" arrests the mind's "conventional" (conscious) patterns of logical organization, opening the possibility of reordering and restructuring these patterns, which occurs with the shock of the "dissociation" when the unconscious drives are liberated. Kuenzli writes:

V. In Lieu of a Conclusion

In hopes of clarifying the seemingly nebulous, mysterious concept of Surreality, this essay worked to elucidate and interpret Breton's thoughts about Surrealism and its connection to the cinema. In its essence, Surreality is about re-examining and re-awakening the neglected, forgotten aspects of existence, the phenomena of life that resist logical, rational explanations, and yet are undoubtedly the very things that give life its authentic meaning. Surreality, according to Breton, is a new form of understanding, a unique form of vision, which reveals the world in a new light - the world in its essence! But, what exactly is this metaphysically charged jargon really saying? What does it mean to the artist?

Breton would perhaps respond to the foregoing query by stating that Surrealism's penetrating view of things holds the potential to reveal the social order as an edifice and artifice of human construction, with the disastrous potential of alienating us from the very things that matter most in life, those things of a creative nature that make our lives worth living and celebrating. Accordingly, such knowledge would usher in the possibility for a monumental revolutionary reform of global proportions. In other words, an artist movement, inspired by the truth of Surreality, would strike out against society in a move to solve "all the problems of the world" by overturning Europe's socio-political hegemony.

To detail the manner in which Breton and the group sought to bring their "transcendental materialism of desire" down to earth is beyond the scope of this work. In fact, the group's organized political activities: e.g., their brief and erratic encounter with the political philosophy of Karl Marx, took shape after 1930, during the "second wave" of Surrealism, and not at the time when Ray and Buñuel produced their first films. However, their future plans of revolution certainly included the "modern mystery" of the cinema, for they saw clearly, as early as 1924, that the film industry was an expression of bourgeois sensibilities on the cultural plane. Benjamin Peret, in the 1951 essay "Against Commercial Film", expresses precisely Breton's notion that commercial film is grounded in the mercantile aspirations of capitalism: i.e., "sordid market forces, producing an art that anaesthetized the public" (24). Unfortunately, as history testifies, Surrealism did not defeat the hegemonic beast of modernity, the chimera of logical positivism. Nevertheless, there is something here for the artist and her quest for meaningful and autonomous expression.

The Surrealists, unlike the nihilistic members of DADA, with their penchant for joyful destruction and annihilation, sought to resurrect the artistic imagination - and, dare we say, raise important philosophical issues. Breton's statement about solving the world's problems extends beyond art, beyond the realm of the political. His words take on their meaning when life is conceived in terms of "possibility". Perhaps, Surreality is a mind-set that opens the individual to the ever-present possibility of the world manifesting in a multiplicity of ways, in ways that cannot, and need not, be explained categorically in logical terms. Ferdinand Alquie, a writer for the former Surrealist review, Minotaure, states that beyond the material enactment of a political movement, their greatest contribution to culture, the arts and history were its "philosophical" ideas, which sprang from the non-dogmatic ground of their art.

Within the art of Breton and the Surrealists we encounter the same characteristics that great philosophers and thinkers possess. Their involvement with the plastic arts, poetry and film grew from a desire see the world beyond social convention - and they hailed and embraced the cinema as the "miraculous" medium with the greatest potential to inspire and resurrect a lost (mythic) vision of the world. The notion of Surreality was ultimately grounded in the awakening of a new consciousness by way of the experience of the "expanded" soul of the artist-as-philosopher, brought about most powerfully and effectively through the medium of film, the seventh art.

Endnotes

Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, translated b Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1963). Coined by Nietzsche within his later work, "transvaluation of values" refers to the historical and artistic project of overcoming nihilism, which entails: (1) embracing new values, and (2) establishing an entire system of values based on the notion of "an increased power of the spirit" as will to power. Nietzsche, much like the Surrealists, embraces the "forgotten" aspects of existence: e.g., Nietzsche values the sensate realm of the body, the world as an ever-renewed source of energy and becoming, and the potential power of artist and art to bring humanity in contact with the origin of the world's "chaotic" life-force. Against nihilism, Nietzsche proposes the "counter-movement: Art".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Raphaël Bassan, Théo Deliyannis and Viviane Vagh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Surrealism" and the Omnipotence of Cinema

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Within The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton calls for the complete trans-valuation (1) of modern values by way of an artistic, or "Surreal", revolution.

# data[].attributes.body
According to the Surrealists, Aristotle’s classical model privileges the “logic” of construction and explanation over autonomous creativity, representing a vile form of “literary contamination”, which stifles the authentic artistic potential of the cinema. Within Aristotle’s model, each event within the story is explained and develops out of what precedes it

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CCBS Conference, Business & Travel Management Greece

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
CCBS Conference, Business & Travel Management Greece works for a diverse palette of international and local institutions, businesses and organizations covering their needs in the fields of Business and Academic Meeting.

# data[].attributes.body
Father of surrealism

Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement.

# data[].attributes.body
Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

# data[].attributes.body
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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 Buñuel'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, André 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

Artist: Germaine Dulac

Artist: David Lynch

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 André 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 Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 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, André 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 Buñuel. 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 Buñuel'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 Dalí 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. André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, 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 Dalí, 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 Jetée (1962). Some original Surrealist filmmakers, most notably Luis Buñuel, 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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Surrealists revolutionized cinema with new approaches that freed it from traditional story-telling, transforming the medium to reveal the subconscious mind.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/surrealist-film/
Directed by Germaine Dulac from a screenplay by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman is considered by most critics to be the first true Surrealist film