dianna
10th September 2014, 23:24
Un Chien Andalou (1928)
The film, directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, has minimal plot in which the characters exist in a dreamlike world. It was Buñuel’s directorial debut. - See more at: http://disinfo.com/2014/09/5am-film-series-un-chien-andalou/#sthash.olIFO3jF.dpuf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIKYF07Y4kA
Surrealism is back. The truth is, it never went anywhere. Ever since it was unleashed by the influential French poet Guillaume Apollinaire – perhaps from somewhere deep in our collective unconscious – the term Surreal has paradoxically become a common part of our everyday language.
The wild geometries and rural Catalonian landscapes of the painter Joan Miró hang currently on the walls at the Tate Modern in London, and Tate Liverpool are expecting an abundance of bowler hats, blue skies and pipes imminently for their René Magritte exhibition in June. Ahead of these events, however, one blogger reminds us that far from originating with figures like Miró and Magritte, or even André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto and self-styled leader of the Surrealist group, the ethos of the surreal had been in the air of the art world from as early as 1860. The French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau is highlighted as a particularly strong precursory example. (In fact, something of the surreal aesthetic occurs as far back as the mid-1500s, in the unique work of the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo). It is true that, like any art movement, Surrealism was forged in the fires of those that preceded it, like Moreau’s Symbolism among others, but especially its immediate ancestor Dadaism. But some of the central ideas that were poured into all of these movements originate in a lineage of German thought, which after ticking away quietly behind the scenes eventually culminated in the theories of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, beloved by the Surrealists to whom he was an endless source of inspiration.
The story begins with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the philosopher credited with having the final say on the Enlightenment. What the Enlightenment signified for many, with its strong commitment to scientific inquiry, was a turn away from the sensuous beauty of nature in favour of quantitative investigation and reduction to mere mechanistic laws and principles. In the arts this antipathy became manifest as Romanticism, which valued the subjective, emotional, and sensual side of human experience. Rivaled only perhaps by Britain, Germany produced much of the influential Romantic literature of the time, from writers such as Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin and the Schlegel brothers. Simultaneously, the post-Kantian philosophers Fichte, Hegel and Schelling began to emphasise dynamic historical progressions driven by developments of the human spirit.
The next significant philosopher in the story is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a personal acquaintance to some of the Romantic writers, particularly Goethe, and a life-long antagonist to the other post-Kantian philosophers. One of the criticisms Schopenhauer had of Kant’s philosophy, which in many other respects he deeply admired, was how the two sides of the Kantian distinction between things-as-they-appear, or ‘phenomena’, and the things-as-they-are-in-themselves, or ‘noumena’, interacted. The former was dependent on the latter, but this could not be a causal dependence because Kant had specified causality as a concept applicable only to phenomena, as a category of human cognition and not relevant to the the unknowable thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer’s emendation to the Kantian philosophy was to characterise phenomena and the thing-in-itself not as two separate spheres of reality, but two aspects of the same reality, like the two sides of a coin. One side is that of perception and representation. The other is more mysterious, being by definition beyond perception. Schopenhauer’s great insight, clearly influenced by the Romantic trend, was to point to human inner experience, the awareness of our will, desires, wishes, pains and emotions, as the key indicator to understanding the inner nature of reality beyond sensory perception as mediated by representation. The whole of reality is, at bottom, Schopenhauer claimed, an arational and appetitive force of will, much as the Dharmic religions of the Classical East had taught for millennia.
What Schopenhauer had finally delivered, after a long period of gestation in German thought, was the concept of the unconscious: a drive below the level of the conscious mind that is fundamental to human nature in thought and action, in opposition to the Enlightenment platitude that human nature was in essence rational and consciously self-aware. The next great figure in German philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), inherited these ideas from Schopenhauer and, between the two of them, from this tumultuous picture some of the key ideas that would become familiar to the wider world through the psychodynamics of Sigmund Freud (1856-1989) were derived. Schopenhauer’s work gave an early expression to the now well-known concept of repression, saying of the victims of madness that ‘[t]he mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength’. Similarly to Freud, Schopenhauer stressed the close proximity of the genius to the madman. (It is has also been documented that Schopenhauer was a significant influence on the Symbolists who the above-mentioned art blogger pinpoints as the most immediately obvious precursor to Surrealism). Freud denied all direct influence of Schopenhauer, claiming to have been guided to Schopenhauer’s work by his fellow psychoanalyst Otto Rank only after he had already laid down the fundaments of his own theory. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was avowedly an inspiration to Freud. He reportedly said of Nietzsche that ‘[he] had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live’. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer before him, anticipated many of Freud’s central concepts, perhaps most significantly that of sublimation, according to which deep desires which cannot be countenanced by the proud but conceited conscious mind are redirected and manifested in more appropriate and acceptable activities.
Finally we reach the end, where Surrealism begins. Freud’s ideas, particularly the mysterious and engaging concept of the unconscious, were welcomed eagerly into the world of the Surrealists. In their only face to face encounter, in London 1938, Salvador Dalí, undoubtedly the most widely known of the Surrealists, presented personally to Freud his work the Metamorphosis of Narcissus with the intention of demonstrating his loyalty to Freud’s ideas, and to nominate himself as their rightful heir.
http://thephilosopherseye.com/2011/04/22/surrealism-and-philosophy/
Unlocking Art: Exploring the Surreal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPD6okhfGzs
http://stalkerchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/surreal-photo-9-300x224.jpg
It all began with the slicing of an eyeball…
When the Surrealist movement first started, cinema itself was only just coming to terms with its own potential, and was focused initially on trying to recreate life rather than experimenting in any radical sense. Film theory as we know it hadn’t even been invented yet.
However Spanish auteurs Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel changed everything with the release of Un Chien Andalou in 1929, a twenty minute short in which a woman’s eyeball is sliced in half with a razor, a swarm of ants emerge from a hole in the palm of a man’s hand, and a young couple are transformed into two puppets after walking down a beach.
A woman’s eyeball is sliced in half with a razor, a swarm of ants emerge from a hole in the palm of a man’s hand, and a young couple are transformed into two puppets after walking down a beach.
Up until then Surrealism had only been associated with art (Dali, again, at the forefront) and literature, but with cinema the possibilities took a little longer to be realised. Of course there had been a few Surrealist attempts before Un Chien Andalou, most notably Artaud and Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928), but these were unfortunately overshadowed by the former’s success.
Many of the first horror films (Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in particular) also contained elements that could be considered surreal but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that the genre really began to take hold.
Surrealism held the power to disturb by subverting the expectations of its audience. The slicing of the eyeball is an appropriate metaphor: using the unusual juxtaposition of scenes, shocking imagery and a complete rejection of realistic psychology Surrealism was able to present another way of looking at the world.
Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang D’Un Poete (1930), for example, takes a series of everyday scenarios and turns them on their heads: an artist sketches the face of a woman and the mouth begins to move on the page; a group of boys play in the snow but one is killed when a snowball turns into a lump of marble. Not exactly your average blockbuster.
Le Sang D’Un Poete takes a series of everyday scenarios and turns them on their heads: an artist sketches the face of a woman and the mouth begins to move on the page; a group of boys play in the snow but one is killed when a snowball turns into a lump of marble.
A little way down the line after the revolution of sound had taken over and ‘talkies’ were in fashion, Dali began collaborating with various American directors, most famously Hitchcock, for whom he designed Gregory Peck’s dream sequence in Spellbound (1944). He also began to develop a project named Destino with the animator Walt Disney, which ended up being shelved due to financial issues, but was finally completed by the Disney Company in 2003.
In recent decades probably the chief exponent of Surrealist cinema has been the artist and director David Lynch. His films range from the unsettling Eraserhead (1977) to the completely impenetrable Mulholland Drive (2001), and all play with the fundamentals of Surrealism in such a striking manner that the term ‘Lynchian’ (meaning the placement of the mundane with the macabre) is now in common usage.
Cinema has progressed immeasurably since the golden age of Surrealism, yet the modern audience member is now less susceptible to the kind of subversive imagery that Dali and Buñuel were then creating.
Elsewhere on the spectrum directors like Darren Aronofsky, whose debut feature PI (1998) portrays a mathematician suffering from extreme hallucinations and paranoia. Terry Gilliam, the man behind Brazil (1985) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), are also both good examples of filmmakers who incorporate elements of the surreal into their work, along with Charlie Kaufman, Federico Fellini and Alexandro Jodorowsky.
Cinema has progressed immeasurably since the golden age of Surrealism, yet the modern audience member is now less susceptible to the kind of subversive imagery that Dali and Buñuel were then creating. Sadly we may never get another moment as shocking as that eye-slice, but with films like Holy Motors and Only God Forgives being released yearly, perhaps Surrealism is slowly on its way to resurrection.
http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/11/twisted-visions-the-history-of-surrealist-cinema/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmbzq5nAXRc
The film, directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, has minimal plot in which the characters exist in a dreamlike world. It was Buñuel’s directorial debut. - See more at: http://disinfo.com/2014/09/5am-film-series-un-chien-andalou/#sthash.olIFO3jF.dpuf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIKYF07Y4kA
Surrealism is back. The truth is, it never went anywhere. Ever since it was unleashed by the influential French poet Guillaume Apollinaire – perhaps from somewhere deep in our collective unconscious – the term Surreal has paradoxically become a common part of our everyday language.
The wild geometries and rural Catalonian landscapes of the painter Joan Miró hang currently on the walls at the Tate Modern in London, and Tate Liverpool are expecting an abundance of bowler hats, blue skies and pipes imminently for their René Magritte exhibition in June. Ahead of these events, however, one blogger reminds us that far from originating with figures like Miró and Magritte, or even André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifesto and self-styled leader of the Surrealist group, the ethos of the surreal had been in the air of the art world from as early as 1860. The French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau is highlighted as a particularly strong precursory example. (In fact, something of the surreal aesthetic occurs as far back as the mid-1500s, in the unique work of the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo). It is true that, like any art movement, Surrealism was forged in the fires of those that preceded it, like Moreau’s Symbolism among others, but especially its immediate ancestor Dadaism. But some of the central ideas that were poured into all of these movements originate in a lineage of German thought, which after ticking away quietly behind the scenes eventually culminated in the theories of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, beloved by the Surrealists to whom he was an endless source of inspiration.
The story begins with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the philosopher credited with having the final say on the Enlightenment. What the Enlightenment signified for many, with its strong commitment to scientific inquiry, was a turn away from the sensuous beauty of nature in favour of quantitative investigation and reduction to mere mechanistic laws and principles. In the arts this antipathy became manifest as Romanticism, which valued the subjective, emotional, and sensual side of human experience. Rivaled only perhaps by Britain, Germany produced much of the influential Romantic literature of the time, from writers such as Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin and the Schlegel brothers. Simultaneously, the post-Kantian philosophers Fichte, Hegel and Schelling began to emphasise dynamic historical progressions driven by developments of the human spirit.
The next significant philosopher in the story is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a personal acquaintance to some of the Romantic writers, particularly Goethe, and a life-long antagonist to the other post-Kantian philosophers. One of the criticisms Schopenhauer had of Kant’s philosophy, which in many other respects he deeply admired, was how the two sides of the Kantian distinction between things-as-they-appear, or ‘phenomena’, and the things-as-they-are-in-themselves, or ‘noumena’, interacted. The former was dependent on the latter, but this could not be a causal dependence because Kant had specified causality as a concept applicable only to phenomena, as a category of human cognition and not relevant to the the unknowable thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer’s emendation to the Kantian philosophy was to characterise phenomena and the thing-in-itself not as two separate spheres of reality, but two aspects of the same reality, like the two sides of a coin. One side is that of perception and representation. The other is more mysterious, being by definition beyond perception. Schopenhauer’s great insight, clearly influenced by the Romantic trend, was to point to human inner experience, the awareness of our will, desires, wishes, pains and emotions, as the key indicator to understanding the inner nature of reality beyond sensory perception as mediated by representation. The whole of reality is, at bottom, Schopenhauer claimed, an arational and appetitive force of will, much as the Dharmic religions of the Classical East had taught for millennia.
What Schopenhauer had finally delivered, after a long period of gestation in German thought, was the concept of the unconscious: a drive below the level of the conscious mind that is fundamental to human nature in thought and action, in opposition to the Enlightenment platitude that human nature was in essence rational and consciously self-aware. The next great figure in German philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), inherited these ideas from Schopenhauer and, between the two of them, from this tumultuous picture some of the key ideas that would become familiar to the wider world through the psychodynamics of Sigmund Freud (1856-1989) were derived. Schopenhauer’s work gave an early expression to the now well-known concept of repression, saying of the victims of madness that ‘[t]he mind, tormented so greatly, destroys, as it were, the thread of memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength’. Similarly to Freud, Schopenhauer stressed the close proximity of the genius to the madman. (It is has also been documented that Schopenhauer was a significant influence on the Symbolists who the above-mentioned art blogger pinpoints as the most immediately obvious precursor to Surrealism). Freud denied all direct influence of Schopenhauer, claiming to have been guided to Schopenhauer’s work by his fellow psychoanalyst Otto Rank only after he had already laid down the fundaments of his own theory. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was avowedly an inspiration to Freud. He reportedly said of Nietzsche that ‘[he] had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live’. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer before him, anticipated many of Freud’s central concepts, perhaps most significantly that of sublimation, according to which deep desires which cannot be countenanced by the proud but conceited conscious mind are redirected and manifested in more appropriate and acceptable activities.
Finally we reach the end, where Surrealism begins. Freud’s ideas, particularly the mysterious and engaging concept of the unconscious, were welcomed eagerly into the world of the Surrealists. In their only face to face encounter, in London 1938, Salvador Dalí, undoubtedly the most widely known of the Surrealists, presented personally to Freud his work the Metamorphosis of Narcissus with the intention of demonstrating his loyalty to Freud’s ideas, and to nominate himself as their rightful heir.
http://thephilosopherseye.com/2011/04/22/surrealism-and-philosophy/
Unlocking Art: Exploring the Surreal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPD6okhfGzs
http://stalkerchronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/surreal-photo-9-300x224.jpg
It all began with the slicing of an eyeball…
When the Surrealist movement first started, cinema itself was only just coming to terms with its own potential, and was focused initially on trying to recreate life rather than experimenting in any radical sense. Film theory as we know it hadn’t even been invented yet.
However Spanish auteurs Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel changed everything with the release of Un Chien Andalou in 1929, a twenty minute short in which a woman’s eyeball is sliced in half with a razor, a swarm of ants emerge from a hole in the palm of a man’s hand, and a young couple are transformed into two puppets after walking down a beach.
A woman’s eyeball is sliced in half with a razor, a swarm of ants emerge from a hole in the palm of a man’s hand, and a young couple are transformed into two puppets after walking down a beach.
Up until then Surrealism had only been associated with art (Dali, again, at the forefront) and literature, but with cinema the possibilities took a little longer to be realised. Of course there had been a few Surrealist attempts before Un Chien Andalou, most notably Artaud and Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928), but these were unfortunately overshadowed by the former’s success.
Many of the first horror films (Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in particular) also contained elements that could be considered surreal but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that the genre really began to take hold.
Surrealism held the power to disturb by subverting the expectations of its audience. The slicing of the eyeball is an appropriate metaphor: using the unusual juxtaposition of scenes, shocking imagery and a complete rejection of realistic psychology Surrealism was able to present another way of looking at the world.
Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang D’Un Poete (1930), for example, takes a series of everyday scenarios and turns them on their heads: an artist sketches the face of a woman and the mouth begins to move on the page; a group of boys play in the snow but one is killed when a snowball turns into a lump of marble. Not exactly your average blockbuster.
Le Sang D’Un Poete takes a series of everyday scenarios and turns them on their heads: an artist sketches the face of a woman and the mouth begins to move on the page; a group of boys play in the snow but one is killed when a snowball turns into a lump of marble.
A little way down the line after the revolution of sound had taken over and ‘talkies’ were in fashion, Dali began collaborating with various American directors, most famously Hitchcock, for whom he designed Gregory Peck’s dream sequence in Spellbound (1944). He also began to develop a project named Destino with the animator Walt Disney, which ended up being shelved due to financial issues, but was finally completed by the Disney Company in 2003.
In recent decades probably the chief exponent of Surrealist cinema has been the artist and director David Lynch. His films range from the unsettling Eraserhead (1977) to the completely impenetrable Mulholland Drive (2001), and all play with the fundamentals of Surrealism in such a striking manner that the term ‘Lynchian’ (meaning the placement of the mundane with the macabre) is now in common usage.
Cinema has progressed immeasurably since the golden age of Surrealism, yet the modern audience member is now less susceptible to the kind of subversive imagery that Dali and Buñuel were then creating.
Elsewhere on the spectrum directors like Darren Aronofsky, whose debut feature PI (1998) portrays a mathematician suffering from extreme hallucinations and paranoia. Terry Gilliam, the man behind Brazil (1985) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), are also both good examples of filmmakers who incorporate elements of the surreal into their work, along with Charlie Kaufman, Federico Fellini and Alexandro Jodorowsky.
Cinema has progressed immeasurably since the golden age of Surrealism, yet the modern audience member is now less susceptible to the kind of subversive imagery that Dali and Buñuel were then creating. Sadly we may never get another moment as shocking as that eye-slice, but with films like Holy Motors and Only God Forgives being released yearly, perhaps Surrealism is slowly on its way to resurrection.
http://www.impactnottingham.com/2013/11/twisted-visions-the-history-of-surrealist-cinema/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmbzq5nAXRc