ON
(Experimental)FILM
Speaking
of OUTLAWS—shall we?—I thought of our SURREALIST predecessors.
" The screen's white eyelid would only need to be able to
reflect the light that is its own, and it would blow up the
Universe." Luis Bunuel
In
reading over texts on Surrealism and its connection with cinema, I was amazed:
it could be now; the opinions, style, prescriptions contemporary! The
Surrealists' appreciation of the power of cinema: "From the instant he
[spectator] takes his seat to the moment he slips into the fiction evolving
before his eyes, he passes through a critical point as captivating and
imperceptible as that uniting waking and sleeping... It is a way of going to
the cinema the way others go to church and I think that, from a certain angle,
quite independently of what is playing, it is there that the only absolutely
modern mystery is celebrated." (A. Breton) Their appreciation was coupled
with disappointment in the use to which this had been put and disdain for much
film practice, both narrative and formal.
" I have never deplored the incontestable
baseness of cinematographic production except on an altogether secondary,
subordinate level. When I was at the 'cinema age' ... I agreed wholeheartedly with Jacques Vache in appreciating nothing so much as dropping into the
cinema when whatever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and
leaving at the first hint of boredom—of surfeit—to rush off to another cinema…
and so on... I have never known anything more magnetizing." (A. Breton)
The
Surrealist spectator or critic was an active viewer, participating creatively
in generating the film's effect and was called upon not to be manipulated but
to demand something else from film. The Surrealist called for a cinema which would
enliven the spectator's imagination and act as an inspirational force. Luis
Aragon coined the term 'synthetic criticism' to refer to a tangential reading
of a film in order to reveal its latent content. For example, one might
"extract individual images or short sequences whose poetic charge , liberated from their narratives, was
intensified." Paul Hammond's THE SHADOW AND ITS SHADOW (One is reminded
here, somewhat, of today's notions of intertextuality
and deconstruction. )
Preferring
to subvert narrative from within, the Surrealist opposed purely formal,
aesthetic or academic art in favour of a practice
which connected with the social, the substantive-an ethical aesthetic—but not a
puritanical morality!—(postmodern?)
Many
strategies were suggested (re-work found footage, use sound asynchronously,
purposely employ discontinuity, and have, within the film, self-referential
critique) which would subvert expectations of continuity, reassert
inventiveness in cinema, maintain the autonomy of meaning in an image and
maintain a subjective, creating role of the spectator. Surrealist cinema would
unseat the authority of the rational in the apprehension of irrational
knowledge and the chance connections of the dream state. "Already the richness of this new art appears
to those who can see. Its strength is impressive since it reverses natural
laws; it ignores space and time, upsets gravity, ballistics, biology etc... Its
eye is more patient, sharper, more precise. It is
therefore the creator's job, the poet's, to use this hitherto neglected
strength and enrichment, for a new servant is at the disposal of his
imagination." P. Soupault Jan. 1918
"Poetry
[for Hegel], then, does not stop, or even start, at the arbitrary limit of
reason, at explaining things, but underlines the bond between the universal and
the particular, the continuity between them, their expression as functions of
each other." (Paul Hammond's The Shadow and Its
Shadow)
"Often
enough a film leaves the head of its creator and the hands of his colleagues
like a ship in a tempest, as best it may, the bearer not only of what they to
say, but also of some things no one wished to say. But is not the participation of chance in
this clash of wills a fascinating thing?" J. Brunius
In
the Surrealist's attitude towards bridging of polarities/unity/the ground
between the rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, construction
and destruction; in their concern for the position of the spectator; in the
emphasis they placed on the popular both as social context and as source; in
the notion of cinema as the modern day site of mystery and collective ritual;
in their interest in themes of love/desire as a special realm of film; and in
their disruptive, anti-authorial practices, I sniff smoulderings
of many sparks of those outlaws that are being fanned by today's experimental
filmmakers.
Originally
published in Cinema