Surrealistic film
The surrealist film is the manifestation of the artistic movement of surrealism in the medium of film . The most important surrealist films are An Andalusian Dog ( Un chien andalou ) and The Golden Age ( L'Âge d'Or ), both of which emerged from an artistic collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel .
Content
The Surrealists' preoccupation with the irrational aspects of dreams and the unconscious in art and literature , influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis , also led to a cinematic implementation of the alienation grotesque and excessive elements of this art direction. Due to the intensive technical preparation that films require, the element of unconscious, “automatic” creation, which gave chance to play an important role in the painting and literature of Surrealism, was missing in the surrealist films.
Early surrealist films
Germaine Dulac made the experimental film La Coquille et le Clergyman in 1928 , based on a screenplay by Antonin Artaud , in which a general prevents a cleric from finding fulfillment in love for a woman. Artaud, however, did not agree with the implementation of his script as an explicit "dream film" and insisted on the autonomy of the world he had created, which did not need a justification that it was only a dream. With his films L'Étoile de mer (1928) and Les Mystéres du Château du Dé (1928) , Man Ray implemented the ideas of surrealism more successfully by combining numerous alienating cinematic means such as blurring , fading , slow motion and backward shots with realistic settings. Even Philippe Soupault and Robert Desnos wrote screenplays for surrealist-inspired films, the films of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter show surrealist influences
An Andalusian dog and the golden age
Luis Buñuel created the first recognized surrealist film in 1929 in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, An Andalusian Dog . In purely associative terms, Luis Buñuel strings together shocking, sexually connotated and amusing sequences and thus destroys any linear type of narrative in order to irritate and frighten the bourgeois audience. In 1930, the two artists worked together again with The Golden Age , which expanded the concept of the previous film to include aspects of fetishism . Among other things, Luis Buñuel refers to The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade by presenting a Christ-like figure as the last survivor of an orgy. When it premiered, the film sparked right-wing protests and riots and was then banned. With this film, Bunuel's surrealist creative period ended, although he later used surrealist elements to break the logic of the film , for example in The Milky Way (1969) , The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and This Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
aftermath
Although only the two Luis Buñuel / Dalí films are considered the only purely surrealist films, films from later times also had surrealist features. These include the Danish film Spiste Horisonter by Wilhelm Freddle from 1950 and La Cloche by Jean L'Hôte from 1964, in which a church bell is shown on its wandering through the streets of Paris. Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930) also lives from a dream-like atmosphere and symbolism reminiscent of surrealism. Maya Deren made the experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 , in which classic narrative structures are dissolved in favor of a seemingly surrealistic symbolism and which, in terms of motifs, was a pioneer for the films by Alain Resnais ( last year in Marienbad , 1961) and Alain Robbe-Grillet ( Der Man Who Lies , 1968).
In the 1970s, filmmakers like Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky drew on the imagery of surrealist models and used them for their own radical approach in films like Fando y Lis (1968), El Topo (1972), Montana Sacra - The Holy Mountain ( 1973) and I'll run like a crazy horse (1972).
Surrealist imagery is also used in the Polish film The Handwriting of Saragossa by Wojciech Has from 1964, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Count Jan Potocki (1760–1815).
Surrealism in contemporary film
The influence of surrealism continues to affect many contemporary filmmakers. Surrealist motifs can be found among others in David Lynch ( Eraserhead , 1977), David Cronenberg ( Naked Lunch - Nackter Rausch , 1991), Terry Gilliam ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , 1998), Paul Thomas Anderson ( Magnolia , 1999) or Gaspar Noé ( Enter the Void , 2009), whereby surrealist intentions often have to take a back seat to the visually appealing execution of effects and tricks.
Generalization of Binotto
In his essay "For an impure cinema - film and surrealism", Johannes Binotto argues that cinematic surrealism is not only to be found among those directors who explicitly refer to the movement of the surrealists, but rather represents a basic characteristic of the medium of film as such the film inevitably always mixes reality and dream (as Breton demanded in his first surrealist manifesto): "To speak of surrealist cinema turns out to be a tautology . Cinema and surrealism cannot be separated from one another." Just as the surrealists discovered surrealist moments in Chaplin's or the Marx Brothers' early films , surrealism is most effective where it is least suspected: less in explicitly surrealist avant-garde films than in representatives of American genre cinema, for example Busby Berkeley's Musical Dames from 1934, Richard Fleischer's B-Movie Follow Me Quietly from 1949 or Jonathan Demme's thriller The Silence of the Lambs .
literature
- Surrealism and Film. From Fellini to Lynch , ed. by Michael Lommel, Isabel Maurer Queipo, Volker Roloff, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-863-6
- Le cinéma des surréalistes , ed. by Henri Béhar, Lausanne: L'age d'homme, 2004
- Michael Richardson: Surrealism and cinema , paperback, Oxford: Berg, 2006, ISBN 1-84520-226-0
- Robert Short: The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema , Creation Books, 2003, ISBN 1-84068-059-8
- Marcus Stiglegger: Surrealism In: Thomas Koebner : Reclams Sachlexikon des Films. Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart 2007. ISBN 978-3-15-010625-9
- Linda Williams: Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film , paperback, University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 0-520-07896-9
- Alain Virmaux / Odette Virmaux: Les surrealistes et le cinéma , Paris 1988
- Jörg Bernardy : Blurring and fleeting love in surrealist films. In: Look and Introduce. Controlled imagination in the cinema. Edited by Heinz-Peter Preußer. Schüren, Marburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-89472-853-3
Web links
- Peter Schneider-Rabel: Filmography on Surrealism in the Forum of Poetic Cultures
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johannes Binotto : For an impure cinema: Film and Surrealism in: Filmbulletin - Cinema at eye level 3.10 (April 2010)