Surrealism - Spectatorship - Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

Surrealist Cinema (Brief History/Background)

Based in the Paris avant-garde movement of the 1920s, surrealistic films unconventional style dealt with issues concerning the merging of the conscious and unconscious worlds. Juxtapositions of random images are often filmed in non-sequential displays thus opposing the dominant forms of Hollywood narrative cinema. Opposed to conventional forms of narrative and realistic storytelling, the surrealists sought to shock the subconscious through the juxtaposition of random non-sequential images dealing with death, sexual desire, cruelty and violence. While the style violates and openly rejects traditional, linear narrative and psychological logic, it does create its own dreamlike meaning. The initial artists who based their films in this controversial style were Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (Un Chien Andalou); Buñuel would continue much of his career in this vein with films like L'Age d'or, The Phantom of Liberty, and Belle de Jour.

Although the actual movement died out towards the end of the '20s, surrealism has had a profound effect on all of cinema, due to the film's 'dream filled' use of images. The style remains popular through the work of contemporary directors such as Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books, A Zed & Two Noughts), Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik), the Coen Brothers (Barton Fink), and David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire).

Dali saw surrealism as ‘a traumatic and violent disequilibrium veering towards concrete irrationality.’ Film spectatorship is seen as similar to ‘conscious hallucination’, in which the body undergoes ‘temporary depersonalisation’ and robbed of ‘its own sense of its existence'. The viewer becomes nothing more than two eyes fixated upon the screen, with a limited and guided gaze. Vision therefore becomes more complex and the connection and meaning between images becomes obscured. Often this is seen as being a violent shock to the eyes. Time and space are fractured by dislocated and mismatched cuts, which ultimately question the certainty of seeing.

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams." - Luis Buñuel