A note on surrealism in cinema
(This is somewhat revised from an earlier version)
It’s always a bit hard to decide one way or the other on issues of ‘authorial’ (here ‘auteurial’!) control in a film that either is or borders on the surrealistic. Because in a sense you can’t argue against the director. If it doesn’t make sense on a ‘conscious’ level it might well on an ‘unconscious’ one! And clearly the rules with the latter are quite different! For the same reason interpreting such films in general is to always start quite handicapped. With a Hitchcock or an Antonioni you have (in certain films) a suggested ’surrealism’. A narrative that functions ‘normally’ but gives you this surrealistic dimension. So these works can be judged in ‘normal’ ways. But when a film truly goes over to that other side it becomes (at least as far as I’m concerned) a rather vexing issue. Late Fellini is often considered indulgent by many critics but he is in some ways easier to read than the ’surrealist(s) proper’ those same critics celebrate. Because Fellini seems to transcend the ’surreal’ inasmuch as his late work cannot be reduced to a ‘psychoanalytic’ logic. One could argue that surrealism itself ought not to be reduced to such a formal schema. In some ways Godard ‘domesticated’ his surrealism by always attaching it to Godardian signatures of technical choice. So when
you weren’t sure about the film you could rely on Godard’s grammar. This is true for his peak period films at the very least (of course his later period involves a constant effort at the deconstruction of peak 60s Godard). Fellini in his later films or Lynch in the recent Inland Empire don’t really do this. In general the issue of surrealism and cinema is not entirely resolved in my mind. It seems to me that Bunuel is a master at this mode precisely because he eschews the earlier Dali-esque ways and resorts to ‘formal’ narratives that are madly surreal otherwise. Or rather his surrealism is all the more effective to the extent that it erupts in the midst of a certain formal rigor. Where his earlier films might have been guilty of a certain literalism in their adherence to the surreal the somewhat late and ‘later’ work discards any such obligation. But someone like Arrabal follows the earlier, Dali-esque Bunuel, with interesting but mixed results. The same is true for a number of Eastern European talents and so on.
May 27, 2009 at 10:03 PM
Re: “It seems to me that Bunuel is a master at this mode precisely because he eschews the earlier Dali-esque ways and resorts to ‘formal’ narratives that are madly surreal otherwise. Or rather his surrealism is all the more effective to the extent that it erupts in the midst of a certain formal rigor.”
I think Bunuel is able to produce this effect because he is one of the premier representers of perversity; or rather, one might say his social critique takes the form of revealing the perversity that underlies the ordinary, the routine, the everyday. The surreal in the late Bunuel, that is to say in films like Belle du Jour; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or Cet Obscure Objet de Desire, is not the surreal of Dali (which I would characterize as the presentation of a reality that simultaneously underlies “normal” reality, and is stubbornly other than it), but the effect of unreality produced by the bourgeois insistence on normalcy in the face of abnormality. “Surreal” here is the effect produced by the characters within the film ignoring the elephant in the room — even as the whole film is geared toward showing the audience the world of the film in the elephant’s permanent shadow.
May 27, 2009 at 10:30 PM
But this perversity is also revealed by the insistence on ‘normality’. In other words Bunuel is so perverse because he takes the latter as completely normal while latter is then rendered ‘obscene’. In a formalistic sense Bunuel never alerts the viewer to his ’surrealism’. You’re absolutely right in that this comes off as a powerful critique of bourgeois life but it seems to me that Bunuel goes beyond this. There is ultimately a mysticism of the perverse in Bunuel’s work. He certainly moves away from a certain ‘materiality’ that is at the heart of the Dali oeuvre.
May 28, 2009 at 2:28 PM