The Origins and Characteristics of Surrealism
Surrealism was an artistic movement that developed in France in the early twentieth century, aiming to express the worlds of dreams, the subconscious, and the unconscious. It was characterized by absurd, fantastical imagery in which reality and unreality intersect, and profoundly influenced visual art, literature, and cinema. Leading Surrealist artists include Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, whose works depict unreal worlds resembling dreamscapes. How these artistic methods of Surrealism have been passed down and developed in moving-image expression, particularly experimental cinema, is a fascinating subject to explore.
Surrealist Visual Expression in Un Chien Andalou
Surrealist aesthetics found their clearest cinematic expression in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou. The work eliminates logical narrative progression entirely, consisting instead of scenes that follow one another like a dream. For example, its opening juxtaposes an image of the moon being sliced by a cloud with the shocking image of a human eye being sliced. These scenes evoke powerful emotions in viewers while faithfully embodying the Surrealist ideal of recreating the flow of associations and sensations within dreams.
Surrealism and Liberation in Visual Expression
An important element of Surrealist visual expression is freedom from logical causality and the laws of reality. By exploring worlds of dreams and fantasy, Surrealists sought to offer new visual experiences beyond the framework of everyday life. This distorts time and space within the filmic world and creates visual uncertainty. Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, for example, features a scene in which a character enters another world through a mirror. Using the mirror as an object that crosses the boundary between reality and unreality, Cocteau gives cinematic form to a Surrealist journey into another world.
Surrealism's Influence on Experimental Cinema
These Surrealist methods had a profound influence on experimental cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. Works by American experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger adopted an approach that rejected narrative in favor of visual impressions. Their films strongly reflect Surrealist themes such as dreamlike worlds and making the subconscious visible. For example, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man layers images of natural landscapes and the human body in a poetically unfolding succession of images. This form of visual expression realizes Surrealism's concept of approaching the unconscious through the moving image, blurring the boundary between reality and dreams.
