
In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. . . . The creative handling of film images is such that, among all means of human expression, its way of functioning is most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep. A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream. . . . on the screen, as with the human being, the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins. The device of fading allows images to appear and disappear as in a dream; time and space are flexible, shrinking and expanding at will; chronological order and the relative values of time duration no longer correspond to reality, cyclical action can last a few minutes or several centuries; shifts from slow motion to accelerated motion heighten the impact of each.
As quoted in Luis Buñuel by Ado Kyrou, 1963 (Source: Toby Mussman, “The Surrealist Film”, in Artforum, September 1966.)
As with all of the members of the group, I was attracted to a certain idea of revolution. The surrealists did not consider themselves terrorists or armed militants; they struggled against a society that they detested using scandal as their principal weapon. … the true goal of surrealism was not to create a new literary or pictorial movement, nor even philosophical, but to smash society, to transform life.
Luis Buñuel, Mon Dernier Soupir, 1982
From the first experiments of dada cinema to the temptations of cinema by the surrealists, we share a collection of early experiments in “automatic filmmaking”.
René Clair, Entr’acte, 1924
Man Ray, Emak-Bakia, 1926
Hans Rchter, Filmstudie, 1926
Hans Richter, Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1927
Man Ray, L’Étoile de mer/The Star Fish, 1928
Germaine Dulac, written by Antonin Artaud, La Coquille et le clergyman/The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928
You will look in vain for a film which is based on purely visual situations whose action springs from stimuli addressed to the eye only . . . untrammeled by psychological or irrelevant complications or by a verbal story expressed in visual terms.
The visual action should operate on the mind as an immediate intuition.
In the scenario which follows I have tried to realize this conception of a purely visual cinema, where action bursts out of psychology . . .
The scenario is not the story of a dream . . . I shall not try to justify its incoherence by the simple device of labeling it a dream. The scenario seeks to portray the dark truth of the mind by a series of pictures, self-engendered . . . but governed by an inherent and ineluctable necessity of their own, which forces them into the light.
The outer skin of things, the epidermis of reality, these are the raw materials of the cinema . . . The pictures . . . create an autonomous reality of their own. And from this interplay of images, a transubstantiation of elements, there arises an inorganic language which works on our minds by an osmosis and demands no translation into words.
(Artaud’s introductory statement accompanying the scenario, originally titled “Cinema and Reality” and appeared in La Nouvelle Revue Français, Nov. 1927. It was translated for the June, 1930 issue of Transition. Source: Toby Mussman, “The Surrealist Film”, in Artforum, September 1966.)
Man Ray, Les Mystères du Château de Dé/The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice, 1929
Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog, 1929
The scenario was written in less than a week and it followed a very simple rule that we [Buñuel and Salvador Dali] adopted by common accord: to accept no idea or image which could be the object of a psychological or cultural, rational explanation. To choose only those images that impressed or touched us, without knowing why.
Luis Buñuel, Mon Dernier Soupir, 1982
Luis Buñuel, L’Age d’Or/The Golden Age, 1930
Pingback: The surrealist film-eye | Autonomies | word pond