Dada and Surrealism: a very short introduction by David Hopkins

Author:David Hopkins [Hopkins, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Criticism, 20th century, Cultural studies, Art History, Art & Art Instruction, Art, Fine Arts, History of art, art & design styles, World history: from c 1900 -, History - General, Modern (late 19th Century to 1945), Criticism & Theory, History - Surrealism & Dadaism, Art & design styles: Surrealism & Dada, Arts; Modern, Surrealism, Arts, Dadaism, Arts; Modern - 20th century
ISBN: 9780192802545
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

23. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, frames from Un Chien Andalou, film, 1929

wound in its palm pouring forth ants – to an image of a woman, seen from above, poking a severed hand with a stick. If the dream-like images of Un Chien Andalou beg to be unpacked psychoanalytically, the second Dalí/Bun

˜uel film, L’ge d’Or (The

Golden Age) of 1930, deals more squarely with the real world, although its images are no less shocking. Its central concern, in committedly Surrealist fashion, is the social repression of desire, particularly as an outcome of Catholic dogma. Its climax consists of a lengthy intertitle announcing the imminent emergence from the Selliny Castle of the libertines who have engaged in the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. As the castle door opens we see that the first of the sodomites is Jesus Christ.

If Dadaist film drew attention to itself as film, usually with subversive intent, Surrealist film aimed to make the viewer forgetful Ar of the medium, in order to ‘transform consciousness’. Dada’s legacy t an

in terms of film history was an avant-garde or ‘underground’

d anti-ar

tradition which reached fruition in the experimental films of 1950s and 1960s filmmakers such as Stan Brackhage or Andy Warhol. t

Surrealism, on the other hand, would have greater impact on mainstream film where the audience is characteristically primed for imaginative release. Bun

˜uel himself had an extremely fertile later

career, producing important films ranging from The Exterminating Angel (1962) to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), while key international filmmakers have continued to extend the Surrealist possibilities of the medium to the present day. Important figures here are the Czech film animator Jan S

ˇvankmajer and

the American David Lynch whose Mulholland Drive (2001) demonstrates the extent to which lavish Hollywood production values powerfully enhance Surrealist effects. These are selfconsciously ‘Surrealist’ practitioners, but mainstream film in general, with its thirst for ever more startling juxtapositions of imagery, has effortlessly absorbed the techniques of Surrealism. The historical destiny of Dada and Surrealist film makes a broader 95

point about the aesthetics of the movements. In Surrealism there was a tendency to allow the filmic medium to function

‘transparently’, in other words, not to intrude too insistently on the spectator’s aesthetic expectations, in order to effect a psychic transformation. This was easier for mass culture to assimilate than Dada’s insistence on the disruption and negation of the spectator’s pleasure. In this respect one could point to the enormous impact Surrealism has had on graphic design and advertising right up to the present day. Numerous instances could be cited, but the series of playfully surreal Benson and Hedges cigarette advertisements of the 1970s are excellent examples. Critics such as Fredric Jameson have noted that the Surrealist cult of desire, along with the visual techniques fostered to give it expression, has been hijacked by the market system to cater to the ‘pseudosatisfactions’ of capitalist consumerism. In a sense this returns us to a question posed in the introduction, about our inability to have any real distance from the aesthetic consequences of Surrealism.

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