I just got back from seeing some surrealist films. I have to admit, I'm not as impressed with their films as I am with their paintings. Of course, it's Friday, and after a long week as a desk monkey, the last thing I want to do is sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair surrounded by yahoos who find the eyeball scene in "Un Chien Andalou" funny.
Still, there was much to like about these movies. The first one shown was Germaine Dulac's "Smiling Madam Beuret" (1922), a film really before its time in its depiction of the female psyche. Dulac was a feminist, and you can see this in the way the story of an unhappily married woman is played out before you on the screen.
The second feature was a purely experimental film by Man Ray entitled "Emek Bakia" (1926). The visual effects in this film were fantastic, even moreso because they didn't have a lot of fancy lenses and equipment to create such things. Ray altered what was on his film by either altering his camera lens (at one point there's vaseline on the lens) or by physically altering the film (near the beginning, a black and white static is created by rubbing salt on it). It also had a swinging Django Rhinehart-esque jazz accompaniment. My only complaint about this movie was that some of the mini-vignettes featured rotating subjects - and after awhile, it felt like I was trapped in a clothes dryer.
Most everybody's heard of Luis Brunel and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) even if you've never seen it. Near the beginning, there is the infamous eyeball being sliced by a razor scene. Surrealists have a near fetish about including eyes in their films because they're an illusion to the camera. (And since I'm a half-assed McLuhanite, and McLuhan always associated visual bias with rationalism, I see that act as a backlash against the rational by the irrational, but maybe I'm just reading into it.) Dali was also apparently really into Freud, and made references to them in his works. (I've seen it twice now, and I'm still wondering what the donkey carcasses rotting away on the grand pianos is all about.)
The last bit of film we saw was a chapter of Jean Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" (1930). It was very odd, maybe because we saw the last chapter (though in retrospect, you could probably watch this in reverse, and it wouldn't make a lot of difference). It would definitely be something to see again, especially after I've read his biography (the movie has some autobiographical references, including references to his father's suicide, according to our gracious host). But the one Cocteau film I'd really like to see again is his version of "Beauty and the Beast" (forget about that Disney schlock). It's the most visually lush movie you'll ever see in black and white - I highly recommend it.
11:05:29 PM 
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