Surrealist Documentary As a Mode of Confrontation

2021 THE PROVOCATIVE SCREEN: Surrealist Documentary as a Mode of Confrontation BY MACY MEYER Senior Honors Thesis Department of English & Comparative Literature University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 03/29/2021 APPROVED: ____________ Acknowledgments I would like to start by thanking my thesis advisor, Rick Warner, for encouraging me to write this thesis and for supporting me every step of the way. Writing this thesis has been extremely difficult as I navigated both my senior year and the global pandemic, so I can only say that I finished this thesis thanks to Rick. I also must thank him for being such a significant influence on my ungraduated experience as a film major – through the six courses I have taken with him – from my first-year to my last. I also must thank Martin Johnson and Richard Langston for reading and evaluating my thesis, and providing support along the way. I must acknowledge that it is only with Dr. Langston’s instruction that I fell in love with experimental films after taking his course studying avant-garde cinema. I will forever appreciate my first introduction to surreal cinema. I have to thank my parents, Todd and Kathy, who have given me everything and beyond. Your love and guidance has been instrumental in accomplishing this thesis. Lastly, I must also thank my sister, Meredith, and my dear friend, Meg, for always taking my phone calls and providing moral support through all of the moments I was on the verge of quitting, or perhaps, insanity. This thesis is dedicated to my parents who simply said, “OK, great” when I told them I want to be a film major, who always believed I was capable of anything, and for being my biggest cheerleaders in life. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………………01 Chapter 1: From Hurdanos to Hakua Cults: On Ethnographic Surrealism in Buñuel and Rouch Films…………………………………………………………………. 09 • Buñuel and the Beginnings of Ethnographic Surrealism • The 1950s Resurgence of Ethnographic Surrealism and Jean Rouch • Surrealism as Conduit for Social Rebellion Chapter 2: Rewriting the Past: The Intersection of Post-colonialism and Surrealism in Perfumed Nightmare and The Act of Killing ………………………………….31 • The Disillusioned Nightmare of Postcolonial Philippines • Performing Murder – Violence Meets Surrealism in Historical Reenactments • Viewing Violence: Surrealism Shapes Spectatorship Chapter 3: Memory and Trauma: The Introspective Power of Surrealist Documentary in Dick Johnson is Dead and Waltz with Bashir …………………54 • Let’s Play Dead: Surrealism in Dick Johnson is Dead • Dreaming the Past: A Waltz with Bashir’s Uncanny Surrealism • A Different Direction of Surrealism Filmography………………………………………………………………………77 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….. 78 1 INTRODUCTION The 1920s saw a myriad of avant-garde art movements emerging in the wake of World War I. From Dada to Expressionism to Constructivism, there was no shortage of creativity outpouring from the ruins of Europe in the interwar period (O’Pray 8-9). But through the cracks of the devastated continent, there came a revolution: Surrealism. In the early 20th century, Surrealism emerged from principally the influence of Dada as a new inter-art movement that dispersed across poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, and most important to the discussions of this thesis, film. While there are debates as to the extent of the connection between Surrealism and Dada, the movements unquestionably stem from similar aesthetic and political goals as stated in the chapter of A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, “Nothing, Ventured: Paris Dada into Surrealism,” Elizabeth Legge wrote: The dada events and manifestoes that captured the attention of the public and press in 1920 were flares sent up in the postwar cultural confusion; but they identified institutional hypocrisies, manipulations of cultural value, the commerce of art and literature, and the complicity of language. Dada proposed new poetic operations, deplored the realist or psychological novel, excoriated logic and valued madness, dream, and the unconscious. All these negotiations carried into Surrealism, defined in Breton’s 1924 Manifesto. Breton retrieved elements of Dada, not to prove any simple influence of Dada on Surrealism, but rather to prove that his surrealism had already existed in his dada, waiting to be named (142-143). Dadaists sought to create a movement that rejected logic, expressed nonsense and upended bourgeois and capitalistic ideals as a reaction to the ridiculous carnage of World War I. While the Dadaists wanted to declare a compete assault on all things rational and made a deliberate defiance of everything – culture, social values, national politics, even art itself – Surrealists, spearheaded by Breton, held onto the idea of art as an outlet for a radically avant-garde expression and a revolutionary transformation of perception. The movement was a direct 2 reaction to the European culture and politics rooted in the tyranny of reason and rationalism that precipitated the war and guided nations into wars that caused senseless bloodshed, the destruction of cities and stole about 20 million lives. If rationalism is what led Europe to the most catastrophic war the world had ever seen to that point, then the surrealists wanted nothing to do with that so-called rationalism. They embraced everything that was irrational and imaginative and unconscious. Surrealism’s mission to end the “reign of logic” was at once aesthetic and rooted in left-wing politics (Breton 9). Not only was there a turn to enter completely into a world in which dreams and fantasies combined with the everyday world to create “an absolute reality, a surreality,” but there was a drive to alter the perception of all that viewed their art (Breton 14). The surrealists wanted to unveil the untapped realm that rejected the ‘rationalism’ of bourgeois tastes, attitudes, and values, and they did so through bizarre juxtapositions of images, dreamscapes, and highly controversial, confrontational depictions. Surrealism’s role in the history of cinema dates back to the beginnings when Surrealists became obsessed with the film medium before even being filmmakers. Surreal cinema began in the early stages of the movement in Paris, France when members of the Surrealist Group picked up film cameras to begin their surrealist explorations. Surrealists saw cinema as an immense possibility to capture the play between reality and the unconscious in a dreamlike way by using techniques only available to the film medium: superimpositions, slow motion, reverse-motion, stop-motion, strange camera angles and many more tricks through camerawork or editing. Surrealists could manipulate space and time through film to put surrealism into the realism of the film world while also using the highly immersive film experience to also shock and confront audiences. Surrealism first connected with the cinematic form in 1928 with what is considered the first surrealist film, Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine Dulac). Just a year later, came 3 what many consider as the most seminal piece of surrealist cinema, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). These films showcased the distinct ability for surrealist films to manipulate perception by rejecting narrative conventions through images of dreamscapes, an oneiric unfolding of time that replicates the very mechanics of dreams, shocking imagery and a subversion of narrative plot for nonlinear sequences, which therefore, revolt against logical reason. Despite the possibilities of the cinema for surrealists, the 1920s produced few examples of canonical surrealist films (O’Pray 19). In fact, self-defined, canonical surrealist filmmakers and theorists – Buñuel, Jacques Brunius, Jan Svankmajer, Joseph Cornell, David Lynch as a few examples – are few in far between in the history of cinema (19). This brings up the important point that many films that use surrealism, including many of the films discussed in this thesis, are not made by traditional surrealists, but made by filmmakers that instead use aspects of the surreal mode in their work. In his essay “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” Adrian Martin distinguishes two branches of surrealism: historic and eternal (190). Martin writes that historic surrealism “encompasses finite careers and biographies, and documents the activities of those who invented the term surrealism and called themselves surrealists” (190). But what Adrian Martin calls “historic” surrealism accounts for only a sliver of surreal work. Therefore, we must adapt to looking at these films within the lens of the “eternal”: surrealism that is “much broader and far-reaching,” but still has the same inclination to immerse in fantasy life, dreamscapes and imagination (190-191). It is important to note that surreal cinema is still constantly reinventing itself to maintain its subversive capacity and not become mainstream. While melting clocks and slicing eyeballs are still the most widely recognized images of the movement, surrealism is found in films across the world and across the decades – and across genres – meaning surreal cinema never looks or sounds exactly the same as it manifests across nationalities and time. 4 Not only was surrealism an “intermedial” movement that spanned mediums from fine arts to film, but surrealism is also what can be called “intergeneric” (Warner). Surrealism is an artistic movement that is not restricted to specific conventions or aesthetics, and therefore, surrealist filmmakers used surrealism as a mode or aspect

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