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 of their films across genres. The surreal mode gave artists a means to reject logic or reality through unconventional techniques such as automatism, images of dreamscapes and the subliminal mind, and disjunctive narratives within a variety of film genres. There is no limit to where surrealism can be used within the film medium. Surrealism can be found in melodramas, comedies, horror films, romances, any mainstream genre, and, most critically to this thesis, documentary.
It may seem contradictory to put the words “surreal” and “documentary” side by side with many contemporary spectators implicating documentary with being a genre rooted in objective realism and surrealism being a movement rooted in undercutting realism. However, as
Michael Richardson writes, there has always been “a certain ‘documentary’ element to surrealism in all of its aspects” (77). Michael Richardson lists plenty of examples that showcase the surrealists’ interest in and pursuits of documentary in his essay “Surrealism and the
Documentary.” He states: the ‘Bureau of Surrealist Research’ documented the surprising aspect of society, early surrealist writings such as Aragon’s Paris Peasant or Breton’s Nadja are
“‘documents’ of encounter,” and many surrealist journals, La Révolution surréaliste and Georges
Bataille’s Documents, have strong documentarian approaches (77). There is a clear foundation for surrealism to intersect with documentary. From the beginnings, there was never a distinct binary between surrealism and documentary because documentary is rarely a purely realistic depiction of reality that is completely objective. Therefore, we must question the binary between truth and fiction when it comes to documentaries. When thinking about the indexicality of the 5
film image, it should be considered that the images on screen serve as evidence of the past as
these images were documented at a particular moment in time. Also, it must be considered that
film images, even in surrealism or fictional genres, hold traces of the real as they document real
people, places and objects at a particular moment in historical time. At some level, all live-action
films are documentaries. I also think we must go back to the beginning of the documentary tradition to question it as a genre of supposed truth. British producer and director John Grierson first coined the term documentary in 1926, and described the form in his essay, “The
Documentary Producer,” as “the creative treatment of actuality” (8). While documentary has
roots in actuality, the term “creative” is critical here because documentary films in all facets reflect the subjectivity of the filmmaker, are socially conscious and seek to sway the spectator towards a certain perspective or advocate a particular cause, and have historical ties with propaganda. I, and many film scholars, argue documentary has no greater grip on objectivity.
Documentaries at their most basic level put forward a particular viewpoint and address the audience directly often with difficult or highly emotional images to instigate social change or justice. Documentaries have an ability to unveil and show spectators what we have not seen or cannot see in our particular geography or moment in time and often use shock to prompt action
— not very different from the aims of surrealism. In this sense, surrealism and documentary have always worked in tandem. Not only did surrealism and documentary emerge at similar times in the 1920s, but documentary was an important aspect of surrealist cinema right from the outset.
If self-defined surrealist filmmakers are uncommon, the number of surreal documentaries
is even fewer. Yet, surrealists engaged with documentary as early as the 1920s and many
documentarians across film history, as we will see throughout this thesis, use surrealism to 6 confront and engage audiences (Richardson 77). As Richardson points out in his essay, there is a storied history between documentary and surrealism:
Key figures in documentary film, such as Henri Storck and Luc de Heusch in Belgium and Jean Painlevé, Jean Rouch and Jean Vigo in France, were close to surrealism, while Humphrey Jennings in Britain was a central figure in the British documentary movement. Jacques Brunius also made a number of documentaries, many for the BBC, although most of them seem to have vanished from view. Surrealism was also in many ways a decisive, if not determining, influence on the powerful documentaries of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Georges Franju, while the recent American documentarist Les Blank is close to the Surrealist Group in Chicago (77). Despite these connections, little has been written about the engagement of surrealism in the documentary genre outside of Buñuel’s film, and what is considered the most seminal surreal documentary, Land Without Bread (1933). The filmmakers listed above began the tradition, but they certainly are not the last filmmakers who saw the potential of the surrealism mode in documentary. Filling the gaps in the discussions around surreal documentary is precisely the aim of this thesis. While I engage with canonical surrealists in my opening chapter, the final two chapters will be looking at filmmakers who are not surrealists, and yet, their films can be viewed through a surrealist lens, entering more into what Adrian Martin coined as eternal surrealism.
From all of these examples, surrealism, in the context of documentary, will emerge as a critical tool for confrontation and addressing this audience both emotionally and intellectually.
In chapter one, I focus on the beginnings of surreal documentary with the particular ethnographic turn that occurred in surrealist filmmaking. I use James Clifford’s essay, “On
Ethnographic Surrealism,” as the primary text to define ethnographic surrealism and explore the particular way surrealists used anthropology or anthropologists used the mode of surrealism to create strange, and often, troubling documents of life in other cultures. Then I turn to two examples of ethnographic surreal documentaries – Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes) and Jean 7
Rouch’s The Mad Masters (1955) – and use these films as evidence to argue that the particular activity of undercutting realism with surrealism, when the viewer least expects it, is what makes it possible to deeply explore otherness. Finally, I explore how applying the mode of surrealism to the ethnographic practice produces an aggressive experiential reality, which often conveys important socio-political commentary.
In chapter two, I step away from European-centric filmmakers to focus solely on the surreal documentaries created by the Other or in collaboration with the Other. By analyzing
Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tamihik’s Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s
The Act of Killing (2012) that was a collaboration with Indonesian citizens, I argue how a shift in authorship aligns us with a new perspective – largely that of a victim of neocolonialism – to explore the ongoing ramifications of colonialism. I explore surrealism’s intersection with colonialism and with post-colonialism, a field of study on the societal and cultural legacy of
Western colonialism and imperialism, to understand the filmmakers’ neo-colonist dilemma to make a more subversive, revolutionary cinema that decries the imperialist system they are currently forced to live within.
In chapter three, I explore how surrealism, when combined with the documentary genre, has the power to be introspective and confront personal trauma. I focus on surreal documentaries,
Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), which assist the respective filmmakers in their personal confrontation of their own traumatic past or pressing traumatic events, and how these films help the filmmaker reflect on, accept and heal that trauma. In short, this chapter explores the very specific ways surreal documentaries can be wholly therapeutic and confrontational. 8
As will be shown in my investigations, the idea of confrontation, whether that be outwardly to another person or inwardly at one’s own subconscious, is key to the impact and stakes of the films discussed across the thesis. I argue that surreal cinema, in any form, has not only the ability, but also the need to confront. Surrealism is a universal and timeless tool that can assist in confronting and working through conflict, whether that confrontation is for sociopolitical justice, a fight against colonialism or resolving personal trauma.
9
CHAPTER ONE From Hurdanos to Hakua Cults: On Ethnographic Surrealism in Buñuel and Rouch Films
Their principal weapon wasn't guns, of course; it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny—in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of Surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself. -Luis Buñuel
Surrealism has never been a tradition or genre confined to a singular set of conventions, ideas or aesthetics. Surrealism is less a rigid system of ideology and more a wavering, fluid practice of liberation. Surrealism’s definition is often as elusive as the films that make use of it.
André Breton, through his many writings on surrealism and especially in his Manifestos of
Surrealism, has rather described it as an “activity” of the unconscious mind, or an encounter that is brought unto us through experiences free from the “reign of logic” (Breton 6). Breton wrote that surrealism was a revolutionary movement that sought to overthrow the oppressiveness of rational logic that led to destruction and murder such as World War I. Breton and the surrealists instead hailed the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind, resulting in the main tenants of the movement to include psychic automatism, dreamscapes and explorations of the working mind. Surrealism was a fight against rationality and reason to favor visons and aesthetics that depicted the irrational, the strange, the unexpected, the uncanny and the unconventional.
In this chapter, I will focus on the Surrealist Group, the founders and key figures of the movement, and their particular inclination to engage in ethnographic activity. A number of the key figures associated with surrealism sought to explore the customs, practices or phenomena of other, often exotic, peoples and cultures to tap into a new reality. It has been stated that 10 surrealists were motivated by the need to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism, and one method was to free themselves from the normality of their own culture to explore another in a cultural awakening. In his seminal essay
"On Ethnographic Surrealism," James Clifford describes this new phenomenon as a particular research perspective that intersected both anthropologists and artists in the two decades following the end of the First World War (539). He provides the earliest definition of ethnographic surrealism as those works that “attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness – the unexpected” (562). In this way, we can understand this particular surrealist activity as a turn away from the bizarre of the subconscious, to a study of the bizarre and strange of the monotonous day-to-day events in an unfamiliar culture and landscape.
Since the turn of the century, European artists from across mediums had shown a zealous fascination for studying cultures and societies beyond Western Europe, especially – and most importantly to later sections of this chapter – with colonial Africa. Since the early 1900s, artists grew an obsession with cultural artifacts, so-called primitive objects and Afro-art (Kelly 319).
But the convergence of ethnography and surrealism first saw its beginnings with the launch of
Documents, an art journal edited by Georges Bataille that published seventeen issues in Paris spanning between 1929 and 1930. The publication included writings from anthropologists and surrealists alike and promoted the “anti-aesthetic mode of representation,” which meant a particular interest in the grotesque or the unbeautiful (Russell 26). From the many spreads on foreign objects across the decade, Europeans were able to explore foreign customs and traditions previously unknown to the West. It was not long before newly minted anthropologists and surrealists alike, desired to document these exotic cultures via film instead if just through photos or writings. 11
As a novel technology, the film camera drew many early 20th-cetury artists and researchers who were fascinated by its new capabilities. Thus began the first burst of early documentaries. These preliminary documentary films sought to record everyday life in other parts of the world as they unfolded in real time to show an objective account of other populations’ traditions and lifestyle. It is particularly notable that documentary as a genre really began with an ethnographic focus. In what is widely considered the very first feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922), American filmmaker and explorer Robert J.
Flaherty traveled to Canada's northern Quebec region and documented the lives of the indigenous Inuit peoples he met there. These early filmmakers, who were not yet considered documentarians, sought to record the bizarre and taboo of these other cultures. There was an investment into the strangeness and “otherness” of non-Western daily life. It is important to note that the beginnings of surrealism in poetry, literature and film coincided with the beginnings of modern anthropology in France (Ruoff 45).The timestamp of these emerging disciplines, and the duel fascination with the idea of otherness, predestined these two fields to eventually emerge in some capacity.
The canonical surrealists – including Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson,
René Magritte and others – dominated the 1920s, but the sharp turn to ethnographic surrealism, when the Surrealist Group began their unbridled dissent into the anthropological, began in the decade out from the end of World War I. The 1930s saw a rapid movement of the Surrealist
Group away from the leftist political films of the decade before. The obsession with dreamscape aesthetics, irrational juxtapositions and hyper-Marxist ideologies gave way to a gravitation towards cultural emancipation – liberating oneself form the enlightened reason and bourgeoisie attitudes of the contemporary authority that led to hunger, widespread poverty, illness and other 12
suffering – and a need for aggressive realism. What began in these strange documentaries was as
active investment in otherness, both racial and cultural. Surrealists left the safety of their
European cities and traveled outward, committing themselves to a new endeavor in cultures far
from their own. It is important to note that the surrealists of the 1930s did not completely forsake
their aims of the previous decades; they continued to be driven by an intense need for anti-
rationality and saw ethnography as a means of such escapism from the bourgeoisie values they
still sought to purge. Surrealists had the desire to free themselves from the chains of enlightened
and authoritative reason to enter a new space outside of one’s self. They did this by any possible
means they could afford – drugs, art, poetry, films, and this new passion for delving into other
cultures. The convergences of ethnographic documentary and surrealism range far and wide, but
actually began in 1930s Western Europe.
This chapter will explore the particular way surrealists used anthropology or
anthropologists used the mode of surrealism to create strange, and often, troubling documents of
life in other cultures. I will argue that surrealism, and the particular activity of undercutting
realism with surrealism when the viewer least expects it, is what makes it possible to deeply
explore otherness. By applying the mode of surrealism to the ethnographic practice, filmmakers
are able to use these contradictory forms to produce an aggressive experiential reality, which
often conveys important socio-political commentary. I will then make the case that these films
whose agendas are to shock and disturb us are absolutely necessary historically and socially
critical tools for fixing the suffering depicted in the films.
Buñuel and the Beginnings of Ethnographic Surrealism
When discussing the origins of surreal documentaries, it is impossible to overlook Luis
Buñuel and his pioneering film, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933), which 13
became the pinnacle piece of ethnographic documentary intersecting with surrealism. In the
aftermath of the war, Buñuel – like other major and prominent Spanish artists such as Salvador
Dalí and Juan Miro – left his home county and journeyed to Paris, then the epicenter of artistic
discourse in Europe. There he met André Breton, Paul Éluard and other major figures from the
Surrealist Group and began his work within the artistic movement. Buñuel, too, was attracted to
Freud and the depths of the unconscious mind while also developing a radical, Marxist ideology that would become prevalent throughout his work. With his early films such as Un Chien
Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L'Age d'Or (The Golden Age, 1930), Buñuel had already become an iconoclast of the movement and of the European art scene (Ruoff 45). Buñuel
was witness to and participant in the interdisciplinary bubble of Paris during the interwar period,
and there began his connections to ethnography. While many artists took their anthropological
pursuits to Africa on grand expeditions through the colonized nations, Buñuel saw a much
greater opportunity in Europe – specifically his homeland.
Spain was experiencing socio-political and economic upheaval at the time of Buñuel’s
return to his home nation. Already behind in the burst of industrialization and modernity at the
turn of the century, Spain continued to slip backwards in development and prosperity with the
First World War and the ensuing Great Depression in 1929. With economic crisis, the ruling
class and monarchy were resigned for a political revolution in which Spain underwent five years
of great social unrest where the political right and left vied for control. These were the first
tremors of the oncoming Spanish Civil War and the precise polarization of Spanish life so
evident in Buñuel’s first surreal documentary. In what was only the third film of his career,
Buñuel produced a new genre by reworking established genres of the travelogue and 14
documentary with his pioneering example that was even more radical, political, critical and controversial than his previous two films.
It can often be difficult to comprehend the nature of Buñuel’s surrealist documentary,
pinpointing how it is both surreal and seemingly objective documentation. Mercé Ibarz in "A
Serious Experiment: Land Without Bread, 1933" provides a working definition. She describes it
as “a multi-layered and unnerving use of sound, the juxtaposition of narrative forms already
learnt from the written press, travelogues and new pedagogic methods, as well as through a
subversive use of photographed and filmed documents understood as a basis for contemporary
propaganda for the masses” (Ibarz 28). Buñuel was able to create an amalgamated genre that combined both surrealist aesthetics, leftist politics and documentary traditions where the hybridity formed a staunchly unsettling and provocative experimental reality.
Buñuel’s Las Hurdes works as a mockumentary, combining objective documentation of a
rural Spanish community and a parody of such documentary conventions. The film is not entirely
fabricated, as Buñuel creates a twenty-seven minute portrait of life as a Hurdano, but the film sits
at the crossroads of objectivity and partiality. Las Hurdes expands upon the many disjunctive
cinematic conventions of Buñuel's canonical surreal films – such as blurring the boundaries of
both the real and the surreal, upsetting narrative continuity and distorting the coherence of space
and time – and includes the guiding anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeoisie ideals of the surrealism
group. Indeed, this film is very much still indebted to Buñuel's deep roots with both the surrealist
aesthetics and social stances of the movement. The filmmaker once admitted such: “I made Las
Hurdes both because I was concerned with the conditions of human existence and because I had
a surrealist vision. I saw reality very differently from the way in which I would have seen it
before surrealism” (Buñuel, quoted in Kyrou 1963: 113). At this moment, Buñuel was influenced 15 by both his surreal involvement and his recent induction to the Communist Party, which both have deep threads in Las Hurdes through both his attack on the bourgeoisie authority and the discontinuity of the film which will be discussed at length later. But perhaps the most peculiar aspect of Buñuel’s film – and what makes it decidedly ethnographic surrealism instead of just a bizarre, experimental documentary – is the filmmaker’s constant undercutting of realism when the spectator least expects it. This activity is what Clifford means when he argues that an ethnographic surrealist practice “attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness — the unexpected” (Clifford 562). In this case, Buñuel defamiliarizes the documentary genre and challenges its claims of truthful objectivity, but also lays an attack. Surrealism is key to this assault on documentary conventions in large part by the filmmaker’s incorporation of shocking images that attack the eyes of the spectator. Through violence, cruelty and otherwise disturbing imagery that was so common in surrealist works, these films make use of shock as a means of upending our sense of normalcy, of comfortable realism.
The film opens by defining itself, with text onscreen, as a “cinematic essay of human geography,” and immediately establishes that Las Hurdes, the area of interest, is a far cry from the prosperous, bustling cities of the capitalist Europe and is instead a forgotten space, peripheral to most of Europe and Spain alike. The film opens as a travelogue as Buñuel and the crew travel to Las Hurdes, passing through towns like the village of La Alberca and Las Bathecasa. The montage of churches, buildings, street vendors and daily life introduces us this new place and immediately prepares the audience for a familiar ethno-inspired documentary. The spectator is comfortable as the film passes through the Spanish towns to reach its destination, presenting images of the most banal aspects of the villages. This practice of introducing the spectator to a new town with a differing culture using montage is a standard feature of the most traditional 16
ethnographic films. But this familiarity – this expectation that we are watching a standard
ethnographic documentary – is quickly subverted with violence. Even before we have reached
the region of Las Hurdes, cruel undertones become apparent as Buñuel painstakingly records a
tradition in La Alberca in which all of the married men must tear off the head from a chicken. In
dramatic close-ups, Buñuel puts the spectator right in front of the gruesome action and forces our
attention to the deaths of the animals by stating that the scene must be shown in order to remain
objective. This depiction that seems to relish the cruelty of the act is the first of many and begins
the trend of Buñuel playing with the spectator’s emotions and reactions. It cues us to recognize
the sardonic, detached tone of the vocal narrator and the violent situations presented to us.
Notably, the voiceover narrator is monotone, sounding almost bored and careless throughout the
film as if the narrator is giving a play-by-play of events instead of recounting the dire environment, sickness and violence that plagues the region. After the first introduction to this voice that is surprisingly aloof and unsympathetic towards the upsetting images just witnessed, the film then returns to the typical form of a documentary. Long shots of sweeping, mountainous landscapes, with voiceover describing the altitude and geography, reintroduce the familiar documentary conventions the spectator is accustomed to seeing, making us question our perception of the strange, dark, and brutal undertones of the earlier scene.
Buñuel continues to develop this tension between what is expected of an ethnographic documentary and what we are actually given – a cold, harsh narrator that seems to be relishing in the despair of the town. The town is clearly in squalor; the houses are falling down, the people are impoverished, there are not basic amenities such as roads or electricity. Their diets consist of either potatoes or cherries that cause fatal dysentery. The film is ridden with images of sickly women, old men, dead babies, orphans, deformed midgets and in-bred cretins and yet the 17
voiceover narrator calls it “laughable.” The examples of the narrator’s seeming hostility are
numerous: when a little girl is shown to have some an unexplained mouth disease, he bluntly
relies that she died later; when Buñuel is presenting the ills of the town, the voiceover
sarcastically says a women is just thirty-two years old, although she is clearly far older. This
contradictoriness continues, as there are whole scenes where the narrator describes the scene in a
way that does not align with the filmic image. The voiceover is untruthful, which creates a
strange tension not only between what we are expecting from the genre’s conventions, but a
tension between what we are actually seeing and what we are being told from the narrator. The
realization of the dichotomy between voiceover and film image signals that this is not a
conventional travelogue documentary – it signals it is intentionally parodying these types of
films. Though presenting a travelogue through Spain, Buñuel clearly is not an advocate of this
genre; in fact, he was intentionally mocking the hyperbolic travelogues made in the Sahara at the
same time. Buñuel seems to be suggesting that condescension, whether intentional or not, and
callous depictions from a colonizer perspective that exaggerate the suffering of the foreigners
depicted are integral aspects of travelogues. While the voiceover is confronting the cold-nature
built into the travelogue genre, it is also a tool for inserting humor into the film. Black humor,
which makes light of taboo, grave or wretched subject matter, was a common practice for
surrealists who often used it to make social or political criticism, much like Buñuel is doing in
this film through the voiceover narration. The tension brought from the voiceover creates a
leaning into black humor as the narrator himself seems oblivious to the irony of the disjointed film image and voiceover while the spectator discovers the dark comedy of the contradictions and intentional condescension. The dark comedy threads itself throughout the entirety of the 18
film, but at no point is this strange cruelty and cold inaccuracy more conspicuous than the scene
of the death of the mountain goat.
The scene begins with shots of mountain goats climbing on and navigating through the
sharp rocks of the Spanish mountains. In a series of shots, we see a pack of goats strategically
making their way across the precarious slopes of the steep incline. The voiceover begins a long
discussion of the importance of such goats to the town that suffers from a lack of resources. The
goat’s milk is so crucial that it is given to the gravely ill and the townspeople refuse to kill the
goats to eat their meat, and will only do so if one has died from falling or natural causes. Just as
the narrator speaks these lines, the medium shot of the goat jumping over rocks cuts to a long
shot of the goat falling down the mountain. Then film then cuts to an aerial shot of the animal
toppling and turning as it falls to its imminent death. These shots are crucial not only because the
two perspectives of the goat falling imply that this scene was both staged and perhaps even
repeated from multiple angles, but also because the long shot of the goat first falling allows us to
see a puff of smoke in the center right of the frame, fading into the off-screen. It becomes clear
from this puff of smoke that the goat
was shot and intentionally killed. This
point becomes even more fascinating
when reading about the film’s
production and finding that it was
Buñuel himself who killed the goat for Figure 1: A puff of smoke can be seen on the right side of the frame as the goat falls to its death. this scene. This participation on behalf of the filmmaker completely subverts the idea of objective documentation as Buñuel manipulated the scene, but it also forces the spectator to question the filmmaker; we have to ask why Buñuel 19
would participate in such a cruel act against a creature so crucial to the town he is supposed
trying to help by documenting their needs. His participation and the use of off-screen space cues the viewer to think about what is occurring off-screen, about the meaning beyond what is shown through the film image. Indeed, throughout the film it appears that Buñuel is much more concerned with mocking the Hurdanos’ lifestyle and lack of resources, but a deeper understanding of the film can allow the spectator to distinguish between what Buñuel is implicitly doing through irony and what the seeming authorial discourse, as voiced by the
narrator, is doing. Buñuel’s authorship and participation in this scene signal that there is a
subterranean layer of implied commentary from the filmmaker that does not quite match with the
attitudes embodied by the narrator and the film’s agenda of callous condescension. There are
numerous occasions where the Hurdanos themselves are compared to beasts – examples – to
create a theme of dehumanization, which James Lastra suggests is thematic of ethnographic inscription. Lastra writes that Buñuel’s inclusion of a critical narrator and participation in violent scenes such as the goat killing, “serves to undermine the film’s claims to objectivity, the validity of ethnographic stagings more generally, and, most importantly, our own certainty about where the film stands, morally and politically” (Lastra 186). An ethical conundrum results to force us to reevaluate the film’s and Buñuel’s own attitudes towards the Hurdanos. We must not mistake the filmmaker’s participation as an opportunity for Buñuel to enforce his derision towards the
Hurdanos, but as his deliberate subversion of the promised transparency of the film to atone for the inhumanity shown to the Hudanos. It is a “mea culpa” that stresses Buñuel is in fact not just aware of the film’s insensitivity, but is actively making it such to criticize his own film (186).
When Europeans of the 1930s first saw the film, Buñuel received intense backlash for its insensitive depictions of life in rural Spain. The Spanish Republic immediately barred the film 20
after first release and just as it was again during the subsequent Fascist regime (Lastra 186).
Though Buñuel wanted to intentionally offend people through the film to highlight the both the
cruelty of the Spanish government’s neglect of the region and the cruelty of contemporary
documentaries, many are duped by the filmmaker’s intentions. Still today, many audiences and
critics take this film at face value and condemn Buñuel for his supposed overwhelming cruelty.
Anthropologists and filmmakers, too, often consider Las Hurdes “a serious, but flawed documentary” (Ruoff 48). While the film does make use of non-fiction film traditions – going so far as to have a film title and opening intertitle that closely echoes non-fiction films predating the film – it is direly important that we do not take this film at face value, just as we do not with
Buñuel’s surreal feature films. Travelogue documentaries of this era were typically, and even supposed to be, serious, sincere and educational. They were meant to record the encounters experienced when traveling through a foreign nation, but often resulted in a documentation that served to exploit the peoples, exoticizing and othering the foreign groups in the process. This is precisely why Buñuel has intentionally used this non-fiction format to subvert the genre’s conventions to offer a stark political commentary on the Western Europeans’ complacency and materialism. On one level, Buñuel travels to a desolate town and records with his camera. But on a deeper level, he attacks Western institutions, including the church and education systems, as well as the capitalism of the bourgeoisie class. Buñuel uses the harshness of the voiceover and the juxtaposition of tones to deliberately outrage and condemn both the oppressive ruling class and the “oppressive ideological systems” that too often and too comfortably conclude groups such as the Hurdanos as barbaric or repulsive (Lastra 188). He does this so he can promptly emphasize that some of those in the audience of his film so quick to dismiss it for insolence are also those that are part of the wealthy Spanish bourgeoisie that have tolerated a town to digress 21
to such a state. In this case, we can understand Buñuel is staying true to his leftist ideals that
stem from his involvement with the Surrealist Group, but it is also crucial to note that Buñuel is
also critiquing the so-called liberal humanism of the politically left. Many academics and
anthropologists who were part of the left wing often made expeditions into foreign countries to
record exotic cultures, but often did so in manners that seemed exploitative. . Anthropologists
such as Marcel Griaule, who led the 1932 Mission Dakar-Djibouti into the sub-Sahara Africa to gather thousands of African artifacts for a French museum, were making a spectacle of another culture for a European audience (Ruoff 45). Buñuel refused to join the expedition and instead made his first documentary to expose the ethical and moral dilemmas of this activity as these liberalists, under the guise of social justice or education, were in fact making a spectacle out of exotic cultures and peoples for entertainment. Buñuel asks the spectator to question this activity of academics and filmmakers alike entering into an exotic space and passing judgements on the lifestyles of such people or making spectacles out of the foreign groups.
Although we should not reject or ignore Buñuel’s film as a despicable and insincere documentary, it is important to discuss that the film is not without its faults. While the filmmaker does create a powerful interrogation of ethnographic filmmaking and strategically questions both sides of the political spectrum, it must be noted that Buñuel did not ask permission to film a documentary that put the Hurdanos in such a negative light. He especially did not ask permission when he faked many of the scenes, ranging from the “dead” children who were merely asleep to the intentional killing of animals. . In fact, in 2000 Dutch filmmaker Ramón Gieling returned to the same region in Spain to record the state of the community sixty-seven years after Buñuel’s film in a documentary aptly named The Prisoners of Buñuel. In his exploration of the region's reactions and the impact made by the documentary, Gieling was met with furious townspeople 22 that still refer to Buñuel’s film as a “biased, untruthful smear job” and say they still suffer from a negative reputation (Young). Although Buñuel was making important social commentary through his film, he did so at the expense of a group that was already suffering. Ethnographic surrealism often engages with “otherness” and embraces irrationality of peoples and cultures, but there are certainly ethical conundrums that bear on Buñuel’s use of othering this population of peoples. Despite these aspects, Las Hurdes is still a revolutionary and pioneering film that will prey on spectator gullibility and employs the same means it is simultaneously challenging. For this, it must be handled delicately. Viewers can at once hail the film for its progressive political commentary while acknowledging the ethical and moral slipperiness created from the film’s treatment of the Hurdanos.
The 1950s Resurgence of Ethnographic Surrealism and Jean Rouch
Outside of Buñuel’s film, few scholars have conducted serious research about the surreal ethnographic films that came after, the films that continued and expanded the legacy of Las
Hurdes. The post-World War II period in France still had strong inclinations towards surrealism as a mode in filmmaking. Michael Richardson has even suggested, in his essay “Surrealism and
Documentary,” that the documentary tradition was so marked by surrealism that it became “its dominant influence during the early fifties” (87). From this post-war period emerged a slew of young, talented documentarians including Alan Resnais, Georges Franju, Chris Marker and
Jacques Baratier. While these directors were not affiliated with the Surrealist Group, they “were deeply imbued” with the spirit of surrealism and their “documentaries in general are surrealist in all but name” (Richardson 87). They were politically less radical than the self-proclaimed
Marxists of the Surrealist Group of the 1920s, but they were as staunchly anti-colonist as their 23 predecessors were. Many of these documentarians were concerned with the representations and exploration of otherness outside of Europe.
Of this group, one figure who sits right at the crossroads of surrealism and documentary is Jean Rouch. As one of the most significant ethnographic filmmakers of his time with films such as Chronicle of a Summer (1961) and Moi, Un Noir (1958), Rouch’s filmmaking style was predominantly much more realist in nature and belonging to documentary compared to Buñuel, but he also worked with the surrealism mode more decidedly than his peers. As an interesting paradox, his non-fiction filmmaking tended to incorporate surrealism, though he was never decidedly a Surrealist and many overlook his surrealist tendencies. It is likely that his early encounter with surrealism, experiencing the movement as a teenager in Paris in the 1930s, when surrealism was still very much in vogue, played a formative role in shaping his later inclinations
(Henley 232). Reading surreal publications in his youth stirred him to bring a surrealist eye and application to each of his ethnographic films even when surrealism was long out of fashion
(Henley 232).
Nowhere is this more evident than his notorious film, Les Maitres Fous (The Mad
Masters, 1955). This film not only stands out as a strikingly surreal documentary, but it also brought him international attention and fame, though the attention was far from complimentary.
Rouch, much like Buñuel, came under scrutiny for his apparent insensitive depiction of African culture and tradition. This thirty-six minute short film depicts a possession ritual of the Hakua cult of the Songhay and Zerma peoples in what was the African Gold Coast under British colonial rule (Richardson 89). Rouch provides an intimate account of this rare ritual. Not only was he personally invited by the group to record their cultural practice, but he also provides a close-up documentation of men and women becoming possessed by spirits, which was 24
revolutionary for post-war audiences and contemporary audiences as Rouch was able to access
such an event as well as expose global audiences to it. It is notable that the Hakua cult emerged
from Niger in the early twenties, likely as a result of trauma from colonial occupation
(Richardson 89). This colonial history will not only be relevant to the action of the film, but it
stands in solidarity with the anti-colonialist stance of the surrealists who saw the colonial
empires of France and Britain mobilize in the post-war period and their predecessors who were
witness to the wrecked nations left after decolonization.
Rouch’s film makes use of the same ethnographic surrealist tradition described by
Clifford – to paraphrase, Rouch subverts the predominant realism of the film with the
extraordinary and supernatural ritual, inserting otherness and the “unexpected” at the forefront of
the film (Clifford 562). He does so by bookending a cult-wide possession – in which its members are possessed by the dead, frothing from the mouth and engaging in activities that are challenging for spectators to witness – with scenes showcasing the banality, the normalcy of the villagers immediately before and after the ritual. It is important here to discern where surreal aesthetics are operating in Rouch’s film. The film is evidently bizarre and challenges the power of the ruling bourgeoisie, but it can be argued that the subject matter itself, the actual inclination to document and bear witness to a possession, is a surreal activity in itself. Jeanette DeBouzek writes in her essay “Jean Rouch's ‘Ethnographie Surrealism’” that Rouch’s desire to document people in a trance “is the manifestation of a broader ‘surrealist’ interest in the world of the imagination, a world that was being explored by the poets — and the ethnographers — of the avant-garde of his youth” (DeBouzek 307). There is something inherently surreal about Rouch’s need to document an event so unusual to most of the world outside of that jungle. 25
The film opens in Accra, a bustling African city where the Hakua live as laborers. The
shots of the city are bright and depict a typical ethnographic documentary-esque montage of the city to establish setting. The film introduces us to the diverse groups and occupations of the city in a montage that familiarizes the viewer with the normalcy of the everyday life of the city.
Rouch emphasizing this normality by showing us shots of laborers, protesters, groups walking down the streets and people simply carrying out the routine of their days. These opening shots are sharply juxtaposed with the switch to a dark setting just five minutes into the film, as Rouch unexpectedly cuts to a medium shot of a figure in pitch-black darkness. The image is obscure to the extent that we cannot discern positively if the figure is convulsing in accordance with the ritual. This confusion is immediately put aside when the film cuts to a close-up shot of a man turning back and forth sporadically and frothing at the mouth. This shocking image last for only a second before we return to the bright city with shots of people gathering and sitting together. It is notable that Rouch here is incorporating a historically surrealist tendency of intentionally shocking the viewer with gruesome, disturbing imagery. With the shocking image of the deranged man still in mind, Rouch and the Hakuas begin the descent into the jungle. The daylight of the colorful cars driving along the street to reach their destination is reminiscent of a travelogue and the viewer is immediately returned to a false sense of security. But as the group winds their way through the jungle on foot to get to the site of the ritual, we become more aware that we are far from the normalcy of the city. Rouch is already playing with the viewer’s sense of comfort, but that familiarity is completely undercut in what is no doubt the most fascinating and disturbing scene – the actual ritual unfolding in real time.
The Hakuas gather with the intent to purge themselves of their everyday misfortunes through the possession. They are especially optimistic that the ritual will cleanse them of their 26 oppression as a colonized society. As the ceremony begins, the group slowly and subtlety starts to act strange. The people seem to succumb to a manic spell. As the group begins to twitch and behave abnormally, the film’s style of presentation becomes increasingly frantic, with quick cuts and a shaky handheld camera. The camera seems to become possessed, too, and mirrors the exorcist-like shaking of the ritual participants. Due to the disjunctive camera, along with the erratic diegetic soundscape that consists of an overlapping of tribal chants and ceremonial voices, the spectator becomes increasingly aware that they are witnessing a paranormal event, a truly surreal encounter of people becoming possessed. The ritual becomes increasingly more violent and unsettling, forcing the spectator to choose between looking away or continuing to see what they have never seen before.
Figure 2: A member of the Hauka tribe under posession during the ritual.
Rouch continues to operate with the surrealistic usage of shock images and bombards us with disturbing images: bodies convulsing and twisting in abnormal positions, Hakuas foaming at the mouth, a butchered dog, and human flesh blistering as it is exposed to fire and boiling water. The sequence is viscerally disturbing as we see the people subjugate themselves to these 27 painful activities. While this is occurring, the voiceover tells the viewers that not only are the
Hakuas being possessed, but they are possessed by colonialist spirits: generals and officials part of British colonialism in Africa are being mocked through the Hakua’s grotesque behavior that characterizes the colonists as barbaric. Not only do the carnal images shock and completely undercut the normalcy established at the opening of the film, but the gates are opened for socio- political commentary about the deep trauma inflicted by colonial occupation.
When Rouch’s film was first shown, there was immediate condemnation by both the colonial British authorities and many across the African academic sector. The film was banned across Niger and other British territories for its supposed racist depictions of the Hakua tribe.
Like Buñuel’s film, Rouch offended everyone. Africans were upset at the depictions that showed their culture as savage, and the British authorities were furious at the mockery of their position.
But also like Buñuel’s film, Les Maitres Fous should not be taken at face value. In fact, it is not a mindless, offensive depiction of an exotic culture; it is a crucial political commentary on the trauma and pain caused by colonialism. The ceremony becomes a parody of colonial occupation much like Las Hurdes’ mocking of a colonial gaze that makes a spectacle of exotic groups so often seen in travelogue films. The viewer is witness to the Hakua’s ecstasy post-possession when they see the ritual participants back in their daily routines and smiling at the camera. But this return to normalcy is upended as the viewer also leaves with a lingering disturbed feeling because they have just bore witness to the horrid violence and misery forced upon them by the colonial rule.
Like Buñuel’s film, Rouch received intense backlash for its surface insensitivity. I have argued that the film moves beyond this initial understanding to be a robust discussion of the legacy of colonialism. But also like Buñuel’s film, there are unaddressed and unaccounted for 28 problematic aspects to Rouch’s film. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Rouch sought out surreal imagery by filming unfamiliar, foreign peoples, customs and nations. There is something inherently unsettling about this depiction of others as exotic, as being innately surreal by their shear nature of not being of the colonial powers. Although these ethical gray areas were no doubt unintentional on Rouch’s part, it is vital to pinpoint these unethical moments for examination. This is not to say films must always be perfectly moral or ethically obligated to be self-critical. In fact, the moral ambiguity is what make Rouch’s and Buñuel’s film powerful in their sociopolitical agendas. A film can be both controversial and profound, and often the interplay of the two is what leads to deeper meaning. However, acknowledging the exploitative potential of such films that record foreign cultures for a greater agenda is important to understanding the limits of European filmmakers making an unproblematic anti-colonist film. In his efforts to shock the viewer and insert an anti-colonist stance, Rouch still exoticizes the group.
This suggests that perhaps only the colonized can make a truly ethically sound anti-colonist film
– a notion that I will examine in the next chapter.
Surrealism as Conduit for Social Rebellion
Both filmmakers strategically challenge the comfortable, the status quo and the familiar by using surrealism as a weapon in undercutting the familiar as it suits them. In doing so, they not only break down the trust in documentary as a genre that often promotes objective reality and attempts rhetorical persuasion, but they also challenge the spectator to see beyond the basic narrative, to work for the deeply meaningful messages hidden under the top layer. By undercutting the standard filmic conventions of documentaries and travelogues that often make viewers comfortable, Buñuel and Rouch force the audience to confront images that are difficult, painful, and often very confusing. By challenging the spectator’s comfort, the film removes any 29
safety barriers so that what we expect of a documentary are reduced to ash and in turn, an
entirely new perspective of the film can arise, forcing us to acknowledge the deep social and
political commentary buried within the cracks.
It is important to note that Buñuel and Rouch carry out this breaking down of
objectivity through different methods. Though both filmmakers are brazenly participatory with
the filmmaker partaking in the events seen onscreen, Buñuel’s play with objectivity is much
more difficult to spot. In Buñuel’s film, slight winks and nods to the spectator can be caught with
a viewer knowing of the filmmaker’s larger surreal project and one that is keen to comedic irony,
but anything less than full attention may lead us to believe he is nothing but an insensitive tyrant.
Instead of laying all his cards on the table, Buñuel plays with the film’s objectivity by having the
narrator promise transparency and truth from the outset and eventually breaks down any
impartiality to reveal the cruelty of Western Europe’s colonial history. Rouch does the opposite.
Rouch gives no pretense of objectivity; he has a crystalline anti-colonial stance when he shows the ecstasy of the ritual and the cruel influence of colonialism to lead such a group to purge in such a way.
As mentioned, both filmmakers faced intense derision post-release of each respective film. Banning and censorship prevented many contemporary audiences from experiencing the attack on their complacency with the bourgeoisie, authoritarian forces that brought forth the suffering depicted within each film. I argue that many audiences, both in the early to mid-1900s and now, are often unwilling and unable to challenge themselves by handling the provocative dimension brought to the surface by such films. Audiences are much more willing to sit through what makes them comfortable and secure, than confront their own behaviors that create negative aspects in the world. If suffering is shown on screen, we want to see no beauty in it and have the 30 filmmaker clearly in good moral standing, but we also want to feel like the suffering is far removed from us personally and that we absolutely had no hand in causing it. Audiences want artists to play it safe, not challenge our own security while we are in a comfortable stasis while film watching. However, discomfort and shock are intrinsic aspects of Surrealism. From the very inception of the movement, Surrealism as a mode dedicated to the irrational and shocking lent itself to be a perfect conduit for revolting against society and stimulating a cultural reawakening.
Surrealism goes hand in hand with rebellion, and as such seems to be an ideal mechanism for pushing the sharply political agenda of films like Rouch’s and Buñuel’s in which the filmmakers rebel against the ruling institutions and colonial attitudes. Though surrealism is often associated with dreamscapes and the fantasy across mediums, it is an apt tool in documentary films for its praxis of shocking viewers; shock often being a key mechanism for inciting sociopolitical action.
From this, I argue that films such as Buñuel and Rouch’s are not just needed, but absolutely necessary. Using surrealism to produce provocative documentaries as a tool for activism or social critique is no doubt a lost activity, but an important one as our media landscape is saturated with that which makes us feel safe from the horrors of reality. Perhaps the legacy of such films has not been fully realized by modern documentarians, and perhaps it should be in order to awaken viewers to the horrors that are happening here and now.
31
CHAPTER TWO Rewriting the Past: The Intersection of Post-colonialism and Surrealism in Perfumed Nightmare and The Act of Killing
The “perfumed nightmare” refers to a seductive aspect of modern culture enticing us to be like our colonial masters while discarding and even throwing into the garbage bin the precious holistic knowledge of our forefathers. In this national obsession, the perfume of seduction eventually begins to sour. –Kidlat Tahimik
As discussed in the first chapter, the surrealism movement expanded far beyond narrative fiction films, emerging within documentary by the 1930s. When surrealism took an ethnographic turn, artists across the globe saw the potential for surrealism to intersect with documentary, and for decades to come, filmmakers would continue to blur the lines between documenting reality and inserting the weirdness of Surrealism. While the first chapter focused exclusively on the beginnings of surrealistic documentaries and how European directors saw the potential of using
Surrealism to depict the plight of the Other – whether that be a forgotten town in Northern Spain or the Hakua tribe in Africa – this chapter will focus on the surreal documentaries created by and with the Other. This shift in authorship will not only align us with a new perspective – largely that of a victim of neocolonialism – but will introduce us to a new manifestation of the surrealism movement. By understanding that surrealism is prominent outside of interwar Europe, we can grasp that surrealism has what Adrian Martin calls an “eternal” path, moving beyond the aesthetics and motivations of the finite Surrealist group of the 1930s, and constantly reinventing itself outside of the central hub to constitute “a permanent revolution” across the space and time
(Martin 190). The switch in authorship allows us to witness surrealism as a fluctuating mode 32 succeeding from its historic dimension, so we may read the films discussed in this chapter as surreal despite their lack of adherence to canonical surrealism.
While much of the academic research on Surrealism has centered on the male European filmmakers, lionizing the work of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau amongst others,
Surrealism was truly a global movement with practitioners across continents who believed in the power of Surrealism in film. Despite non-Western Surrealistic artists lacking the same popularity as their European counterparts, there is no shortage of art made in these so-called Third World
Nations. Many may know of the work of Surrealists in the United States with lauded figures such as Maya Deren, Joseph Cornell, and more recently, David Lynch, or the work of Frida Kahlo in
Mexico, but there were Surrealist movements all across the globe. Throughout Latin America,
Surrealism was enthusiastically practiced within the artistic community, including Chilean artist
Roberto Matta, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, and the pioneering surrealist films of Alejandro
Jodorowsky. Movements also appeared in Eastern European with the films of Czech filmmaker
Jan Švankmajer. Surrealism even made ground in the most unexpected nations of Egypt and
Japan. While there are plenty of surreal works that deserve recognition, this paper will specifically look at surreal documentaries with subjects from the Philippines and Indonesia.
Before analyzing specific films and their missions grappling with the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the Third World, it is important to give a background of Surrealism’s intersection with colonialism and with post-colonialism – a field of study on the societal and cultural legacy of Western colonialism and imperialism – in cinema more generally. With this background, we can understand the filmmakers’ neo-colonist dilemma to make a more subversive, revolutionary cinema that decries the imperialist system within which they are currently forced to live. 33
Postcolonial studies first intersected with film studies in the late 1960s and1970s with the growth of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought (Ponzanesi). Generally, postcolonial films include any film that deals with the history and impacts of imperial rule and oppressions.
Many of these films participate in the ongoing conversations of the legacy of colonialism, spurring debates about how modern experiences of migration, economics, government, militarization, and domestic tensions are even now swayed by the colonial past. In their collection Postcolonial Cinema Studies, authors Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller write that when defining postcolonial cinema, it “matters less what a film is thematically about and more about how it engages with history, subjectivity, epistemology, and the political ramifications of all of these” (1). The authors stress that postcolonial filmmakers used a
“postcolonial lens” and politically charged aesthetics in which filmmakers challenged audiences to move beyond “imperial imaginaries” (1). These films are highly centered on spectatorship and cinematic engagement, not only encouraging their once-colonized viewers to reject the representations and ideologies of the imperialists that continue to dominate everyday life, but to have a militantly anti-colonial position which means denouncing capitalism and the Hollywood system of filmmaking. In what is perhaps the most famous and consequential development in postcolonial cinema, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino created an anti-neocolonial film movement that rejects bourgeoisie values and creates cinema not used for entertainment purposes, but to inspire left-wing revolutionary activism. In their manifesto
“Towards a Third Cinema,” written in conjunction with their militant essay film Hour of the
Furnaces (1968), the movement they call Third Cinema is “the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point – in a 34
word, the decolonization of culture” (Solanas and Getino 2). This movement defines cinema of
developing nations that incorporates guerilla-like tactics to respond to the social, political, and
economic realities of post-colonial nations and to stimulate viewers to take action to fight their
current position.
It is important to note that post-colonial discourses were not singular to just the art of
cinema, but that postcolonial artists believed “cinema was a perfect medium with which to
convey these ideological discourses, whose legacies continue to shape political and cultural
landscapes long after the official end of colonization” (18). While the connections between this
anti-colonial filmmaking may not initially seem to have any similarities with the Surrealism
movement, Surrealism and anti-colonialism have deep, historical connections. In fact, the
Parisian Surrealist Group were avid supporters of anti-colonial ideology, including the
Vietnamese and Algerian struggles for independence. Though the Surrealist Group, under the
leadership of André Breton, did not concentrate on colonialism in the first two “Manifestoes of
Surrealism,” the many pamphlets circulated by the Surrealists, as well as the themes of many
films, paintings and poems, emphasized their anti-colonial mindset (Antle and Conley 1). These
pamphlets included the pamphlet of 1925 that circulated in support of the rebels of the Rif Valley
fighting in Morocco for independence from France and “Liberty is a Vietnamese noun”
published in 1946 that reasserted their support of anti-colonialism at the end of World War II.
Even with the Surrealists also speaking openly about anti-fascism and the second war, anti- colonialism remained through the decades with the signing of “Manifesto of the 121” in 1960 in support of the Algerian fight for independence (Antle and Conley 1-3). In short, the Surrealist
Group espoused a staunch anti-imperialist perspective from its inception in 1919 and continued
for many decades through decolonization until the Group officially folded in the 1960s. But even 35
with the official end of the organized Surrealist Group, filmmakers still use surrealism to confront the dark past of colonialism and the painful legacy left from centuries of imperial rule.
When surrealism entered into the postcolonial cinema sphere, the tenets, motivations and provocative impact of Surrealists combined with the aggressive call-to-action against oppressive neocolonial policies and legacies. A new moment of surrealism began in which recognizably surreal elements of dreamscapes, explorations of the working mind and the proclivity for aesthetics that depicted the irrational, the strange, the unexpected, the uncanny and the unconventional combined with the intense anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist views of postcolonial cinema. Whereas surrealism of films in the first chapter Land Without Bread (1933) and Mad Masters (1955) appeared in the strange occurrences of ordinary, everyday life in foreign nations, here non-Western film subjects are using surrealism and the power of the imaginary to escape the colonial oppressions of their daily life. These filmmakers do not merely immerse into a dream state, but show how their subconscious is the space safe from neocolonialism to create a novel, radical documentary that encourages the spectator to fight against imperialism.
In this chapter, I will analyze the impact of the Surrealism movement on filmmakers and film subjects within some of the most marginalized communities: the so-called “Third World
Nations” that experienced years of misery under colonial rule. While many ethnographic surreal documentaries have exoticized the colonized peoples, whether intentional or not, postcolonial surreal documentaries righted those wrongs. In fact, the postcolonial imagination used
Surrealism to challenge colonial empires and “its ability to control native and migrant populations through careful administration, indoctrination, surveillance, and the management of every level of civil life” (Vartanian). For artists of the Third World, Surrealism offered freedom, 36
a conduit through which they could express their internal thoughts, emotions and fantasies
unencumbered by a colonial gaze or racist ideology.
This chapter will look at two films: Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare
(Mababangong Bangungot, 1977) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012).
Tahimik, a Filipino filmmaker, gives an intimate portrait of the ongoing ramifications of colonialism on his culture from his own perspective and understanding of the Philippines disillusionment caused by colonialism. Oppenheimer’s film is working in a unique method of authorship because Joshua Oppenheimer is a white man from the United States and based in
Denmark. He himself is not a non-Western director, but for this particular film, he is working with Indonesian citizens who contribute and are critical authors of the film. Indonesians are both subjects, as the film closely follows a group of Indonesians part of mass executions against accused communists, but also have a role in the film authorship as an anonymous Indonesian citizens is a co-director of the film. With this in mind, the perspective of the Indonesians are central to the composition of the film.
By analyzing two postcolonial documentary films, I will explore the fascinating ability
for the filmmakers to use both the documentary impulse, and certain aesthetics and motivations
of Surrealism, to confront the respective nation’s colonial history. I will examine how Surrealism
is used not only as a mode to challenge the ongoing legacy of colonial rule, but also as a
provocative weapon to assault the imperialists that caused such strife in their communities.
Before turning to the films in question, I must acknowledge that it may be initially
difficult to understand these films in relation to Surrealism. These films are not composed of
glaringly surreal images such as a man slashing an eyeball or a dreaming woman chasing a
mysterious hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Nor are these films made by filmmakers that 37
were part of the Surrealist group or self-proclaimed as surrealists like Luis Buñuel and Jean
Rouch. However, Surrealism is an elusive, ever-evolving art form and has never been a tradition
or genre confined to a singular set of conventions, ideas or aesthetics; these films emphasize that.
I argue that these films are influential examples of the power of surrealism in documentaries,
although how that Surrealism appears is different from the surrealism of narrative films, or even
from the documentaries discussed in chapter one.
In these films, there is no longer an attack on “the familiar, provoking the irruption of
otherness – the unexpected,” as James Clifford described in his seminal essay "On Ethnographic
Surrealism," (562). Instead, these films align the audience with the perspective from the foreign culture to try to eliminate the estrangement and problematic depictions of other cultures so common in films that are made from the perspective of Westerners. In other words, the presentation of the strange of the monotonous day-to-day events in an unfamiliar culture and
landscape, is not where the Surrealism arises in postcolonial cinema.
The Disillusioned Nightmare of Postcolonial Philippines
The Philippines have a long and painful history of colonialism since the first Europeans
arrived with Ferdinand Magellan in the early 1500s (Herrera). Since these expeditions into the
Eastern hemisphere in the early decades of global imperialism, the Philippines and surrounding island nations endured direct Spanish colonial rule, which included introducing Christianity, new laws and new culture (Herrera). This Spanish colonialism only ended with Spain’s defeat in the
Spanish-American War in 1898, making it a territory of the United States and putting the
Philippines under American rule. Japan briefly occupied the Philippines in 1942 during World
War II and remained until the U.S. military overthrew the Japanese imperialists in 1945. The
U.S. controlled the nation until 1946 when the Treaty of Manila established independence. But 38
as Perfumed Nightmare will suggest, American influence on the Filipinos stretches far past the
signing of a document in the 1940s. (Herrera). This ongoing neocolonial influence is what
Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tihimik confronts in his surreal documentary Perfumed Nightmare.
By looking at his documentary, we will grasp how surrealism and postcolonial discourse
combine in an amusing and personal film that still has stakes rooted in sociopolitical
commentary in the end.
Tihimik produces a semi-autobiographical documentary about a young Filipino man and
his experience that awakens him to the adverse impact of American cultural colonialism.
Specifically, the film centers on the protagonist’s realization of the legacy of American culture
and technology on his Philippine national identity (Metz 121). The main character, Kidlat
Tihimik (Kidlat Tihimik), is a jeepney driver who is enamored with America’s technological
culture, especially American space travel, and dreams of becoming an astronaut at Cape
Canaveral. Kidlat also seems infatuated with the West – he religiously listens to the Voice of
America and he is even the president of the Werner Von Braun fan club in his small village.
When he gets his break to work for an American businessman in Paris, Kidlat is thrilled at the
result. He when he travels to Western Europe and gets a rude awakening to the failures of
globalization and “becomes disillusioned by the human cost of technological progress” (Metz
121). Kidlat realizes that his obsessions with American capitalism and technology is in fact a
“perfumed nightmare” and we see his idyllic vision of this culture go from a fantasy that he
wakes from to realize it was only a bad dream. Anneke Metz, in her essay, emphasizes the hybridity of the film’s tone, shifting from hopeful and optimistic to ruptured and dejected, that serves to represent the duality of cultural identity in nations that were colonized and the process that occurs when colonies realize their culture is now blighted with another. Tahimik shows the 39
pressure of American culture on traditional Filipino culture through “the juxtaposition of
traditional Filipino music to multinational sound bites, the title as oxymoronic testament to the
schizophrenic task of assimilating two cultures, the critique of technology and capitalism
followed by formation of a new ‘cultural technology’” (Metz 123). Metz even emphasizes the
American influence on the film’s production as Kidlat is addressing a multi-national audience to
critique the ideals of imperialism that the audience may be complicit with. In fact, Kidlat chose
to have the film in English rather than Filipino dialects to draw a more international, Western
audience (Metz 124). This decision to have the film accessible to a majority-Western audience is critical for understanding the film’s postcolonial context and the political stakes at hand.
While Perfumed Nightmare lacks the “irruption of otherness” in ethnographic surreal documentaries made by Westerners, this film has the same playfulness when undercutting the supposed implied realism of the documentary genre (Clifford 252). The films of the postcolonial development still undercut realism when least expected, playing with expectations between fact and fiction. Much like Land Without Bread (Buñuel, 1933) and The Mad Master (Jean Rouch,
1955), Tahimik presents a documentary rooted in realism to the spectator, only for Tahimik to eventually disrupt that sense of realism by negating documentary conventions to insert
Surrealism that shocks the viewer out of the comfortable viewing experience. The film has many scenes of cinéma vérité as Tahimik films a visit to the Sarao Motors jeepney factory and includes sequences of the townspeople practicing penance. The opening introduces this sense of documentary with Tahimik offering shots of activity on the town’s bridge. The camera is set at a distance from the bridge, showing the cars and pedestrians crossing the bridge in long shot using a wide angle. These opening shots establish a feeling of documentary reminiscent of a travelogue or of a city film that focuses on the banality and poetic quality of a city’s day-to-day events, like 40
Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) or Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter
Ruttman, 1927). Immediately, the spectator expects a documentary of a town’s daily activities; we expect something both safe and familiar.
Despite this introduction, Tahimik follows the tendency of surreal documentaries to present what Michael Richardson calls “the unexpected aspects of contemporary life” (77). In other words, surrealism is introduced through documenting the strangeness of ordinary life. Over the course of the film, the scenes gradually become more surreal until there is a finale that is almost entirely surreal unlike the beginning that introduces the film as a documentary. But, sometimes Kidlat inserts an unexpected image that shocks the viewer. This element of surreal discordance is most obvious in the scene in which Tahimik shows the town’s ritual where young boys are circumcised one by one early in the film. Prior to this moment, the scene is one of childhood joy as young boys play in a river, jumping in and out of the water. The boys’ laughs and cheers are the only sounds heard. The lightness of tone is undermined when the film cuts to a close-up of hands sharpening a razor on a piece of wood, and suddenly the gravity of the situation is revealed as the laughter turns to painful yells as the process begins. Quite suddenly, the lightness of a child playing is swapped for close-up shots of children’s faces in anguish. The
inclusion of such a personal closeness and the
cringe-inducing sound of metal clinking combine
to emphasize the intensity of the process. Not
only does this scene present a frank
verisimilitude as the boys go through this painful Figure 3: Surrealism can often provide a frank verisimilitude such as showing the anguish of a young Filipino undergoing process without painkillers or doctors, a painful circumcision. showcasing the painful process in an unvarnished 41 manner with the camera merely documenting the young kids’ extreme pain, but it is a scene that invites discomfort for the spectator. Many Surrealists sought to make their viewers squirm in their seats and cringe away from the images presented on screen, canvas, or any other medium.
Here, Tahimik seems to be exploring Surrealism’s ability to overtake the realism with an ultra- graphic, bloody image that shock the viewer. Though it may seem backwards for hyperrealism to engage with surrealism, Adrian Martin has stated that while realism rarely offers much for surrealist attitudes, “a newer form of mainstream hyper-realism has refound a certain crazy, high-pitched near-hysterical intensity” (Martin 194). It is this grueling emotional intensity that takes the film past conventional realism. It is important to note that many could read this scene from the stance of a colonizer, seeing these boys undergo this process without aid and try to make the argument that these traditions are somehow savage or these villagers live in an inferior, defective society as compared to industrialized countries. This is not the attitude conveyed by the film itself during this scene. Tahimik does not include this scene to show a lack of resources or lament the austerity of the tradition. Instead, the scene is addressed to a Western audience to show the normalcy of such a ritual in his village and the camaraderie of the ritual as the boys gather in excitement. While it may seem harsh to an outsider, Tahimik confronts this Western perspective that may find the process gruesome or progressively backwards. In this scene,
Tahimik uses the surrealist tradition of shocking the viewer with bloody, graphic images to make a comment on the colonial gaze. Outside of the shock-value of the corporeal imagery, Tahimik also makes use of the surrealist tendency to engage in political discourse and to offend when the film really unveils its decidedly anti-colonist agenda at its end.
Tahimik further comments on the disillusionment that can come from indulgence in
American culture when the film gets progressively more surreal as Kidlat realizes the nightmare 42 that is Western modernity. Kidlat travels across Europe and gradually becomes more fascinated yet infuriated with the human cost of such a technologically advanced society. This frustration culminated in the most surreal scene of the film, namely when Kidlat escapes Europe in a rocket ship fashioned from a found incinerator that only flies our protagonist back to his hometown using the winds of a Philippine typhoon. As a side, it is important to acknowledge that the appropriation of found objects is a key surrealist tradition as surrealists in the 1930s would accumulate objects to make collaged assemblages that challenged reason and depicted associations to the subconscious. Breton believed that assemblages of such objects had the power to break into the subconscious and “bewilder sensation”; this seems to be a point Tahimik is familiar with as it is this found object in the film’s diegesis that allows the protagonist to puncture the realism (263).
Tahimik shows that the industrialization, and the economic and technological advancement of the West, can appear desirable, but it can also be dangerous and unnecessary for human happiness. He shows that an obsession with Western aspects can wreck the native values of the Philippines, so one loses their love for their home culture and peoples. Certainly, this is a fantastical, playful depiction of a great escape as Kidlat flies away from the city that so brutally shattered his dreams to go back to the comfort of his home. However, the surrealism is working not just to show how Kidlat’s sense of reality became uprooted, his sense of the world is muddled, and he can really only show his disillusioned state with fantasy; the surrealism is also acutely political, emphasizing the dreaded side effects of imposing Americanism. By showing that Kidlat’s reality was enveloped in the ideals of American values – such as technological and economic progress, and the superiority of Western culture – Tahimik is showing the dangers of neocolonialism. While Americans no longer occupy the physical land, American values remain. 43
Tahimik shares his stance that the Philippines, like many nations once under colonial control,
may be independent, but are still controlled by their colonizer’s culture and values.
It is important to note that Perfumed Nightmare is filmed in English and also distributed
by an independent American film studio, Zoetrope (Ramones). Tahimik wants an American
audience to be able to access his film and see the consequences of the colonial rule. He wants the
white, America viewer, who likely still holds the same values of needing economic and
technological superiority, to confront their complicity with the neocolonialism that harbors
Filipinos and to acknowledge the ongoing ramifications of colonialism.
Performing Murder – Violence Meets Surrealism in Historical Reenactments
If Perfumed Nightmare incorporates a playful whimsy to a film with intense political
stakes, The Act of Killing does so tenfold. This is a unique example of documentary because
while Oppenheimer is credited and awarded as being the sole creator of this documentary, he had
two co-directors: Christine Cynn and a most importantly to the stakes of this chapter, an
Indonesian man credited as “Anonymous” (Armstrong). In an interview, the unidentified co- director and co-producer believed the importance of bringing the stories behind the mass executions wad necessary, but also stated the importance of having a hidden identity because
“the possibility of violence still exists” in Indonesian when speaking about the atrocities
(Armstrong). With the perspective and knowledge of this anonymous Indonesian citizen,
Oppenheimer tells the story of the Indonesian mass killings that took place between 1965 and
1966 using an experimental format on documentary film. The documentary gives us access to the
most lethal death squad of the North Sumatra Indonesian providence by filming the participants in an intimate exploration of their lives after the massacre and allowing the murderers themselves to reenact the horrific methods they used to murder as many as 2.5 million people. Oppenheimer 44
creates an example of storytelling that leaves the spectator wondering if the film is an
experimental documentary or a surrealist black comedy. I argue the film is both, sitting at the
intersection of a revealing portrait of Indonesia’s dark history and a captivating deep dive into
mass murders using the tenants of Surrealism. In The Act of Killing there is certainly an emphasis
on dream logic with poetic associations, the imagination, disturbing and violent imagery and a
visual attack on the viewer. The Act of Killing, like Perfumed Nightmare, contextualizes the
nightmarish colonial history of the nation while also confronting the spectator with shock and
discomfort until an acknowledgement of the colonial legacy is understood. Before analyzing the
historical context of colonialism in Indonesian and key scenes from the film, I must first point
out that this film is not directed by an Indonesian, but a white British-American based in
Denmark. Thus far, this chapter has been centered on the perspective of the colonized Other and
it may be unclear why The Act of Killing has been included into this chapter. But, I must argue
that despite a Western director, this film is still told from the perspective of the Other as the film
is planned and organized, and based off of the memories of Indonesians who participated in the
massacres. Also critically, the crew consisted of approximately 60 Indonesians, from assistant
directors to production managers to cinematographers, who had to remain uncredited for safety.
As already mentioned, an anonymous Indonesian is part of making all of the production and
directorial decisions behind the film. While this film has the input of a Western author, the film
is a project encouraged by the Indonesian perpetrators, an anonymous Indonesian co-director and anonymous crewmembers. Therefore, there is a strong sense of collaboration that incorporates a myriad of viewpoints apart from just Oppenheimer’s perspective, but one that showcases how within Indonesia there are differing opinions onto the ethics of the mass executions, ranging from sympathizers to criticizers. 45
Prior to looking at specific scenes, we must situate the film in its socio-historic context.
Political turmoil swept across Indonesian in the 1960s. With Dutch colonial rule ending just
about 20 years earlier, clashes between right-wing military and the left-wing communist party led to horrific violence and fighting in addition to the widespread poverty, hunger, bankruptcy and inflation (Berger). Indonesia’s President, President Sukarno, not only was a key figure in securing the nation’s independence from Dutch rule, but was the main influence for Indonesia becoming a nation over swept with Communists. In fact, with Indonesia’s approximate three million communists, “the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was the largest such party outside of a communist nation” (“The Act of Killing”). With a myriad of political groups and tensions high, violence broke out after a small PKI faction abducted and killed six military generals in
October 1965. Thus began an intense backlash to the communist party, with many stating the
PKI was “a mortal threat to the nation” (“The Act of Killing”). In the months to follow, the army
would work with local gangsters and anti-communist group to capture and kill anyone suspected
of having ties with the Communist Party, leading to an estimated 500,000 murders in the next six
months. While millions lost lives, the participants avoided consequence or prosecution, went
free, and as the film will show, are in fact celebrities in the towns across Indonesia with wealth
and fame. But, the Indonesian army is far from being the only ones culpable; a number of
Western government not only supported, but assisted the army, including the American
government under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. The United States saw the events in
Indonesian as necessary steps in the fight against the spread of global Communism, and
“declassified U.S. documents show that the U.S. government was aware of the Indonesian army's
actions and provided economic, military and technical assistance to the armed forces” (“The Act
of Killing”). While this history provides the background of The Act of Killing, the film fathers 46 explores the ongoing legacy of this colonial history and the ongoing ramifications of Western involvement in foreign nations.
Oppenheimer achieves a documentary that unveils the hidden secrets of Indonesian’s genocide but does so without the usual formula of a historical documentary consisting of interviews and archived footage. Rather, Oppenheimer meets with hardened criminals Anwar
Congo, an executioner, and Herman Koto, a gangster and paramilitary leader, and allows them to script the film and act out their crimes. Though discussed in the same chapter, this documentary in some differing methods from Perfumed Nightmare. While both incorporate a sense of playfulness, The Act of Killing is far more disturbing and violent, and actually is closer to Jean
Rouch’s The Mad Masters in tone and approach. The Act of Killing does not necessarily make the same use of the cinema verité style, but both films utilize the films’ subjects and citizens of the country as authors or part of the actual production crew in a highly collaborative, shared anthropology. Oppenheimer works closely with anonymous Indonesians to direct and produce the film, which puts their point of view in a central position. But, the actual Indonesian executers are also contributing a distinct perspective, even if they are not of the same perspective as
Oppenheimer and the crew. The protagonists of The Act of Killing are calling the shots– though their motivations are somewhat undermined, which will be discussed more later. In all these differences, Oppenheimer still makes use of a fantasy-like playfulness that shares a lightness in some scenes with those in Perfumed Nightmare. This highly political film becomes playful when it documents hardened criminals wearing silly costumes and planning their upcoming performances. The almost amusing scenes of the murderers getting makeup done and playing dress up for the reenactments is undercut when the murderers remind us of their past: they reminisce on the specifics of each murder, laugh at certain victims and completely defend their 47 past actions. Not only is there something viscerally unsettling about someone recreating trauma with pride, but there is an added strangeness of having such intimacy with killers – seeing their bedrooms and seeing them eating, bowling, doing daily activities – and getting to see them vulnerable, open and even goofy. There is a disturbing tonal discordance that arrives between the joy of the killers as they get excited about creating the film they believe will bring them glory for their supposed heroics of wiping out all of the Communists, and the constant reminder that these are murders who causally walk the streets still today. Indeed the manner in which the killers speak is gruesome and gory, but so too is the fact that the perpetrators’ discussions around violence and murder are so flippant.
While the reenactments of crimes using fantastical costumes and set designs from the perspective of the criminals themselves is strange and unsettling, this experimental mode of documentary is not inherently surrealistic. The surrealism of The Act of Killing appears in unconventional methods both thematically and experientially. In chapter one, I discussed how
Surrealism used within the documentary genre often lays siege to our standard expectations of what we expect as viewers from this familiar genre. The Act of Killing makes use of this duping of our expectation by having grandiose reenactments of historical events, specifically horrid and brutal murders, in a surprisingly theatrical manner. Our expectations of how we think the film should approach participants of a massacre are undermined when the viewer is given an intimate relationship with the murders, providing an eerie point of connection. Here, the film incorporates the surrealistic tendency to disrupt the viewer’s sense of the real versus the irrational and the expected versus the uncanny combines with the provocative and violent imagery of the films to make an uncomfortable, shocking viewing experience. Along with surrealism’s provocative engagement of the viewer, the film does so through some of the main thematic elements of 48
Surrealism, including images of one’s dreams or nightmares and a focus on the interior
imagination. Surrealists hailed the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind and experiences
free from the “reign of logic” (Breton 6). Surrealists had an inclination for exploring the
subconscious mind, including dreams and nightmares, and depicting the interior externally, a
tendency that often unveiled hidden truths, which is perhaps why Oppenheimer depicts Anwar’s
nightmare. The scene begins with Anwar explaining that in his dreams, he sees ghosts who come
to him with threatening voices. He reflects on if these voices are from those her killed in 1965.
The gravity of the situation is undercut by a person, who is to represent the ghost of Anwar’s
subconscious, dressed in a costume that is over-the-top kitschy with a feather headdress, and
black and white costume makeup standing next to him.
Figure 4: The film depicts Anwar's personal subconscious nightmares. Over time, he begins to face his guilt with his involvement in the mass executions.
The film cuts to the filming of the nightmare in which we see a medium close-up on Anwar as he sleeps with smoke slowly starting to appear around him. The person dressed as a ghost appears, laughing maniacally and slowing approaching Anwar in a prowling manner. The costume 49 reminiscent of a bad Halloween costume mixed with the poor acting makes the scene seem completely goofy, even ridiculous. The light tone from the silly scene is upended when Anwar remarks that he thought he killed the ghost. While the dream sequence is fabricated and foolish, we are still granted access to Anwar’s interior. The audience is clued into understanding a sense of Anwar’s guilt – that is later admitted at the end of the film – and we are granted intimate access into his hidden subconscious by seeing his dreams play out for us even if those dreams are poorly acted. The film’s ability to unlock the subconscious and depict the strange visions of our minds, of dreams and nightmares was a focus of the surrealists. While this activity was liberating for many surrealists, the journey into the locked interior may be more so a cathartic activity for
Anwar and the other murderers. It is indicated that the men have never broadcasted their memories from the massacres, so unleashing their darkest memories may be freeing. Throughout the film, Anwar and his colleagues engage in discussions about their dreams, their memories and their imaginations. The men’s proclivity to discuss their interior, subverted nightmares in relation to their past and act it out is reminiscent of the fiction surreal films, indicating that there is a connection between Surrealism and confronting one’s horrific past. Here, the use of oneiric surrealism is a tool for unearthing and processing the traumatic past and forces Anwar to rethink his initial support of the mass executions. Anwar’s processing of the past unfolds like a therapy session where he can come to face his locked interior. Perhaps these men cannot face the evils of their past without using Surrealism. It is Surrealism that allows the men a conduit to finally admit fault, guilt and responsibility. While we see these men engaging in surreal activity, it is important to note that the film is not just helping these men confront their our guilt – it is helping the spectator understand our own guilt. 50
Much like Bunuel’s Land without Bread, Oppenheimer’s film almost immediately faced backlash and condemnation into the questionable ethics of the film. While the film received some rave reviews and awards from critics, Oppenheimer was also condemned intensely. There is no denying that Oppenheimer pushes an agenda the film’s subjects are not privy to knowing.
While the subjects think they are working with Oppenheimer, the unfolding of the film evidently suggests that Oppenheimer is using them for his own goals. This duping of the film’s subjects is what Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jill Godmilow calls an “illusion of learning and caring”
(Godmilow). Godmilow rightfully critics the film’s ethical dilemmas on multiple fronts: how the film wants a “cozy relationship we are urged to enjoy with the killers,” the unfairness to the actors that are now forever known for their crimes, Oppenheimer’s compromising of audience trust by forcing our allegiance to Anwar and much else. While the two directors have different definitions for what constitutes ethical documentary filmmaking and respect for international audiences, the point Godmilow makes that is indisputable is that despite the supposed confrontation of Western audiences, “there is no mention in Oppenheimer’s film of the role of the U.S. in the Indonesian massacres, or of the bigger Cold War drama” (Godmilow). While the film certainly does not make the audience feel remotely comfortable after viewing, it could be said that the film absolves the direct incrimination of all that were complicit.
Like Perfumed Nightmare, the viewing experience of The Act of Killing is purposefully shocking. Both filmmakers use the surrealistic tendency of combining the familiar with the strange to create an uncomfortable viewing experience. In chapter one, I discussed how there is something about surrealism that is intrinsically violent and aggressive. I argue it is this aggressiveness and violent nature that makes surrealism so adept at exploring tragedy, specifically the profound colonial violence that caused decades of death, pain and misery. 51
Confronting the long, painful history of colonialism in the Philippines and Indonesia is not an undemanding challenge, and a formulaic documentary on such topics would have perhaps lacked in the shock-value and thus, the political impact of such as film, which is so essential to surrealist documentary. There is a tradition of surrealists using shock to aggressively advocate a perspective and to confront that audience into audience; it is exactly that horrid discomfort throughout the film that urges the viewer to fight against injustices. In fact, the film has put extreme pressure on American and English officials to acknowledge their part. Historian and
Director Bradley Simpson has even written about the film’s ability to spark debates amongst
Indonesians about holding involved parties accountable (Simpson). And though the United States and Western governments have not atoned for their role in the massacre, it is still noteworthy that a Western audience is not only learning about the genocide through the film, but learning about Western involvement – a feat which should not be overlooked. While many filmmakers and critics have lashed back against the film’s questionable ethics, and rightfully so, it must be noted that surrealism is a movement rooted in controversy and provocativeness. Surrealism works in tandem with offensiveness to force the spectator into an active role and engage, or in these cases, inspire political action. Surrealism, with all of its provocativeness and shock, makes it the perfect mode for unsettling the viewer into understanding the true magnitude of the suffering caused from colonialism.
Viewing Violence: Surrealism Shapes Spectatorship
As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the two postcolonial films analyzed here are not part of the ‘historic’ path of surrealism as defined by Martin and are not made by canonically surreal filmmakers. But they are part of the eternal path of surrealism that continues primary surrealist principles: spirit of revolt, shock and confrontation, subversion of realism, a 52 focus on the unconscious (dreams and fantasies). The documentaries are certainly creative, experimental, and even playful. However, I argue there is something about the viewing experience with the discordance of expectations that disrupts the typical viewing habits and the provocativeness that confronts our very security as spectators. The strangeness of the documentaries, the casting off of the conventional methods of documentary film, disrupts our typical habits of viewing films and puts us into a position where we must be responsive to the direct address of the films. The spectator is put into a position to squirm from not only the violence of the graphic images of death and murder, but the metaphorical finger pointing at the viewer to bluntly point out our complicity in the long colonial history of developing nations.
Surrealism lends itself to the postcolonial films because the built-in provocativeness of the movement, and its ability to challenge viewers is a tool for not only exploring the destruction of colonialism but for confrontation – demanding an acknowledgement of fault.
Both Tahimik and Oppenheimer strictly confront a Western viewer. The accessibility to
English speakers was certainly not an accident; it was a strategy to attract Westerners to see how their decades of imperialism and colonialism have afflicted the Third World nations they left in chaos and destitution. As Kidlat confronts the American cultural colonialism still cause widespread disillusionment in the Philippines, Oppenheimer also confronts Americans, and our hand in assisting these killers, sweeping their crimes under the rug and allowing violence to kill millions for the nation’s own interests. While watching these films, it can be difficult not to feel responsible at some level, not to feel some guilt and remorse for the despair of these people. That is precisely to power of Surrealism. The surrealism mode removes the distance between the spectator and what we are witnessing, making us realize the ongoing legacy of colonialism.
Surrealism combines with the fight against neocolonialism so that spectators may realize the 53 legacy of the colonial past on non-Western victims and Westerns may acknowledge their complicity in the wrongdoings on those colonized people and begin to right them.
54
CHAPTER THREE
Memory and Trauma: The Introspective Power of Surrealist Documentary in Dick
Johnson is Dead and Waltz with Bashir
“Real life is often much more fascinating than what you can make up.”
-Kirsten Johnson, Dick Johnson is Dead
“Can’t films be therapeutic?”
-Boaz Rein, Waltz with Bashir
Throughout these chapters, I have explored how surrealist documentary can be political, controversial, emotional and challenging, often all at once. In chapter one, I aimed to show how surrealism, when joined with ethnographic documentary, has the ability to undercut the conventions and supposed truth of documentary, specifically travelogues. This tactic of subverting documentary conventions is in the pursuit of social critique and for inciting sociopolitical action to rebel against ruling institutions and colonial attitudes. In chapter two, I aimed to show how surrealism, when combined with documentaries made by, or in collaboration with, non-Western filmmakers, can enhance the perspective of those who are still reeling from a colonial past and give those victims of colonialism a mode to express the ongoing ramifications of that imperial rule. In all of these cases, surrealism, with its dedication to the irrational, the unexpected and the shocking, lends itself to being a conduit for revolting against society and stimulating a cultural reawakening or a shift in perspective. But most of all, the previous two 55 chapters and the films discussed have shown the greatest ability of surreal documentary — its ability to confront the audience.
I hope to show in this chapter how surrealism, when combined with the documentary genre, has the power to confront personal trauma. The first two chapters already touched on surrealism’s ability to work through traumatic events when those films discussed the pain inflicted on innocent victims by the ruling powers and colonialists, alike. The previous films as also show surrealism’s ability confront the mostly white, Western spectators complacent and complicit in inflicting trauma. However, instead of reflecting outward on wide-scale social issues and investing in larger sociopolitical stakes, this chapter will instead turn inward. This chapter will focus on surreal documentaries, Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), which assist the respective filmmakers in their personal confrontation of their own traumatic past or pressing traumatic events, and how these films help the filmmaker reflect on, accept and heal that trauma. In short, this chapter will explore the specific ways surreal documentaries can be wholly therapeutic.
Few experiences are more traumatic than the death of a loved one and the involvement in a horrific war. For the filmmakers discussed in this chapter, making documentaries became an outlet for exploring their traumatic experiences, and for making strides to come to grips and heal from it. First, I will analyze and discuss Johnson’s documentary Dick Johnson is Dead (2020), a creative blend of comedy and candid intimacy in which Johnson imaginatively stages the different ways her elderly father could die as they face the inevitability of his morality. By turning to narrowing on key scenes between Johnson and her father, Richard “Dick” Johnson, we will not only see how this film is a necessary aid for them both, but that the film makes use of surreal elements including dreamscapes, for this curative process. Then, I will turn to Israeli 56 filmmaker, Ari Folman’s, animated war documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008) that explores his recent traumatic past with the 1982 Lebanon War and his missing memories from his service as a solider.
It is important to acknowledge here how different these two films are in both content and style. Dick Johnson is Dead explores familial death utilizing both artificial staged sequences of death scenes and observational documentary camerawork as it follow Kirstin and Dick throughout the filmmaking process. In contrast, Waltz with Bashir is an animated film about the horrific 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre that occurred in Lebanon in which a Christian faction called the Phalange kills hundreds to thousands of mostly civilian Palestinians and Lebanese
Shiites. The film follows Folman as he attempts to process his trauma after witnessing, and realizing his complicity with, the massacre. From the outset, the stylistic differences are starkly apparent. However, the films both utilize surrealism in similar methods and operate with the same emotional register, which will become more noticeable in the upcoming scene analysis. I will acknowledge here that little has been written about Johnson or Folman’s films in terms of surrealism discourse. Neither Kirstin Johnson nor Ari Folman are self-proclaimed surrealists, or even filmmakers that are notably avant-garde, but these films in question have an undeniable surrealism – and I argue it is only with that surrealism that the filmmakers are able to show the interior traumas they are actively processing as the film unfolds.
Let’s Play Dead: Surrealism in Dick Johnson is Dead
Dick Johnson is not dead, but one day he will be, and that is exactly the terrible truth
Kirsten Johnson confronts in her documentary Dick Johnson is Dead. The film, which has met with critical acclaim since its release at Sundance Film Festival in 2020, documents Johnson and 57
her 88-year-old father beginning in 2017 when he was first diagnosed with dementia. It is a
difficult task to watch a parent die, and one Johnson is already familiar with experiencing.
Johnson has already had to experience the hardships of losing her mother, Katie-Jo, from
Alzheimer’s just years prior, an experience which is intimately explored in her 2016 documentary Cameraperson that assembles footage from her career as a cinematographer working on other films combined with home footage to create a tribute to her late mother.
Johnson states at the opening of Dick Johnson is Dead that she regrets not filming her mother often enough, which has fueled her motivations to create the portrait of her father. From the very outset, the film cues the spectator into understanding Johnson’s motivations to use this film to simultaneously overcome and prepare for the trauma of losing a parent.
The documentary takes the viewer through the journey of Dick’s retirement from his psychology practice as he packs both his office and home in Seattle to move in with Kirsten in
New York City as his health and memory declines. As the film progresses, the two share special moments. They sort through his possessions in her childhood home that has just been sold and reminisce about his youth and how he met his wife. But within these moments, Johnson already begins dreading what is to come: that her father will slowly lose his capacity to listen and remember her until he dies. It is "the beginning of his disappearance,” as she states it in her intimate and vulnerable voiceover narration. With this painful certainty lingering at the forefront of her mind, Johnson and her good-humored father begin lavish and surreal stagings of the many ways her father could possibly die: for instance, an air conditioner falling on his head as he walks along a city street; breaking a hip and falling down the stairs; or a cut to the carotid artery. In the
elaborate enactment of death, Johnson begins to grapple with her anxieties of losing him and
reflecting on the uncertainty of the next few years, as over and over again Dick “dies” before the 58
camera, before popping right up and reminding everyone that for now, the Johnsons have alluded
death.
From the outset, there is something explicably surreal about repeatedly reenacting death in a future tense. Like Buñuel and Rouch before her, Johnson begins to blur the lines between the truthful reality that viewers have come to expect of a documentary film with the fictionalized
deaths of her father. Michael Richardson once wrote, in The Dedalus Book of Surrealism: the
myth of the world, “Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor
does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself” (275).
Johnson is not subverting reality here; she cannot because death is inevitable, but it is through
these repeated stagings that Johnson and her father are able to explore the reality of his death in
different ways and then emotionally come to grips with that reality.
One of the most surreal aspects of the film consists in how Johnson seems to be tricking
the viewer as the film presents Dick’s death without forewarning. The film constantly oscillates
between the different registers of reality and fiction, often without signaling which register the
film is currently operating within prior, so when we are presented with a scene in which Dick
dies, there is a visceral feeling of shock before he wakes up and we realize he is in fact not dead.
Johnson constantly puts the truthful reality of the situation into question when least expected, a
tenet of surreal documentary. Her playful trickery is established right from the outset in the
opening two scenes.
The film opens with a candid vérité camera as we see Dick playing with his grandkids, sitting and watching as they swing back and forth on a rope in what looks to be a barn. From the
very outset, the scene establishes a jovial mood, one of nostalgia for childhood fun as Dick
laughs with his daughter and her kids. The theme of death is already introduced when one of the 59 kids talks about almost dying from the swing and that he “loved dying.” As the scene continues,
Dick stands from his seated position on the side of the barn, needing help from one of the children, before going to push his grandson who is swinging on the rope. In the long shot, we see
Dick slowly shuffle toward the rope, but more importantly, we become immediately aware of the hay straw littering the barn floor that Dick steps on as he walks. As viewers knowing this film is about her father dying, we cannot help but be acutely aware of the potential of him dying here and feel anxious for that. Kirsten confirms our anxieties when she tells her father to be careful of the straw from behind the camera. To highlight the precariousness of the situation the film cuts to a shot of Dick’s feet sliding on the straw, truncating his legs from his body and emphasizing the potential for an accident. Just as we think the scene may end safely, Dick falls with a heavy thud and we suspect the worst. Our fears of injury are relinquished when Dick begins laughing at his fall and confirming that Kirsten caught his tumble on the film. His grandchildren help him up and continue their play, signaling that he is in fact alive and well. While the spectator feared we may be seeing a death here, this scene was instead a documentation of a coincidental accident that happens in everyday life, letting us know we are still within the register of realism.
The film immediately cuts to the next scene in which Dick is walking down a city street.
In a medium shot, Dick is shown smiling and
carrying a cardboard box in his arms. The film
cuts to a wide shot now from Dick’s profile as he
still walks, but suddenly a large air conditioner
falls from the top of the frame and crushes his Figure 5: Dick Johnson is "dead" after an air- conditioning machine falls on his head head. In an aerial long shot, Dick is laying still on the city street with broken machine parts scattered around. The camera slowly tracks out, but 60
lingers on this image, allowing us to soak in the fact he is not moving and that given the velocity
of the impact, Dick should very well be dead. Eventually Dick slowly sits up, again,
relinquishing any suspicions of death. Upon first watch, the unsuspecting fall of the air
conditioner and the crash of the machine hitting Dick’s dead causes a jump scare and we cannot
help but be fearful for his safety. From the first scene, we suspect Dick to immediately begin
laughing as he did when he fell with his grandkids, but when the film lingers for several seconds
without movement, the question of his injury certainly starts to creep in with a slow creep of
fear. Like scene one, all is well for her father, but Johnson did not signal that we moved from the
candid camera to one of fictionalization. In this case, we can understand that from the outset and
through the reminder of the film, Johnson negates making any sort of distinctions between
moving into fact and fiction or reality and fantasy. It is crucial to our understanding of this film
as surreal documentary that we are reminded that such a blurring of fiction from nonfiction is a
key tenet of all surrealist documentaries. It is precisely these moments in which we are unsure of
which we are operating that causes shock and suspense, an unquestionable pillar of surreal
cinema.
When discussing the surrealism of the film, it is of course important to discuss the actual
dream and fantasy sequences, these specific moments when we see a sequence of what Dick
envisions in his mind as his ideal heaven, as his ideal afterlife. Throughout the film, there are
these magical, glitter-strewn scenes set in heaven where Dick imagines a fantasy in which he
receives what he desires most: a reunion with his late-wife and a fixed pair of feet. At the 30- minute mark in the film, there is a scene where Johnson asks her father what he would wish for if he has the gift of a wish. He previously said that his feet, that are deformed and toeless, always were an insecurity so he would wish for feet with ordinary toes, but then he says he wishes for 61
“mom not to die.” The film immediately cuts to a heaven space that consists of a brilliant blue and white sky backdrop with glitter and clouds floating around the frame and a choir sings in an angelic harmony undercutting the realism of the documentary as we enter the fantastical landscape in which Dick is receiving a pedicure from Jesus himself.
Figure 6: Dick Johnson is in heaven as he receives a new pair of feet and a reunion with his late-wife. As glitter slowly falls from the skies, Dick sits comfortably in a salon chair. A close-up on his feet show the deformed feet that have been a point of personal embarrassment for Dick. The film cuts to a medium close-up of Dick’s face, and the low positioning of the camera puts the frame at feet-level, looking up at Dick’s face as he looks down at his feet. An expression of surprise slowly overtakes his features until we cut back to his feet, seeing that he now has two perfectly mundane pair. Dick rejoices his perfected feet until we cut to a shot of shaking pompoms that move apart to reveal Dick’s greatest wish: his wife, specifically a figure wearing an enlarged cardboard cutout of Katie-Jo’s face. Again, the film cuts to a reaction shot of Dick’s overwrought joy. Not only does this scene undercut the realism of the film, but it provides a dreamscape in which we can see what Dick dreams about most. André Breton has even described surrealism as a sort of fairytale for adults in his first Manifesto of Surrealism: 62
Charming as the stories may be, adults would consider it demeaning to nourish themselves on fairy-tales, and I would agree they are not suitable for them. The web of adorable unrealities requires to be spun a little more finely, the older we get, and one is left waiting for that species of spider...But the faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for the extravagant, are devices, which we will never summon in vain. There are stories to be written for grown-ups, stories as yet quite rare (11-12).
These heaven scenes are an immersion into a blissful fairytale for Dick and Kirsten; it is what they desire most. For these moments of heaven, the viewer is taken into a fantastical heaven landscape from Dick’s dreams, but we are also privy to his psyche by learning about his innermost wishes. Most of the films I have discussed in this thesis have been violent and gory and staunchly political, and while, in Johnson’s film, there is certainly surreal shock in play that arrives from the violent death scenes, there is also a clear innocence and child-like naiveté
apparent in these sequences. In “The Artificial Night,” Adrian Martin makes a case for
surrealism as innocent and even playful. While applying the term “innocent” to surrealism,
which is often “blackly humorous and full of social rage” it is also “light, airy and supremely
comic” (195). This scene, with the golden bathtub for Dick’s feet and lavish salon chair and gold
glittered pieces falling slowly around the space, there is unquestionably a lightness at play. This
innocence, as Martin argues, comes from the “imaginative liberation” and leans closer towards
Breton’s definition of surrealism with its “provocative openness to poetry” (195). These heaven
scenes offer a special moment where death is not a pressing issue and one can just relish the joy
of a child-like dream. These scenes liberate Dick, and also the viewers, from the reality of his
looming death and instead unabashedly indulges in pure, endearing imagination.
So far, I have discussed the film’s shock, playful suspense and innocent dreamscapes, but
it is also necessary to take a moment to discuss the film’s humor. This is a comical film in many 63
respects, and Johnson and her father are keen to that humor. While the film is not laugh-out-loud
funny with one-liners, the film makes use of two kinds of humor intimately tied to the surrealist
tradition: black humor and slapstick humor. As a film that centers on recreating death again and
again, there is absolutely a dark sense of humor at play from both Johnson, who is planning these
extravagant death scenes, and her father, who has agreed participate. In his essay “Black
humour,” Michael Richardson discusses the surrealist tradition of incorporating dark, harshly
cynical comedy. Richardson writes, “In black humour, more than anything, death–and perhaps
life itself–is a trick that is played on us all (212). As noted earlier in the scenes in which Johnson
tricks us into questioning whether her father is injured, death itself is used as a joke, a prank on
the viewer. Scattered throughout the film are bleakly funny moments, from Kirsten perfecting
her father’s death pose after he has “fallen” down the stairs to the beach scene in Lisbon where
Dick’s grandchildren fully bury him in sand as he sleeps and no one on the crowded seems to
notice the man fully covered in a sand mound. The black humor of the film is perhaps most
noticeable in the scene in which Dick is speaking to a stuntman. The stuntman bluntly states,
“I'm good at running over with a car. You know, I'm the bum you grab from the street... and throw in front of a bus” while Dick just nods in agreement. The stuntman then proceeds to excitedly talk about all of the creative ways they can kill Dick in this office death scene. This fixation on death is key to black humor, but so too is the giddiness and excitement from such a bleak action. This exhilaration at faking death aligns with Richardson’s point that black humor is often a “joy in the face of death… a laughter that affirm(s) one’s own existence while recognizing its fragility and cruelty” (211). The Johnsons are keenly aware of Dick’s nearing death, and yet still happily and candidly discuss it within these scenes. The lavishness of the 64
death scenes make a lightness of a bleak, dower situation, which is precisely one of the aims of
dark humor.
One of the most surrealist aspects in Johnson’s film is the full acceptance of the absurdity
of the staged deaths. The Johnsons dive headfirst into breaking the rigid ways in which humans
usually approach or discuss death and render it both endearing and ridiculous. The farcical and
exaggerated physical comedy from the staged deaths is reminiscent of slapstick comedy in
Buster Keaton films, a known fan favorite of the Surrealist Group. In his essay “Buñuel, Bataille,
and Buster, or, the surrealist life of things,” James Lastra discusses how the proto-surrealism of
Keaton’s film emerges from “their joyful embrace of absurdity and their correlated rejection of
the arbitrary rigidities of the social world. It is also their rejection of the elevated and poetic in
favour of the base and prosaic” (Lastra 24). Dick Johnson is Dead without hesitation discusses
death openly and intimately, rejecting the social “rigidities” that often make death an
undiscussable topic. The Johnsons do not just talk about death, but plan and organize it with
scenes that certainly fit the definition of “absurd.” It is also notable that Lastra writes that
Keaton’s film did not make any pretenses of being highbrow, but preferred the improper. I argue that the fixation of Dick’s deformed feet certainly plays into the film’s stakes in the inappropriate. In fact, the whole film could be read as inappropriate if one cannot see the good-
natured humor of Kirsten and her father as the film provides them an opportunity to spend time
together, and love each other, before he dies.
Although it has been excluded from discussions of surrealism, this film makes use of a surrealist approach that provides Kirsten and her father with an outlet for coming to grips with
his nearing death. In this unconventional documentary, surrealism acts as a method of therapy through which they can prepare and even manage that death. In an interview with LA Times 65 reporter, Amy Kaufman, Kirsten states, “I needed the movie to help me cope with this. How devastating it is to be human. To love is to have to experience this wrenching, horrible thing…
Acknowledging some of this stuff allows you to embrace pleasure” (Kaufman). The filmmaker herself admits the film was therapeutic, but I argue that the film only gains this power through surrealism, which transforms documentary into a coping mechanism. Over the last few chapters,
I have made a point of arguing for surrealism’s special ability to shock and confront. Often, that shock and confrontation is used for political or social justice purposes, but here it is a personal confrontation of one’s inner fears; it is a self-reflexive confrontation, as Johnson must face what truly haunts her: the death of her one remaining parent. Johnson is able to do that confrontation only with surrealist humor, surrealist innocence and surrealist shock. Johnson, with these fantasy and dream landscapes, can imagine her father in heaven without the reality of him actually being dead. It is through surrealism’s ability to make one explore life in a new perspective that grants her this critically important therapy.
Dreaming the Past: A Waltz with Bashir’s Uncanny Surrealism Death is certainly traumatic, especially if one has a hand in such a tragedy and must live with the consequences of the lasting guilt. That is exactly the traumatic truth that Israeli filmmaker explores in his animated war documentary A Waltz with Bashir as he attempts to navigate his fickle memory that eventually reveals his participation in a massacre as a 19-year- old solider during the First Lebanon War. Folman was an infantry solider stationed in Beirut during the 1982 war with Lebanon when he witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre that killed thousands. Despite the severity of the experience, he cannot remember it, and it is not until he talks to an old friend from the military that he realizes his memories of that time have been suppressed. Over the course of the film, Folman seeks out his old comrades also in Beirut to help 66
him unlock his past and come to terms with the trauma he experienced over 20 years before.
What transpires is a highly personal journey of reconstruction and confrontation in which the
film, and the process of making the film, becomes a therapeutic experience. Similar to Dick
Johnson is Dead, the viewer is given intimate access to the filmmakers’ mental processes of
processing and coping.
From the outset, the use of animation makes the film an atypical example of documentary
and starkly dissimilar to Dick Johnson is Dead’s live-action footage. While animation seems like
an unsuitable choice for a war documentary, animation here is a critical tool for exploring the
incomplete jigsaw puzzle of Folman’s past as well as depicting the emotional mission of trying
to uncover and reenact the undocumented past. While the surrealism of the animation will be
discussed in-depth later, it is notable that right from the outset the film looks and feels dreamlike,
but is still tonally dark; the animation is far from the bright, colorful fairytale feel of a Disney
animation. Folman’s choice to use a combination of Flash and CG gives the film a sort of
graphic novel aesthetic, so the figures and landscapes look more like flat, one-dimensional cutouts. The film unfolds with typical documentary interviews and reenactments, but instead of using live footage, Folman and his director of animation, Yoni Goodman, turns those moments
into animation, so there is still an investment in realism within the lack of live-action footage.
The animation also uses bold colors, especially in the moments of reenacting past memories; the
palette of strong reds and yellows set off the dream sequences from the more muted depictions of
life during the war. But the film still incorporates shadow-play and low-key lighting to set the dark mood that runs through the entire duration. The film, with its stakes in grappling with intense guilt, pain and trauma, is tonally dark and visually moody. The combination of standard documentary conventions of interviews and reenactments with the dreamlike color and flat 67
characters makes the film oscillates between realism and surrealism. In short, the animated
documentary meshes dream and reality as Ari Folman goes on a personal odyssey into his lost memories and the horrors of war.
Early on, the film establishes its motivations as a type of therapy for the traumatized. In a scene where Folman speaks to his old friend from the military, Boaz Rein, they discuss how
Boaz has experienced paralyzing nightmares from their time of soldiers. Rein details the
nightmares he has witnessed in which a pack of 26 dogs runs to his apartment to kill him. He
believes the dreams, which he has experienced for two and a half years, are as a result of the 26
dogs he was forced to liquidate in
Palestinian villages during the war. The
men discuss Boaz’s guilt from killing
these animals and when Folman asks
why Boaz called him instead of a
mental health professional because he is
Figure 7: A sequence shows Boaz's nightmare of 26 dogs chasing “just a filmmaker,” Boaz responds with him down through the streets. the question that becomes a catalyst for
the rest of the film: “Can’t films be therapeutic?” he asks. While Boaz recalls these recurring
nightmares and memories from the war with painstaking detail, Folman admits he has no
recollection, no flashbacks or dreams of any kind, of any of that time. For the remainder of the
film, Folman begins a mission to understand and heal the trauma that has prevented his memory
from the massacre.
Dreams are critically important moments in Waltz with Bahir. Not only are Boaz’s
dreams the catalyst for Folman’s exploration and realization that he is missing memories, but the 68
film takes us into the content of Folman’s dreams. It is in these dreamscapes where Folman’s subconscious guilt and remorse is explored most in-depth. It is exactly dreams, and nightmares, that help Folman rediscover his past and overcome his bottled trauma.
Despite the lengthy dreamscape scenes, little has been written about in terms of this film being a surreal documentary. Surrealism in a crucial aspect of the film as it is precisely these dreamscapes, which are perhaps the most recognizable and canonical facet of surreal cinema, that allows Folman to face his trauma. It is in these surreal dreamscapes that Folman is able to explore the memories, or what he believes are memories, from his traumatic past. But more so than just intimately detailed dreamscapes, the film explores the imagination, specifically how the imagination has shaped and distorted certain recollections of memory. Throughout the film, we are shown Folman’s flashbacks as he attempts to piece together his past from testimonials of his military friends. The more he learns, the more his flashbacks differ each reenactment. The first flashback occurs right after Folman leaves the bar from his meeting with Boaz. He recalls floating nude in an ocean when a yellow flare lights up the night sky and dowses the sea in a yellow glare. He recalls two men with him, Carmi and another comrade he cannot recognize, and they dress before heading to the street just outside of where the massacre took place.
Figure 8: The film repeats Ari's "dream" of seeing flares falling from the sky in Beruit 69
The audience is shown this supposed flashback numerous times as Folman creates a timeline of
his experience in Beirut. Eventually, in the closing scenes, we discover Ari Folman was not in
the ocean at all, but instead he was on the roof of a building in Beirut. We discover he assisted in
lighting the yellow flares flying across the sky so the Christian Phalangists can see in the dark
night to begin their killings of thousands of Palestinian civilian men women, and children in
retaliation for the assassination of the Lebanon President-elect and Phalange, Bashir Gemayel. It was the guilt that prevented Folman access to this memory and his subconscious imagination that created the false flashback that is reenacted. The entirety of the film is a recreation of Folman’s military experience, a technique of confronting trauma that will be explored further later in this section. These repeated flashbacks and how they change over the course of the film provide
“another layer of reenactment,” one that specifically reenacts the dreamscape and imagination
(Kraemer 61). The reenactment of these moments showcases in filmic representation how
Folman’s dreams and imagination fill in gaps with falsity where real memory is not persisting through the trauma. The viewer is privy to Folman’s imagination at work in a surreal method of documenting interior subconscious thought and processes as they unfold during the film. In these moments, the viewer is granted imitate access to Folman’s missing memories and discovers how his subconscious has altered those memories in his traumatized mind. The surreality of the film is not just from the sheer fact the film has dream and nightmare scenes, but because the film as a whole unfolds like the mental workings of the imagination and subconscious.
I cannot write about Waltz with Bashir without talking about Folman’s choice to use animation instead of live-action video. Animation is an unusual choice for a documentary about war, albeit for documentary in general, but Folman’s choice to go with animation is, I argue, critical to the film’s stakes in rediscovering memories of the past and also the surrealism of the 70
film. Waltz with Bashir is not the first animated documentary as Joseph Kraemer notes in his
essay, “Waltz with Bashir (2008): Trauma and Representation in the Animated Documentary.”
Kraemer lists animated documentaries that proceeded Folman’s film, including Disney’s Victory
through Air Power (1943), John and Faith Hubley’s feature Of Stars and Men (1964), and Chris
Landreth’s Academy Award–winning short Ryan (2004), but highlights The Sinking of the
Lusitania (1918) by Winsor McCay as the pioneer of this novel genre of documentary (59).
Kramer notes these earlier documentaries paved the way for Waltz with Bashir, so there is a
precedent for Folman’s “willful blurring of once strict borders between genres and techniques”
in a film as emotionally charged as a war film about a massacre, post-traumatic stress and
memory (57). While the animation certainly helps to blur this distinction between fiction and
documentary, the animation also works in other critical ways: it enables the recreation of the un-
documentable past and heightens the uncanniness of the film.
Earlier I discussed the repetition of the flashbacks in those key scenes that unlock
Folman’s memory of the massacre; those reenactments are critical to documenting history only
captured and saved in mind, but also the notion of continued repetition presents a surreal
connection to Sigmund Freud’s writings on the uncanny. Not only is Freud a renowned inspiration for the Surrealist Group, but the concept of the uncanny, the unfamiliar in tension with the familiar, has critical stakes in surreal cinema, especially when it relates to repetition.
Many scholars have written about the repetition of the flashbacks as a “reenactment,” specifically Bill Nichols in his essay, “Documentary Reenactment and the Phantasmatic
Subject,” analyzes how the animated reenactments unlocks a crucial novel way to recreate and depict trauma. He writes, “the reenactment forfeits its indexical bond to the original event. It draws its fantasmatic power from this very fact . . . as the very act of retrieval generates a new 71 object and a new pleasure. The viewer experiences the uncanny sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique.” (Nichols 73–80). When he states, “historically unique,” Nichols makes the critical point that the scenes Folman and his friends discuss in the film – from invading Beirut to the bombings to lighting the flares during the massacre – were not documented real-time and therefore, there is no way to document this recent traumatic past without the tool of reenactment. It is only with the function of animation that there can be filmic representation and sharable documentation of what actually occurred in Beirut without a photographic archive. Nichols also makes the key note that there is subjectivity involved when experiencing trauma. Just as Folman’s flashbacks to floating in the sea while flares flew through the sky were false memories, the reenactments and its separation, yet similarity, from the original event seem to mirror how memory works when in the face of trauma. The animation is able to depict the tragedy of trauma, but also can copy the strange ways trauma is processed in the human subjectivity.
An important takeaway from Nichols’ argument is his use of the word “uncanny,” which undoubtedly brings up the teachings of Freud in his 1919 work, The Uncanny. In his work, Freud discusses how compulsive repetitions, “the constant recurrence of the same thing” can create an uncanny effect in which a feeling of fear and dread can be produced (142). He writes, “Anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny” (145). In Waltz with Bashir, the viewer is re-experiencing these flashback moments with a compulsive repetition as Folman, with a sense of obsession, attempts to resolve his trauma. Not only do we experience these scenes with the flares numerous times, with each repetition instigating a feeling of anxiety and disorientation from the repetition, but these false memories also relate to Freud’s argument that the uncanny emerges from when the repressed past is unveiled and unlocked later in life. 72
Freud writes, “As soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old,
discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny” (154). He even concludes that the
uncanny effect can be described as, “the uncanny element we know from experience arises either
when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs
that have been surmounted appear to be once again confirmed,” (155). When Folman finally
hears testimonials of the massacre from fellow comrades, his memory unlocks. There is an
uncanny, disorienting experience, even as a viewer, when the truth emerges of how the past
unfolded in actuality after bearing witness to what we, and Folman, thoughts was the past
multiple times in these flashback moments. Here, the uncanniness produces surreal affects of
discomfort, shock, uncertainty and disruption of comfortable complacency as a spectator.
While Folman’s repressed memory from the war is vital, there is also another repressed
trauma he experienced long ago that was brought to light again: the trauma of the Holocaust. In a
deeply intimate moment towards the end of the film, Folman meets with his therapist friend to
discuss his rediscovered memories from the massacre. When Folman states his disbelief at
unlocking the memories, his friend explains that it was his guilt as a perpetuator: “Unwillingly,
you took on the role of the Nazi. You were there firing flares, but you didn't carry out the
massacre.” The massacre Folman experienced as a 19-year-old soldier was not his first as his family had been prisoners in Auschwitz during World War II. Here, there was an uncanny effect produced as Folman connects his war and massacre to the one his parent’s experienced and he repressed. His friend, Ori Sivan, that tells Folman his interest in massacres occurred long before the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut and that his “interest in those camps is actually about the ‘other camps.’” Sivan says the compulsive need to resolve the trauma has been with
Folman since he was six when he survived the massacre and camps. There is an uncanny freight 73 that is felt when repressed history repeats itself. There is an eerie feeling that stems from of discovering that Folman’s past has deep, subterranean layers of trauma that have spanned over decades.
While animation is critically important to the surrealism of the film, it is important to discuss the one moment when the film is not animated, when the film switches to live-action footage in the very last scene. Folman closes the film with found footage that showcases the tragic aftermath of the massacre. In intensely emotional scene, the viewer is shown the response of the Palestinian survivors, mostly women, as they walk through the dead bodies and see the extent of the horrifying destruction of human life that took place there. The pained cries and inconsolable screams are all that can be heard; it is pure tragedy. Folman’s choice to show the spectator the tragic aftermath live, not only forces the audience to also feel the overwhelming despair of the moment, but to admit the reality of the situation, to confront that the moment portrayed in animation actually happened to real, human people. The spectator cannot ignore gravity of the moment. It is notable that like many of the film discussed in earlier chapters, this film, too, was banned in Israel; many Israelis still refrain from speaking about the inhumane murder of the civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Similar to earlier films, the filmmaker uses surreal shock to force a confrontation with the reality of the devastation. While this film is particularly personal and introspective, there is still an outward confrontation occurring here.
While many Israelis were not willing to speak of the massacre, Folman directly acknowledges an
Israeli audience through the film, forcing a confrontation with the complicit spectator and the traumatic past they all must cope with now. Similar to the discussions of gaining access to
Kirsten Johnson’s traumas in Dick Johnson is Dead, this film also gives intimate access to the mental workings of the filmmaker. It is almost as if the viewer can see the gears turning in 74
Folman’s head as he encounters each new piece of information about his past and begins to process it. There is something incredibly confidential about witnessing this experience of a man working through his deep-rooted trauma. As a viewer given this vulnerable access, we become a type of confidante for Folman; we become a comrade, too. Without the surreal uncanniness and the illustration of the dreamscapes that show the imagination and subconscious at work, the film would not be as deeply intimate and personal. The film would likely have retained its emotional power without these scenes, but it is with these surreal elements included that the film can have the representative power of showing the traumatized mind at work, which is a remarkable feat and a testament to the power of a surreal documentary.
A Different Direction of Surrealism
I have mentioned previously that the surrealism of Dick Johnson is Dead and Waltz with
Bashir operates divergently as compared to the surrealism of the previous four films discussed in earlier chapters. I have shown how surrealism works outwardly, but also, now, interiorly. The previously discussed filmmakers Luis Buñuel, Jean Rouch, Kidlat Tahimik and Joshua
Oppenheimer used a surrealism that was directed outward. Their films made a concentrated effort into confronting the viewer to instigate social change and implicate wrongdoers; the goal was outward social and political stakes. Johnson and Folman’s films are not implicating another for their complicity or complacency in social injustices. Instead, these filmmakers are making films directed inward, into themselves; the surrealism operates to highlight their own personal experiences and their own psychology and mental processes. This is not to suggest that the previous films do not discuss the inner workings of a person as we certainly see interior desires, frustrations and fantasies. But what separates Dick Johnson is Dead and Waltz with Bashir is that 75
these films are filtered through the filmmakers’ mental processes. This is not merely referring to
their directorial or authorial vision, but refers to how the films show the filmmakers actively
trying to process the scenes as they unfold; it refers to witnessing them experience pain and
sadness and frustration and coping with that. These films are also arguably far more personal
from the other four films discussed. There is certainly a connection to the subject matter, a deep
passion and care for the sociopolitical message, and an artistic insight at play in the other films,
but the lack an inwardness and singularity. In Dick Johnson is Dead and Waltz with Bashir, the
filmmaker’s specific anxieties, fears, griefs, struggles and dreams, and how they cope with those
things, are singular to them and them alone, which makes the experience of watching the films
one of unique personalization and intimacy. It is their traumas we are introduced to and working through over the course of the film, and the viewer is allowed to experience that coping, too. In a way, the viewer can also experience a therapy.
With the turn to having the surrealism directed inward, there could be potential for one to claim that the films lack a greater impact beyond the effect on the filmmaker themselves. I would disagree. While Dick Johnson is Dead and Waltz with Bashir do not reflect the viewer’s personal experiences, the films can be points of relatability for many. Trauma and pain is universal; arguably, no one in life goes unscathed from traumatic suffering. These films can be a catalyst for the viewer to begin confronting and working through their own traumas. Likely, the viewer will not create a two-hour documentary film, but the viewer could document a loved one close to death just like Kirsten Johnson or meet with old friends to begin processing trauma like Ari
Folman. I argue these films do not lack social power; these films can actually help or encourage another to turn inward to confront their own trauma. The difference is that the films of this
chapter just do not implicate or aim to inspire widespread social action. 76
The word confrontation is key here. In every chapter, the idea of confrontation, whether
that be outwardly to another person or inwardly at one’s own subconscious, is key to the impact
and stakes of the films. But that inclination to use surrealism as a tool to confront is not novel; in
fact, there is a precedent that dates back to the very start of the surrealism movement. From the
very beginnings in the 1920s, surrealism as an artistic and cultural movement helped artists
confront tragedy and destruction. With its beginnings in the early 20s, surrealism was in a direct
outcome of World War I. Many notorious surrealists, including André Breton, Max Ernst and
Paul Éluard, served during the war, while many others dodged the draft. In whatever location or
status, each person witnessed the destruction of the First World War and surrealism was largely
used as an outlet for responding to the carnage of the war. This idea of using surrealism as an
instrument for confronting trauma flourished during World War II, specifically when confronting
the reality of the Holocaust and Nazi death camps. Films like Blood of the Beasts (Georges
Franju,1949), Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) and Night and Fog (Alain Resnais,
1956), use surrealistic aspects to directly force spectators to face the consequences and ongoing ramifications of the Holocaust and Europeans’ complicity with the devastation. The precedent was set in the interwar period, but surrealism, as seen through the films discussed through this thesis, has remained an essential tool for confronting trauma. Perhaps there is said to be said that surreal cinema, in any form, has not only the ability, but also the need to confront. Perhaps there has always been something about surrealism, with its beginnings after a global and horrendous war, which makes it so crucial in these representations of conflict and instability. Surrealism is a universal and timeless tool that can assist in confronting and working through conflict, whether that confrontation is for sociopolitical justice, a fight against colonialism or resolving personal trauma. 77
Filmography
Dick Johnson is Dead. Dir. Kirsten Johnson. Netflix. 2020
Land without Bread. Dir. Luis Buñuel. 1933.
Perfumed Nightmare. Dir. Kidlat Tahimik. Zoetrope Studios. 1977.
The Act of Killing. Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer. Det Danske Filminstitut. 2012.
The Mad Masters. Dir. Jean Rouch. 1955.
Waltz with Bashir. Dir. Ari Folman. Sony Pictures Classics. 2008
78
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