Concrete Irrationality: Surrealist Spectators and the Cult of Harry Langdon
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Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies Issue 25 February 2013 Concrete Irrationality: Surrealist Spectators and the Cult of Harry Langdon Seth Soulstein, Cornell University Which comes first: the star or the spectator? Followers of film stars have existed as long as the medium itself has, and have not simply served as wide-eyed observers of a star‟s cultural output. They have also contextualized the star‟s creations and public persona for the broader public, provided feedback and criticism for a star, helping to mold stars‟ careers and guide their future creative choices, and indeed prolonged a star‟s legacy and cultural influence by creating new art as an expression of their reception of the star‟s work. In recent decades, this concept of the viewer serving not only as a consumer of meaning, but also as its creator, has entered the conversation of film scholarship. Consider the case of Harry Langdon. Ask the majority of the twenty-first century film- going public to name a silent comedy star, and you will likely be inundated with the same three answers: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Much lower on the list, if at all, would be Harry Langdon, the oft-forgotten fourth clown of the silent era. Yet Langdon was an A-list star for multiple years in the 1920s, and enjoyed an international reputation as well as a devoted fandom. As Greg Taylor writes in Artists in the Audience, “cult appreciation exploded as a tactical response to the very growth of mass culture” (1999: 15). In the early twentieth century, as new film technologies allowed for an unprecedented spread of mass culture across classes and continents, a small subset of film enthusiasts developed what Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton call, in Cult Cinema, a “cult connoisseurship” (2011: 50) of Langdon and his oeuvre – repeatedly viewing his films, writing essays in praise of his artistry, and even making films of their own that included subtle but consistent tribute to his works. They called themselves the Surrealists. Viewed through a certain lens, their cultural output during the late 1920s (and beyond) can be seen as being littered with cult appreciation of Harry Langdon. The Surrealists were spectators before they were stars; it would not be unreasonable to argue that the Surrealists might never have become stars in their own right had they not first felt a need to find a variety of ways to express their feelings as audience members first. Beginning with the Dadaist movement in the post-World War I era, young European artists and cultural critics found solidarity with each other in a 1 Soulstein common appreciation for aesthetics and politics, sharing notions on how to effectively enact societal change. First and foremost in their creed was an anti-bourgeois sentiment – they held no regard for unnecessary value systems created by separating art into class structures. Art made to titillate bourgeois sensibilities and reinforce the self-importance of the avant-garde was therefore considered useless. As Robin Walz notes in Pulp Surrealism, for example, “the dada and surrealist movements had been nearly alone among the Parisian avant-garde in their nonconformist ire and anti-establishment diatribes” (2000: 146-147). Instead, they found value in popular, lowbrow cinema, specifically Hollywood “entertainment” film. Luis Buñuel, a core member of the Surrealists, described two schools of cinema in a 1927 essay: a European school, filled with “sentimentalism, a bias toward art and literature, tradition, etc.,” and an American school, notable for its “vitality, photogenia, [and its] lack of noxious culture and tradition” (Buñuel, 2000b: 62). Salvador Dalí, another infamous early Surrealist, also praised popular American/Hollywood film over its transatlantic counterpart. As Elza Adamowicz notes, “[l]ike Buñuel, he expressed his preference for […] the naturalism of popular films over the aestheticism of the avant-garde cinema. For Dalí, Hollywood film reflected popular fantasies” (2010: 73) while, by contrast, avant-garde “art” film was “deliquescent, bitter, [and] putrefied” (Dalí, 1998: 8). Richard Maltby elaborates, noting that the factory-like production of American movies, “with no deference to tradition or hierarchies of taste,” led them to be received as “unselfconscious, underdetermined, spontaneous, authentic, primitive” (Maltby, 2011: x). [1] Not only was Langdon undoubtedly a member of the American school, he was also emblematic of a subset of the school of comedy of which the Surrealists were especially fond. In the Dadaist tradition, a core tenet of Surrealist thought was a revolt against, and distrust for, logic. As André Breton wrote in his foundational 1924 text, Manifesto of Surrealism, “I believe more and more in the infallibility of my thought in relation to myself” (qtd. in Goudal, 2000: 86). Individual thought, feelings and dreams were considered to reveal truth, while a reliance on systems of logic would only obfuscate it. “Everything that is foolish about cinema is the fault of an old-fashioned respect for logic” (Ibid.: 90), wrote Jean Goudal in 1925, and the Surrealists saw comedy film stars as the world‟s most outspoken champions of the illogical. Michael Richardson writes in Surrealism and Cinema that the Surrealists gravitated towards various genre films, since the conventions of each genre served in different ways 2 Issue 25, February 2013 Concrete Irrationality to upend notions of a solid, stable reality – but of all the genres, he notes, comedy was the most highly regarded. He continues, [t]he surrealists adored Charlie Chaplin long before it became fashionable to do so, but their special affection was for Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon ([mid-twentieth-century Surrealist Petr] Král regarded Long Pants as the only film that bears comparison with L’Age d’Or), Fatty Arbuckle. […] What united all of these comedians was their taste for anarchy and insubordination, and it was this as much as their humor that attracted the surrealists. (2006: 62) Dalí himself claimed, in a 1932 essay entitled “Abstract of a Critical History of the Cinema,” that the only forms of cinema that “merit being considered” are Communist propaganda films (“justified by their value as propaganda”), Surrealist films, and “a certain „comedy‟ cinema.” (Dalí, 2000: 67). Before creating any of their own cultural material, Dalí, Buñuel, and others attended as many American comedy screenings as they could, and arranged others if what they wanted to see was not already being shown elsewhere. Buñuel worked as an assistant and an extra on some film sets in Paris before briefly finding work as a film critic, a position that allowed him to spend his days watching movies. As Elza Adamowicz tells it, “[t]hanks to his press card, Buñuel would see up to three films a day, including private screenings of American films” (2010: 71). Eventually, in 1927, Buñuel set up the first Spanish film club, at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where he and Dali had both studied. Dalí, too, was an avid watcher of films before he ever thought of making one himself (Ibid.: 72). In the public screenings, these films were often exhibited together as a group of pulp American offerings – comedies or comedy shorts, westerns, crime dramas – which Peter Stanfield, in Maximum Movies: Pulp Fictions, describes as being not just a “lowbrow‟s distraction” but instead “the raw materials of a modernist‟s dramaturgy” (2011: 191). Through their avid attendance at such events, Dalí and Buñuel were amassing a treasure trove of raw material. Their repeated viewings and film club meetings generated discussion about which films they had seen and the relative merits of each film‟s stars, themes, and techniques. The Surrealists, who by the mid-1920s had multiple magazines dedicated to their writings of cultural critique, started putting their thoughts about film on paper and publishing them as essays. These essays became what Mathijs and Sexton call “the first form of cult connoisseurship” (2011: 50). According to them, the Surrealists were connoisseurs of American comedy in the sense that, through their essays they showed that they possessed “the skill and talent to be an arbiter of taste, to deliberately pitch expertise against mainstream and middlebrow conventionality” (Ibid.). Moreover, they Issue 25, February 2013 3 Soulstein claim, the Surrealists were cult connoisseurs because they lauded material “whose reception trajectories put them at the margins of what is culturally acceptable” (Ibid.). Greg Taylor calls this “oppositional connoisseurship,” (1999: 16), which he sees as a major aspect of cult spectatorship. “As literary and artistic provocateurs,” Walz notes, “part of the surrealist project was to illuminate the extraordinary in a mass culture that might otherwise pass as quotidian” (2000: 9-10). It is in this “oppositional” sense that we can understand the Surreal enthusiasm for American comedy as a form of cult appreciation. In “Toward a construtivist approach to media cults,” Philippe Le Guern writes that “the cultist relationship with texts frequently presents itself as a cultivated response to a noncultivated culture (that is, a culture with little legitimacy)” (2004: 8). Thus, when we read Buñuel's claim, in relation to American comedies, that “[p]eople are so stupid, and have so many prejudices, that they think Faust, Potemkin, and the like are superior to these buffooneries, which are not that at all, and which I would call the new poetry” (2000a: 124), we can see him in the cultist act of “putting into perspective judgments of value and taste” (Le Guern, 2004: 10). By naming their group, they established the boundaries of their “interpretive community” (a term used by Janet Staiger, in both Interpreting Films [1992] and Perverse Spectators [2000]), and in focusing on and writing about American comedy films as “the new poetry,” they confirmed their group as “a community, a commonality of congregation that sees itself at odds with normalized culture” (Mathijs and Sexton, 2011: 19).