Notes on Experimental Cinema and Literature Archivo

Literatura y Cultura Visual Notes on Experimental Film and Literature This is a didactic unit devoted to Experimental Film and the ways in which Literature has contributed to its development; sometimes, as an art form to imitate, and others as a tradition to leave behind. Please, read these notes and follow the steps they suggest. The learning objectives of this unit are: - To know and understand the origins of cinema as an experimental art form - To reflect on how Surrealism developed a new cinematographic language - To know four of the greatest Experimental filmmakers of all times (Mèlies, Dulac, Man Ray, Buñuel, Cocteau, and Deren), and watch some of their works. 1. Watch this introductory video on the origins of cinema titled Movies are Magic. This video presents the technical evolution of the cinematographic medium from its origins onwards. It is a good starting point to study film as an experimental art form. As it happened with the birth of the English novel in the eighteenth century, the birth of cinema involved a series of radically new projects –and, in consequence, experiments- that, on the one hand, needed to get some inspiration from traditional art forms (painting, theatre, short stories and novels), but, on the other, was in search of new structures and ideas. The invention of film was the invention of a new language. 2. Read this introduction to the origins of cinema and its relationship with Literature. When film was in its infancy, theatre was the dominant and supreme performative art form. Thus, it was quite common, in the early twentieth century, to see films that relied entirely on well-known plays for their audience appeal. There is a 1909 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Charles Kent & J Stuart Blackton); a 1908 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by DW Griffith; and a 1907 film of Hamlet, directed by none other than Mèlies, among other examples. These works tell us something about how theatre inspired cinema from the very beginning. Curiously enough, theatre often provided visual –more than textual- inspiration, since films were silent. Some sentences, taken from the original literary texts, used to be inserted as intertitles in the films, but the spectators would understand the narrative mainly through the attrezzo, the gestures of the actors, and the visual devices in general. Likewise, other literary forms, such as the novel, also offered material for cinematographic pieces. Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon (1902), based on Jules Verne’s homonymous text, is a good instance here. In this piece, the French filmmaker experiments with the image to produce illusionistic effects, showing that cinema could go beyond theatre’s constraints. Moreover, Mèlies was one of the first artists moving film into storytelling, inaugurating a fashion that still characterizes cinema at present. 3. Go deeper into it! George Mèlies: from Literature to the Special Effects of Cinema To know more about George Mèlies, please read the essays included in Georges Meliès, First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913), by Norman McLaren and John Frazer, available on the Virtual Campus. Then, watch the film, A Trip to the Moon (1902). 1 Literatura y Cultura Visual 4. Now, read this summary on Surrealist Film* Surrealism revolutionized the art of cinema with new techniQues and approaches that freed it from traditional story-telling, transforming the medium into one that could explore, reveal, and possibly even replicate the inner-workings of the subconscious mind. Surrealist films often leave us with shocking images that lodge themselves into our psyche and deprive us of easily legible narratives, while at the same time prove compelling in their deep, ultimately neo- romantic expressions of desire. The movie screen becomes a portal through which the viewer can journey where the traditional common constructs can no longer be reliable guides, from a clergyman's sexual dreams to a poet's Quest through a mirror, from an obsession with a starfish to a wound that emits live ants. Key Ideas • Surrealist films created a revolution in cinema by dispensing with linear narratives and plots, thereby freeing cinema from a reliance on traditional story-telling borrowed from literature. Surrealism creates the possibility of cinema itself as an independent and unique visual art form. • Surrealist films do not merely retell dreams or stories but replicate their very processes through illogical, irrational disruptions and disturbing imagery, uncensored by normal wakeful consciousness or morality. Surrealist filmmakers found new techniques to convey the atmosphere and incongruous states of dreams. Like dreams, many Surrealist films resist interpretation. As in actual dreams, characters in Surrealist films display a lack of will, even a certain impotence. There is a forfeiting of control and a complete submission to the dream state. • Surrealist films often use shocking imagery that jolts the viewer, imagery that had not been seen in films prior to 1928. This challenges the notion of cinema as mere entertainment; the viewer can no longer be passive or complaisant. Surrealist film attempts to change cinema so that audiences experience more than the standard visuals. • Surrealist films often assault traditional institutions in society, such as religion, family, or marriage, exemplified in Luis Buñuel's attacks on the Catholic Church or David Lynch's depiction of a married couple with a deformed child in his film Eraserhead (1977), thus changing a traditional mode of mass entertainment into one full of revolutionary potential at the social and political level. • Many surrealist films are driven by strong feelings of longing, love, and sexual desire, what the founder of Surrealism, André Breton called "insane love," amour fou. This love or desire, while appearing self-destructive or illogical to the rational world, leads characters in surrealist films - and viewers in real life - to realizations they may not have otherwise had. • Unlike Surrealist poetry, which ultimately could only create abstract linguistic metaphor, Surrealist film could show even the most incongruous or absurd images as visual, concrete facts. It could show the marvellous or uncanny as real, the material strangeness of reality. And though Surrealist paintings could depict dream-like scenes, they were still single, frozen illusions, while Surrealist cinema could show actual objects in motion, as they move in dreams, the paradoxical realism of Surrealism. * This section comes from “Surrealist Film”, The Art Story, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/surrealist- film Last access: 30th March, 2020. 2 Literatura y Cultura Visual Overview of Surrealist Film The first expressions of Surrealism took place in the early 1920s not in painting or cinema but in the poetry of André Breton, Paul Eluard, Philip Soupault, and Louis Aragon, all of whom explored automatic writing (writing in an almost hypnotic state, without the filtering of traditional poetic forms, morality, or rational meaning). The first to use the term "surrealist" was actually the older innovative poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, as a subtitle to his scandalous 1917 play, The Breasts of Tiresias. Apollinaire, who had been a major figure in the Cubist movement and had perished in World War I, was much admired by the younger poets, and so they named their movement "Surrealism" in his honour. Interestingly, one of Apollinaire's last projects was the screenplay for a movie, which was never produced, titled The Breton Girl (1917). Key Artists in experimental cinema derived from Surrealism: Germaine Dulac, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, David Lynch. 5. Finally, you can watch the films available here (and on the virtual campus), and read the following summaries and comments SURREALIST FILMS. A SELECTION 1. The Seashell and The Clergyman (1928) Artist: Germaine Dulac Directed by Germaine Dulac from a screenplay by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman is considered by most critics to be the first true Surrealist film. Dulac was already a successful and innovative filmmaker, best known for the way in which her early films set moods through atmospheric camera shots, reminiscent of French Impressionist paintings. Many of her films are also psychological portraits, such as Spanish Fiesta (1920) and The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923). The Seashell and The Clergyman was a major departure from her established style. Dulac was a persuasive writer on cinema theory and declared the independence of film from literature and other visual arts. Antonin Artaud was an actor, poet, and dramatist, and one of the most important figures in modern theater. As an actor, he is perhaps best remembered for his role as a sympathetic priest in Carl Dreyer's classic film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In 1927-28, Artaud was still affiliated with the official Surrealist movement as Director of the "Bureau of Surrealist Research," a small office in Paris where the general public could submit accounts of their dreams and surreal experiences. Artaud would later be expelled from the Surrealist movement by Breton. The film recreates the nightmare of a young clergyman and his repressed sexual desire for a beautiful, aristocratic woman (played by Genica Athanasiou, a former lover of Artaud's). The clergyman is thwarted by an older, more powerful man, who appears in the dream at times as his superior in the priesthood, or as a sword-bearing general. The clergyman tries to destroy this imperious father-figure, but his attempts are futile, and the slow-motion scenes of the clergyman trying impotently to strangle him are among the most disturbing in the film. The clergyman's impotence is also embodied in his crawling, like an infant, along the streets of the city, as well as in his absurd repetitive act of filling test-tubes with blood from a seashell (a symbol of female sexuality) and then dropping the tubes to the floor, creating a pile of smashed glass.

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