Reframing Reality

Alison Frank

Description

The surrealist object is an everyday item that takes on multiple associations by provoking the viewer’s imagination. It also poses a specific challenge for some filmmakers who seek to apply surrealist ideas and approaches when making feature-length narrative films. In Reframing Reality, Alison Frank looks specifically at French and Czech films, including works by Luis Buñuel, Jan Švankmajer, as well as the contemporary hit Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in order to offer a new take on surrealist film.

 

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Surrealist Objects and Cinema

The notion of the surrealist object

The hybrid object versus the surrealist object; cinema versus surrealism

Objects in surrealist cinema: Un Chien andalou

Chapter 2: Style and the Hybrid Object in Á Nous la liberté

Style in Á Nous la liberté

Object analysis

Chapter 3: The Everyday and the Hybrid Object in the Czech New Wave and Jan Švankmajer

The context of a cultural renewal

Czech surrealism from its beginnings to the 1960s

Common concerns of Czech surrealism and Czech New Wave

Hybrid objects and the Czech New Wave

Hybrid Objects and Jan Švankmajer’s short films of the 1960s

Chapter 4: Genre and the Hybrid Object in Late Bunuel

Generic hybridity and subjectivity in the 1930s and 60s

Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Belle de Jour

Cet obscure objet du désir

Chapter 5: Media Objects in Le Fabuluex destin d’Amélie Poulain

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and René Clair

Cinéma du look

Postmodernism

Media of expression and communication as objects

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• General
• General officer
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783201686
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Cover image: A Blonde in Love (1965) © CBK/Filmové studio Barrandov/The Kobal Collection
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Index: Lyn Greenwood
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-712-5
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-169-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-168-6
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Surrealist Objects and Cinema
The notion of the surrealist object
The hybrid object versus the surrealist object; cinema versus surrealism
Objects in surrealist cinema: Un Chien andalou
Chapter 2: Style and the Hybrid Object in À Nous la liberté
Style in À Nous la liberté
Object analysis
Chapter 3: The Everyday and the Hybrid Object in the Czech New Wave and Jan Švankmajer
The context of a cultural renewal
Czech surrealism from its beginnings to the 1960s
Common concerns of Czech surrealism and the Czech New Wave
Hybrid objects and the Czech New Wave
Hybrid objects and Jan Švankmajer’s short films of the 1960s
Chapter 4: Genre and the Hybrid Object in Late Buñuel
Generic hybridity and subjectivity in the 1930s and 60s
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
Belle de Jour
Cet obscur objet du désir
Chapter 5: Media Objects in Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and René Clair
Cinéma du look
Postmodernism
Media of expression and communication as objects
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Reidar Due, my thesis supervisor at the University of Oxford, for his guidance and valuable advice. Michael Sheringham provided helpful insights in the early stages. My college adviser, Michael Hawcroft, was a source of friendly support throughout my studies. I specially wish to thank Xon de Ros and Dorota Ostrowska for their encouragement.
I am grateful to the Keble Association for their contribution towards my year abroad at the École Normale Supérieure, and for supporting trips to Karlovy Vary (2008) and Łodz (2006), where I presented my research at the ‘Rediscovering Polish Cinema’ conference. I would also like to thank Oxford University’s Department of Medieval and Modern Languages for their support of the Łodz trip.
Vanya Murray, former film librarian at the Modern Languages Faculty Library, was of great help in obtaining the necessary books and films. Thank you also to Jelena Stanovnik at Intellect for her enthusiasm and dedication.
I wish to express my gratitude to Diane Watson for including films as part of her English class at Branksome Hall, and to Bart Testa for his comprehensive and inspiring ‘Introduction to Film’ course at the University of Toronto.
Thank you to Mićo Tatalović for unwavering encouragement throughout my postgraduate career. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Barbara and Richard Frank, to whom this book is dedicated, for supporting my studies wholeheartedly from the very beginning.
Parts of Chapter 3 have been published previously in modified form. The section on Věra Chytilová was reworked into an article, ‘Formal Innovation and Feminist Freedom: Věra Chytilová’s Daisies ’, first published in CineAction no. 81 (2010), 46–49. The sections on Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer and Jiří Menzel formed the basis of the peer-reviewed article, ‘Czech Surrealism and Czech New Wave Realism: The Importance of Objects’ in Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media no. 36 (Fall 2011), 39–58.
Introduction
Academic accounts of surrealism and cinema have tended to define the relationship between them either very narrowly or quite broadly. Accounts from the 1970s and 80s by authors such as J. H. Matthews, Linda Williams, Steven Kovács and Alain and Odette Virmaux have focused primarily on the early work of Luis Buñuel ( Un Chien andalou , 1929 and L’Âge d’or , 1930), and may include consideration of La Coquille et le Clergyman / The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), the film made by cinematic impressionist Germaine Dulac for surrealist Antonin Artaud. They may also discuss Buñuel’s later work, based on the argument that the director remained a surrealist all his life, and only needed the artistic freedom to express it. However, films influenced by surrealism but not directly related to the movement receive far less attention, if any.
By the 1990s, the focus was beginning to broaden: Ramona Fotiade, for example, made a convincing case for the cultural influence of surrealism in postmodern French cinema, specifically Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 37 ° 2 le matin/Betty Blue (1986). 1 In the 2000s, The Unsilvered Screen (edited by Graeme Harper and Rob Stone) and Michael Richardson’s Surrealism and Cinema included chapters on Buñuel but also argued for expanding the definition of surrealism in film to include examples taken from Hollywood, American classical animation, British cinema, documentary and works by directors such as David Lynch, Raúl Ruiz, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrei Tarkovsky and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Both narrow and broad approaches to defining surrealism in cinema correspond in different ways to the surrealists’ own approach. In terms of granting its official approval (and the accompanying label ‘surrealist’) to any film, the group was extremely selective, choosing only Buñuel’s first two films: they rejected La Coquille et le Clergyman essentially because it defined itself as dream-based and distanced itself too radically from reality through the use of special effects. However, Ado Kyrou’s volume Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1963) was liberal in identifying what he called surrealist moments in a wide variety of examples of past and contemporary European and American films, from Fantômas (1913) to Russ Meyer.
Between the surrealist selectiveness of the 1920s and 30s and Kyrou’s efforts as a post-war spectator to discover surrealist moments in film lies the story of surrealism’s troubled relationship with the medium. It was a story narrated by André Breton himself in his 1951 essay ‘Comme dans un bois’/‘As in a Wood’: as a young man, he would spend his Sundays with his friend Jacques Vaché, immersing himself in the pure pleasure of film’s ‘ pouvoir de dépaysement ’ / ‘ power of defamiliarisation ’ 2 by wandering from cinema to cinema at will, not bothering about conventional concerns such as the name of the film or watching it from beginning to end. 3 The surrealists were united by their admiration for Chaplin’s film comedy; for Henry Hathaway’s vision of the power of love in his 1935 film Peter Ibbetson ; for Feuillade’s portrayal of the marvellous infiltrating the fabric of everyday reality; for, above all, cinema’s general conduciveness to transgression of restrictive social and moral codes of behaviour and the limitations that they impose on the imagination.
As the surrealists formulated the principles of their own movement, they naturally looked to cinema as a powerful and popular modern medium through which they could communicate their ideas in a manner that would convince a wide audience of their relevance. Fundamental to this power was the fact that cinema was an art form which seemed most faithfully to reproduce life as it is experienced. The surrealists wanted to demonstrate that their revolution was not limited to the mind, and to do so they needed to prove that a revolution of the mind would have a real impact on everyday life. The source of the difficulties that the surrealists encountered with cinema, however, was the fact that their primary concern was the unconscious. They soon realised that it was impracticable to use cinema as a more vivid and immediate form than language for the expression of the director’s unconscious; however, it would take longer for them to realise that it was almost equally difficult to use cinema as a means of influencing the audience’s unconscious.
Breton as a young man had taken an unusually active role in creating his film experience, putting together a mental collage of the film fragments he had seen on his Sunday afternoon at the cinema. Kyrou, too, in Le Surréalisme au cinéma described a subjective approach to watching movies, citing Man Ray’s practice of obscuring his vision as a means of altering his experience of a film, or his own tendency to deliberately confuse his understanding of a film by recalling plots and characters from other films as he watched it. 4 Rudolf Kuenzli argues, however, that while the surrealists advocated ‘active’ viewing of popular films, a ‘passive’ viewer was required for their own. 5 While the surrealists were arguably within their rights to believe that their own films did not require imaginative transformation in order to stimulate the viewer, they were perhaps over-ambitious in the specific effect that they hoped their films would have. They aspired to a cinema that would have a transformative effect on the viewer. Most mainstream cinema is primarily designed to entertain its audience, however, not transform them. Although cinema can present a new point of view, it is unlikely to bring about any radical revolution in the audience’s perspective on the world. However quixotic it appears in retrospect, such a radical revolution was precisely the surrealists’ goal.
Initially, the surrealists had been excited by the fact that cinema used images as its basis of communication. Even before any actual surrealist film production took place, surre