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.ĭirected 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. It could show the marvelous or uncanny as real-the material strangeness of reality.
Surrealist film attempts to change cinema so that audiences experience more than the standard visuals. This challenges the notion of cinema as mere entertainment the viewer can no longer be passive or complaisant. Surrealist films often use shocking imagery that jolts the viewer, imagery that had not been seen in films prior to 1928.There is a forfeiting of control and a complete submission to the dream state.
As in actual dreams, characters in Surrealist films display a lack of will, even a certain impotence. Like dreams, many Surrealist films resist interpretation. Surrealist filmmakers found new techniques to convey the atmosphere and incongruous states of dreams.
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.
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. 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. 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.