Jury’s Notes – Charles Tepperman
These are an unruly bunch of films. And surrealism has always been an unruly, convulsive set of ideas. Here are films that unsettle, play jokes on us, and visualize our unconscious desires and anxieties. A few words to set the stage for – but certainly not make sense of – these films.
“The cinema is a marvelous and dangerous weapon if a free spirit wields it. It’s the finest instrument there is for expressing the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct.” This is what Luis Buñeul wrote about motion picture, and there are many films in these programs that were made by such ‘free spirits.’ Certainly, Grotesque and Red Like Meat confront us in ways that both shock and disgust. Marvelous and dangerous for much different reasons is Skull and Blackberries. This film is dangerous because it threatens to make the artist’s hand irrelevant altogether: here photography is truly nature’s pencil, colouring in dreams with blackberry juice. Copy Shop reminds me of something Bunuel once wrote about a Buster Keaton film: “The film was as beautiful as a bathroom.” Copy Shop is antiseptic, like our glorious modern world. But in this film, impossible things can happen: sterility and multiplication go hand in hand, duplicating the hero like dangerous bacteria that escape our best efforts to sanitize.
Some of the films in this program revisit earlier moments in motion picture history, replaying them like the raw material of our ‘optical unconscious.’ Alone and Yesterday’s Wine do this by bringing the strange, unobserved actions and motions of old movies to our attention. The surrealists believed that popular films could be a rich source of productive energy. André Breton, the writer and high priest of French surrealism, enjoyed dropping in on movies at random moments, absorbing whatever powerful visual energies they had to offer, and then – at the first hit of boredom – moving on to the next theatre: “I have never known anything more magnetizing.” But surrealism isn’t just film history; it’s always reinventing itself. What surrealists like Breton appreciated most was the cinema’s “power to disorient,” and surrealist strategies reappear in many of the impossible, disorienting, paradoxical stories here. At the Heart of It All is notable for the vivid, trancelike state it induces. Tell Us The Truth Josephine, is one of many disorienting stories in this program, but it towers above the rest… mostly because of the stilts.
Bunuel called Un Chien Andalou “a despairing, passionate call to murder.” I felt assaulted in the same way when I saw Botched Eyeball Operation. Science film or horror film? Is there any difference? At its premiere in 1929, Un Chien Andalou was preceded by a science film about astronomy, pointing our eyes up to the peaceful heavens before placing us under the surrealist blade. Chien and Botched Eyeball Operation are just two of the films in this program that attack with such surgical precision. All of these films slice through our dull, conventional ways of seeing the world, and dare us to contemplate the strange, ludicrous, and inexplicable true reality of our lives.
(Charles Tepperman)
Leave a Reply