Discuss how far the development ofyour chosen international film style can be seen as the work of particular creative individuals Surrealism is an artistic movement created in Paris in 1922 that explores a hybrid of the psychical reality and the psychological world. It was influenced by the Dada anti-art movement, whose key features were spontaneity, a lack of conformity to regular conventions and ‘pure idiocy’, focusing on the ludicrous and ridiculous in this world. Andre Breton (who wrote the surrealist manifesto) founded surrealism. This manifesto was based on Freud‘s book, “Interpretation ofDreamS”, a text that explores one‘s fears and desires through the concept of dreams. Three films important in the Surrealist movement are Un Chien Andalou (1928), Iabberwocky (1971) and The Phantom of Liberty ( 1974) An important figure in surrealism is Salvador Dali, a surrealist painter.
He met Luis Bunuel, a filmmaker, and together they created the first surrealist film entitled “Un Chien Andalou“ in 1928. As surrealism explores the psychology of the creator, the film is greatly influenced by the inner psyche ofthe two directors, Dali and Bunuel. This is evident in many aspects of the film. For example, the ants coming out of the protagonist’s hand (played by Pierre BatcheD originate in Dali‘s childhood where he saw a dead donkey being eaten from the inside by masses of ants. This was his first discovery ofdeath where it sunk in to him that things died. Thus the ants are a foreshadowing for death soon to come. The ants are coming out of the protagonist’s hand, an obscure and disturbing image that is a part of character‘s subconscious, separated from reality by a jump cut. Subconscious realism of the creators is also explored, such as their views on women.
The director‘s are both heterosexual men who are ‘obsessed‘ with women, and this is evident by their misogynistic portrayal ofthe relationship between the two central characters. In the chase scene, the man is exploring his desires by chasing the woman around the apartment. The editing transitions explore his subconscious and force the audience to witness his sexual desires. To an extent, the audience is presented with the sexual desires ofthe directors as well, for the characters are essentially extensions of themselves. A reoccurring image in the film is that ofthe striped box; it shows that the protagonist is a complex character. The inclusion ofsuch iconography stems from an extract from Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”, a staple in the creation of surrealism. As Dali and Bunuel would be masters on Andre Breton‘s surrealism manifesto and the works of Freud, the inclusion of the striped box makes sense and adds depth to the protagonist while also bringing another element of Dali and Bunuel into the film.
While I still do not fully understand the film but I am beginning to see how Dali and Bunuel developed surrealism through this film, “Un Chien Andalou” was shocking, experimental and sophisticated for the time it was made, and remains a curiosity of cinema It started a wave ofsurrealist films and is a key piece of surrealist history, along with Dali and Bunuel, who helped make it all possible. This was not Louis Bunuel‘s only revolutionary and inspirational surrealist piece, for in 1974 he came to create “The Phantom of Liberty”, a radical surrealist film that not only challenges traditional narrative conventions, but the moral and social standards of traditional establishments as well. Bunuel uses the film to recognize the violent, grotesque and sexual tendencies present inside all human beings, and how such things are shunned upon by our own manmade code of ethics and morals.
At the same time, it portrays the absurd and surreal, such as policemen and schoolteachers failing to notice an allegedly missing girl standing right in front of them. When talking about absurdity the ridiculousness does not end there; Surrealist films take influence from the dada art movement, and among many things take from it the trait of ‘pure idiocy‘ , being idiot for idiotic’s sake, breaking away from general artistic conventions and standing out from the crowd. The Phantom of Liberty is no exception. One scene in particular stands out as having stark dada traits, and that is the dining scene where the characters are sitting on toilets. The way the camera can follow each person normally as they converse, only to go back to a still shot of the entire dining table and show the toilets really shows startling juxtaposition and absurdity as normality and the bizarre collide.
At some point, one of the guests excuses himself from the table and goes to a private room, where he is served dinner. Both, defecating and eating, are natural human functions, but one of them is shunned by society. One of the most prominent features The Phantom of Liberty is its unconventional narrative structure. There is no singular protagonist, or even group of main characters – the story flows from scene to scene like a relay race. entering with one character and leaving with another, unsettling the audience as they do not easily grasp who they are meant to follow in the scene. An example of this structure is how the film opens with events taking place during the Napoleonic Wars; then, we discover that a nanny is reading these events from a book. The seamless transitions blend together the episodes of the film with nothing but coincidence – the driving force of The Phantom of Liberty.
The continuation of the narrative is dependent upon chance encounters of random characters. In a sense, this portrays one of Bunuel‘s fears. the issue ofliving in a random world without a specific purpose in life and how we are all at the mercy offate. chance and coincidence. Bunuel’s films also include a degree of political criticism alongside the social criticism. This is brought forth in the picture scene: a father and his wife discover pictures their daughter was given by a lewd old man 7 with implied pedophilic tendencies – and proceed to sift through them in horror and disgust. The audience, having never seen the pictures before, assumes the worst, However, when Bunuel reveals the pictures, he shows that they are merely landscape shots offamous monuments. such as the Arch de Triumph.
This scene represents the modern distance between people and their cultural background, something Bunuel was very familiar with, having physically and emotionally distanced himselffrom his background in France and Spain, displayed many times in the films in the controversial films he creates. Such cultural degeneration has been a staple ofthe Surrealist film style that has Luis Bunuel to thank for legitimizing it. Bunuel is a revolutionary and important figure in surrealism, and his controversial films led to a movement that created a wide and diverse filmography from all across the globe. The dream-like style ofthe narrative, mixed with social criticism and pure idiocy blend together for a radical and interesting piece ofcinema history.
