Surrealism
and Cinema
by Michael Richardson
Berg Publishers, New York, 2006
240 pp. Trade, $89.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN 1-84520-225-2; ISBN-1-84520-226-0.
Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington,
DC 20008, USA
a.graubard@starpower.net
Cinema becomes an art during the first
decades of the previous century. Its inspirations
are universal in scope, intimate in effect,
with nearly mythic implications. That
digital technologies are now transforming
cinema by displacing access to films from
the social space of a theater to the private
space of the home has not as of yet given
us more than that.
But what we have in film, and some of
the best of what we have, still seems
to surge from an encounter that surrealism
has helped us to define. Call it an encounter
between dream and reality, desire and
repression, individual freedom and collective
identity, or something similar to this
-- it is there before us, implicating
our struggles, our failures, and our triumphs.
So how have surrealists interpreted, and
continue to interpret, the cinema from
Luis Bunuel to Jan Svankmajer? And what
has Richardson added to this discussion?
At the very least, Richardson begins where
most other commentators leave off. As
an academic close to contemporary surrealism,
he shares something of the sensibility
within each director he examines via these
three points: that surrealist cinema animates
a subversion of prevailing modes, from
the popular to the "avant garde";
that anything is useable; and that a lucent
clarity about relationships -- between
humans, humans and animals, and humans
and things -- prevails.
From Jacques Prevert, to Jean Vigo, Nelley
Kaplan, Walerian Borowczyk, Fernando Arrabal,
Roland Topor, and Wojceich Has, Richardson
tracks their contributions. Not to foreclose
on precursors and how surrealism has influenced
directors who carry some of its charm
in their works, Richardson also discusses
Fueillade, von Sternberg, Herzog, Wenders,
Ruiz, as others. In his intriguing chapter
on the documentary, he notes the influence
of the movement in the striking Jean Painleve´,
who made films on the natural world for
scientists, with a career spanning five
decades.
There is something in this monograph,
however, that brings with it a sense of
possibilities gained, lost and just partially
refigured. That it is far from complete,
with too many sketches of this or that
film maker, including the Brothers Quay,
whose hermetic worlds are more important
than Richardson will admit, is perhaps
a sign of the times. In our consent to
find in the cinema a work played for the
price of a ticket, we have come to a verge
where screens too often elude us. As a
momentary hiatus in our usual complacency,
where images and stories circulate endlessly,
film does not so much restore our reality
to us as glance off it. However honest
the film, clear to its intent and production
values, I can think of few that provoke
an experience we must endure, that eviscerates
our beliefs, and that enlivens without
qualification. Why is it that we refer
to LAge dor so much
as a turning point? Is our attraction
to this film simply nostalgic? I do not
think so. It is not that we yearn for
a cry equal to that which we recognize
here, but that our current films generally
leave us wanting. They are beautiful,
moving, demanding, horrifying, critical,
funny and altogether civilized. They are
films that have slipped into a century,
much like the last, with conflagration
knocking on the door.
What film maker will open that door, as
much to the world as to how we know the
world through film, and find there a vision
of life, of living, masked, unmasked,
it no longer matters, save that it reveals
us uniquely?
That is the promise of surrealism and
the cinema. It is also a promise of the
kind of critique that Richardson casts
over the film makers and films he discusses,
within the context of their historical
moments. Fortunately, it is a promise
that neither cinema nor history, nor the
history of cinema, exhausts.