The Brooklyn Rail

Does Surrealist cinema exist today? According to film critics, Surrealism in movies is all over the place: almost every “film of the year” that we “must see” is full of surreal elements—from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo (2022) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023). “A surreal satire of racial tension” (Sight & Sound), a “surrealistic tour through the … anxieties of a famous Mexican journalist” (Los Angeles Times), “a surrealist fairy tale” (Rolling Stone). The term “surreal” is so often used in film reviews that one wonders whether a Surrealist cinema exists at all. When everything is surreal, nothing is.

Part of the problem is etymological: unlike the concepts of Abstraction or Constructivism, the Sur-réalité or Super-reality described by André Breton et al became part of the vernacular (we never hear our neighbors say “it felt so Futurist” or “what a Dadaist situation!”) The French word “surréaliste” gradually lost its connection to the Surrealist Group of Paris in 1924, and “surreal”—in lower case—became “dream-like,” “bizarre,” “fantastic” in all dictionaries. In film criticism, “dream-like” is a quite common term: “Oneiric (film theory)” is, believe it or not, a Wikipedia entry.

The ubiquity of the word came at a high cost, starting with the depoliticization of Surrealism’s transgressive intent. (A high cost for the Surrealists, I mean; for the status quo, the neutralization of revolt has always been a bargain.) We often forget that Surrealists didn’t see themselves as artists but as actors of a social revolution—hence the name of their journal, La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29), later called Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33). Luis Buñuel often complained that Surrealism’s triumph as an art movement involved its failure as a revolutionary action.

Surrealist cinema started the same year the Manifeste du surréalisme was published: René Clair and Francis Picabia’s Entr’acte was released in 1924. Man Ray’s Emak Bakia and L’Étoile de mer came out in 1926 and 1928. Luis Buñuel directed Un Chien andalou, co-scripted with Salvador Dalí, the following year. Buñuel liked Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (1928), written by Antonin Artaud, who hated it. Early films by Jean Cocteau and Jean Vigo were clearly influenced by Surrealism. Steven Kovács’ From Enchantment to Rage, published in 1980, still is a reference guide to the story of these and others Surrealist films up to Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or (1930). The book’s conclusion chapter is eloquently titled “The Dream Vanishes.”

But … did it? Were there no more Surrealist films after the split of the Paris circle in 1932? Here in America, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947) are often described as “Surrealist” by critics, and you probably concur when they say Buñuel never stopped being one (Cet obscur objet du désir, his last feature, came out in 1977). Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949), Michel Zimbacca’s L’Invention du monde (1952), the early documentaries of Alain Resnais—they all kept the Surrealist spirit alive after the war. And what about the international films of Nelly Kaplan, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Jan Švankmajer in the 1960s and 1970s? Shouldn’t Rubén Gámez’s La fórmula secreta (1965) be in any top ten list of Surrealism in world cinema?

Here comes the problem again: if any motion picture dealing with the unconscious, automatism, dreams, desire and revolution is Surrealist (or Neo-Surrealist), then the list becomes endless, Hollywood movies included. Buñuel admired Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948), David O. Selznick’s vehicle for his lover Jennifer Jones, and l’Internationale surréaliste highly praised Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951), with Ava Gardner in the title role—not least because of Man Ray’s design of the chess pieces seen on the screen or Pandora’s portrait painted à la Giorgio de Chirico.

From the 1950s onwards, in fact, scholars of Surrealism cinema—Ado Kyrou in Paris, Raymond Durgnat in London, Francisco Aranda in Madrid—could find Surrealist elements in almost any feature, whether a Jerry Lewis comedy, a horror movie, or a science fiction film (voilà le fantastique!) I can do it here, too. The uncontrollable love of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)? Clearly, amour fou. The chaplain coming out of the headmaster’s drawer in if… (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)? A non sequitur indeed. The dream sequence in Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1971)? Surrealist through and through.

But, if amour fou is available, you can also order Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994). Doppelgängers? Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) and Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013). Broken mirrors and jump cuts? A myriad of “must-see” movies of the year, from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) to The Daniels’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). You see where I’m going: when everything is surreal …

One could argue that not even the Surrealists kept making surreal films after 1932, not even Buñuel, whose Nazarín (1959) would hardly be defined as such hadn’t we known the name of its director. Dalí contributing to the dream scene in Spellbound (1945) didn’t make Alfred Hitchcock a Surrealist; neither were Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini Surrealists just because they recreated dreams in their films. Describing the work of David Lynch as surreal has always felt like an oversimplification to me. Advocates of Surrealist cinema insist that its influence is incontestable nowadays because of its omnipresence on global screens. But that’s like celebrating the impact of Arnold Schönberg in certain pop singers who tinker with atonality, or the influence of the Bauhaus in the Ikea catalog!

Perhaps the key question after all is not whether a Surrealist cinema as such exists today, but if we are still capable of making and understanding movies as the Surrealists once did—as tools of a furious fight “to explode the social order and transform life itself.”¹