Surrealists as Film Makers
Surrealists as Film Makers
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, June 06, 1987
SIXTY years ago, two virtually-unknown Spanish expatriates named Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali made a short feature film that descended like a thunderbolt on the Parisian art world. The two young men, destined for separate paths of glory in the future, had attended university together in Madrid, and had shared a mutual college chum in the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. As obscure upstarts in the Paris of the 1920’s, they had been caught up in the whirlpool of the Surrealist Movement, and had gone on to write, direct, and produce its first landmark film in collaboration.
“Un Chien Andalou” was, in the words of film critic Raymund Durgnat, “17 minutes of pure, scandalous dream-imagery, a stream of images from which any could be given a rational meaning was rigorously excluded.” Bunuel himself described the film as “a passionate, a desperate appeal to murder,” suggesting that the only possible explanation of the work would be a psycho-analytical one. At any rate, it more than delighted the Surrealists, and was an immediate succes de scandale in Parisian literary circles.
Viewing the film again during a recent sojourn in Europe brought me to the realization that the years in-between had done little to blunt the work’s insistent (if profoundly agitating) imagery — notwithstanding our own contemporary predilection for violence and the macabre. Each sequence unfolds with startling ferocity, featuring dead priests strung in pairs at the end of ropes, decomposed animals draped over grand pianos, severed limbs lying idly on street corners or churning cocktail shakers in the night, books that turn into deadly pistols, hands that sprout live ants from holes bored through their palms, nudes that vanish into thin air, a moth with a skull for a head, lovers buried alive in sand, and a wealth of other bizarre metaphors that feed on the free interplay of word-picture association in a sort-of Jungian orgy of the senses.
Bunuel and Dali produced a second film two years later, the last of their collaborative efforts in a medium so compelling in the hands of Surrealists that it provoked widespread public indignation. Although it brought generous tributes from such renowned figures of the day as Henry Miller and Cyril Connolly, “L’ Age D’ Or provoked angry French patriots to throw smoke-bombs at the cinema screen, slash paintings in the theater’s foyer, and even truncheon its viewers. It was promptly banned by the French police, egged on by Le Figaro and other leading newspapers.
Salvador Dali eventually became a leading pillar of the Surrealist movement and the toast of the European party-set. Luis Bunuel, on the other hand, would drop out of sight for over two decades, reemerging only in 1951 to earn the International Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Los Olvidados.” In time, Dali’s little-known collaborator would establish himself as a dominant influence in modern cinema, emerging as a true master of the celluloid medium.
“It was Surrealism which showed me that life has a moral direction which man cannot but follow,” the Jesuit-educated Bunuel would later say. “For the first time, I understood that man was not free. It was a great lesson in my life. It was also a great step forward into the marvellous and the poetic.”
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Surrealists as Film Makers” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, June 06, 1987
