This was an essay about Surrealism as it relates to film criticism and appreciation, which I wrote for school last semester. It grew out of other papers I wrote about the ways that literature explores the conventions of the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle. I was primarily concerned with how said conventions were used in order to achieve certain aesthetic ends. I had based my previous writing on two texts that stood out in this respect: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Here’s the gist of what I had to say in the preceding papers:
…in Hamlet characters reveal deep truths about themselves and others through their reactions to dramatic shows, but additionally, they often structure their own behavior as performances in order to negotiate the complex demands of their situations. Similarly, the public displays of suffering performed and witnessed by the characters in Crime and Punishment have the effect of reorienting the characters in their world. What I found interesting about these texts is the fact that both seem to assert the notion that the performance-proper (the play or the public spectacle) is an incomplete event, one that is dependent on the audience’s response to supply aesthetic value. To be more specific, the ways in which the audience itself enacts its spectatorship can be seen as a kind of necessary secondary performance that rounds out the artistic experience. Imagine, for example, the very different Hamlet we would have if Claudius had enthusiastically received Hamlet’s “Mousetrap” play, or if Queen Gertrude had, out of sheer boredom, nodded off during her son’s spectacular duel and, as a result, slept through any opportunity to toast the affair. In this project, I will attempt something similar. By modifying the ways in which I perform my own spectatorship, I intend to explore the mutability of artistic performances and experiences.
The prose are kinda academic and were not really intended for a blog. From here on out the rest of the paper is about film. Read on if you like; I’m hoping for this to be the first of several essays I post on this site.
I have decided to focus on the artistic medium of the cinema in order to experiment with the conventional approach to artistic performances. This choice stems, first, from my general interest in film; but more importantly, I was inspired to recreate the approach to films used by members of the Surrealist movement in the early 20th century. The film scholar, Greg Taylor, describes the method by which Andre Breton and other surrealists would become “fugitive spectators of film spectacle who entered and left theaters between plot points.” By moving from film to film, the surrealists eschewed any sort of narrative understanding of the films, in favor of a jumbled juxtaposition of scenes, textures, sounds, and images. Taylor explains that the films’
“storytelling got in the way of reverie—dragging down, literalizing, stifling the images (which themselves were uncrafted magical apparitions). It was up to the surrealist critic to purify the medium, play up its mysterious dreamlike nature, emphasize the uncanny ability of the cinematic apparatus to transform the ordinary into the marvelous. The critic thus liberated the movie behind the movie; it was not the movie everyone else saw, the one the Hollywood technicians thought they had made. That film was terrible; it was worth watching, only because it might be remade into something much more interesting, aesthetic even.”
While I cannot say that I necessarily share Taylor’s cynical assumption that all narrative, Hollywood cinema, taken on its own terms, is wholly worthless, I am intrigued by the possibility of enriching the cinematic experience by encountering it in alternative ways.
But what drove Breton and his cadre to become “fugitive spectators?” In his first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton discusses the nature of the modern experience of the imagination, writing that, “experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to emerge”. Breton’s surrealist project is to liberate experience from this circumscribed world by reasserting the role of dreams and imagination in reality. For Breton, aesthetic experiences come to relate to his project only with respect to their ability to liberate the imagination through their “marvelous” qualities . He writes, “let us not mince words, the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful…Only the marvelous is capable of fecundating work which belong to an inferior category [this includes,] generally speaking, anything that involves storytelling” . Given conventional cinema’s emphasis on narrative, it is safe to say that movies, for Breton, would certainly be consigned to this inferior category. Perhaps, then, his “fugitive spectatorship, can be seen as an attempt to redeem movies by obscuring their stories and finding in them an imaginative, “marvelous” potential. What exactly is “marvelous?” Among sources of the marvelous, Breton includes “fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, [and] the taste for things extravagant.” These qualities will come be central parts of my experience.
It should be said that Breton’s description of a modern world from which the imagination is banished and circumscribed by rationalism and common-sense can aptly be applied to conventional Hollywood cinema and modern American modes of movie exhibition. Our multiplexes work with the rigid efficiency of an assembly line: ticket, popcorn, 90 minutes in the dark, in bed by ten. Meanwhile, with respect to content and quality, the imagination of Hollywood appears crippled by common-sense concerns for economic practicality and efficiency; so many of Hollywood films are built from endlessly recycled plots and tired visual clichés. Can surrealist spectatorship really find something beautiful in such a system? Can it reassert the imagination in a “civilization that has managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition or fancy, [a civilization] that forbids any kind of search for the truth that is not in conformance with accepted practices?” To these questions Breton enigmatically answers, “The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms.”
The Experiment
My plan for experimenting with “fugitive spectatorship” was simple; I would go to my local multiplex, buy a ticket and randomly move from theatre to theatre. I decided against setting a time limit for each theater, opting instead to leave a film upon my first presentiment of narrative understanding. I also set no artificial stopping point for the whole experiment, assuming I would stop when the experiment ceased to be rewarding. Furthermore, I resolved to consider my experience as a unified event, as one whole film rather than a series of fragments from many. There are three central questions I hope to answer with this experience: first, in what respects does this mode of spectatorship alter the way I experience films; second, to what extent does viewing conventional films in a surrealist fashion create an experience that is akin to the aesthetics of actual surrealist/avant garde films contemporary to Breton. The third question I sought to answer was related to the value of “fugitive spectatorship;” does it really redeem films; is it really a “marvelous” experience that reinvigorates the imagination?
The first thing I should report about my experiment is the sense of reluctance and disappointment that preceded my trip to the theatre. It was vaguely unsettling to know that I was foregoing the conventions of an experience that I usually find rewarding. I must admit that, even if Breton’s assertion that conforming to accepted practices stifles and circumscribes the imagination is correct, I find the ritual of going to see movies (even really bad ones) comforting and reassuring. I was able to overcome my hesitancy, but a nagging sense of unease stayed with me throughout my experience.
After arriving at the multiplex, I headed for the nearest theatre. I entered, and began to watch. What follows is a summary of the experience. Because I was interested in viewing this group of fragments as one film, I will relate the images without pausing to note moments at which I left one theatre for another. Since Breton demands that surrealist enterprises be carried out “in the absence of any control exercised by reason,” I will try to convey my experience in a way that is as unmediated as possible, saving my commentary and analysis for a later portion of this essay.
…in Hamlet characters reveal deep truths about themselves and others through their reactions to dramatic shows, but additionally, they often structure their own behavior as performances in order to negotiate the complex demands of their situations. Similarly, the public displays of suffering performed and witnessed by the characters in Crime and Punishment have the effect of reorienting the characters in their world. What I found interesting about these texts is the fact that both seem to assert the notion that the performance-proper (the play or the public spectacle) is an incomplete event, one that is dependent on the audience’s response to supply aesthetic value. To be more specific, the ways in which the audience itself enacts its spectatorship can be seen as a kind of necessary secondary performance that rounds out the artistic experience. Imagine, for example, the very different Hamlet we would have if Claudius had enthusiastically received Hamlet’s “Mousetrap” play, or if Queen Gertrude had, out of sheer boredom, nodded off during her son’s spectacular duel and, as a result, slept through any opportunity to toast the affair. In this project, I will attempt something similar. By modifying the ways in which I perform my own spectatorship, I intend to explore the mutability of artistic performances and experiences.
The prose are kinda academic and were not really intended for a blog. From here on out the rest of the paper is about film. Read on if you like; I’m hoping for this to be the first of several essays I post on this site.
I have decided to focus on the artistic medium of the cinema in order to experiment with the conventional approach to artistic performances. This choice stems, first, from my general interest in film; but more importantly, I was inspired to recreate the approach to films used by members of the Surrealist movement in the early 20th century. The film scholar, Greg Taylor, describes the method by which Andre Breton and other surrealists would become “fugitive spectators of film spectacle who entered and left theaters between plot points.” By moving from film to film, the surrealists eschewed any sort of narrative understanding of the films, in favor of a jumbled juxtaposition of scenes, textures, sounds, and images. Taylor explains that the films’
“storytelling got in the way of reverie—dragging down, literalizing, stifling the images (which themselves were uncrafted magical apparitions). It was up to the surrealist critic to purify the medium, play up its mysterious dreamlike nature, emphasize the uncanny ability of the cinematic apparatus to transform the ordinary into the marvelous. The critic thus liberated the movie behind the movie; it was not the movie everyone else saw, the one the Hollywood technicians thought they had made. That film was terrible; it was worth watching, only because it might be remade into something much more interesting, aesthetic even.”
While I cannot say that I necessarily share Taylor’s cynical assumption that all narrative, Hollywood cinema, taken on its own terms, is wholly worthless, I am intrigued by the possibility of enriching the cinematic experience by encountering it in alternative ways.
But what drove Breton and his cadre to become “fugitive spectators?” In his first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton discusses the nature of the modern experience of the imagination, writing that, “experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to emerge”. Breton’s surrealist project is to liberate experience from this circumscribed world by reasserting the role of dreams and imagination in reality. For Breton, aesthetic experiences come to relate to his project only with respect to their ability to liberate the imagination through their “marvelous” qualities . He writes, “let us not mince words, the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful…Only the marvelous is capable of fecundating work which belong to an inferior category [this includes,] generally speaking, anything that involves storytelling” . Given conventional cinema’s emphasis on narrative, it is safe to say that movies, for Breton, would certainly be consigned to this inferior category. Perhaps, then, his “fugitive spectatorship, can be seen as an attempt to redeem movies by obscuring their stories and finding in them an imaginative, “marvelous” potential. What exactly is “marvelous?” Among sources of the marvelous, Breton includes “fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, [and] the taste for things extravagant.” These qualities will come be central parts of my experience.
It should be said that Breton’s description of a modern world from which the imagination is banished and circumscribed by rationalism and common-sense can aptly be applied to conventional Hollywood cinema and modern American modes of movie exhibition. Our multiplexes work with the rigid efficiency of an assembly line: ticket, popcorn, 90 minutes in the dark, in bed by ten. Meanwhile, with respect to content and quality, the imagination of Hollywood appears crippled by common-sense concerns for economic practicality and efficiency; so many of Hollywood films are built from endlessly recycled plots and tired visual clichés. Can surrealist spectatorship really find something beautiful in such a system? Can it reassert the imagination in a “civilization that has managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition or fancy, [a civilization] that forbids any kind of search for the truth that is not in conformance with accepted practices?” To these questions Breton enigmatically answers, “The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms.”
The Experiment
My plan for experimenting with “fugitive spectatorship” was simple; I would go to my local multiplex, buy a ticket and randomly move from theatre to theatre. I decided against setting a time limit for each theater, opting instead to leave a film upon my first presentiment of narrative understanding. I also set no artificial stopping point for the whole experiment, assuming I would stop when the experiment ceased to be rewarding. Furthermore, I resolved to consider my experience as a unified event, as one whole film rather than a series of fragments from many. There are three central questions I hope to answer with this experience: first, in what respects does this mode of spectatorship alter the way I experience films; second, to what extent does viewing conventional films in a surrealist fashion create an experience that is akin to the aesthetics of actual surrealist/avant garde films contemporary to Breton. The third question I sought to answer was related to the value of “fugitive spectatorship;” does it really redeem films; is it really a “marvelous” experience that reinvigorates the imagination?
The first thing I should report about my experiment is the sense of reluctance and disappointment that preceded my trip to the theatre. It was vaguely unsettling to know that I was foregoing the conventions of an experience that I usually find rewarding. I must admit that, even if Breton’s assertion that conforming to accepted practices stifles and circumscribes the imagination is correct, I find the ritual of going to see movies (even really bad ones) comforting and reassuring. I was able to overcome my hesitancy, but a nagging sense of unease stayed with me throughout my experience.
After arriving at the multiplex, I headed for the nearest theatre. I entered, and began to watch. What follows is a summary of the experience. Because I was interested in viewing this group of fragments as one film, I will relate the images without pausing to note moments at which I left one theatre for another. Since Breton demands that surrealist enterprises be carried out “in the absence of any control exercised by reason,” I will try to convey my experience in a way that is as unmediated as possible, saving my commentary and analysis for a later portion of this essay.
...
I entered the theatre to find Howard Hughes looking at airplanes. This gives way to a mountain of books being set ablaze. As the flames spread, yellow bulldozers feed more and more books to the growing fire. The Rolling Stones sing, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” growing to a climax as the camera moves closer and closer into the fire, until the flames of the burning books fill the screen. A sickly woman lies in a hospital bed plaintively speaking with her teenaged daughter. Through her tears the daughter explains why she had hated her mother and why she now wants to reconcile. She promises to quit smoking. The two women embrace before the daughter leaves, driving her sports car though the nighttime streets of a city. Meanwhile the mother produces a love-letter from beneath the blankets of her pale hospital bed. The voice of an unseen man exclaims his unyielding devotion to her and her withered face smiles. Next, a young man franticly splashes through the dank, green darkness of a cave shouting out for his mother. He finds a woman bound and gagged in a dark recess and works to free her. A white haired man emerges from the shadows and strikes the young man. They struggle. A pair of garden sheers flashes before being thrust into the white-haired man’s chest. He falls and sinks into a pit of putrid muck filled with decomposing bits of corpses. The young man and the woman hold hands while emerging from a garage and the wind blows slowmotion through their hair. Two lovers in bed wonder if they will ever see one another again. At a dusty desert gas station, the voice of an unseen man says, “the trouble with seeing the future is that every time you see it, it changes something. And that changes everything.” Splashes of blue, green, and red. In an exotic, densely pact Indian train station, a bespectacled man carries a trunk. On board, he discusses Russian literature and traveling with a fellow passenger. He asks, “Have you seen this world? I mean England and America? It was like a dream.” The train crashes quickly and loudly. Protruding from the smoke and ruble of the accident, a bloody hand holds out Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” A dirty man pulls a revolver from a wall while inside a dingy motel room, and couple watches television inside their room. To the couple’s horror, scenes of murder and rape fill the TV screen. Their hotel room lights begin to flicker and their door violently rattles in its frame. Then calm returns. Mysteriously, a bright green apple appears on their sink. A wedge has been cleanly removed from it, revealing the fruit’s pure white flesh, upon which there is a crimson thumb-smudge of blood.
...
At this point I left to move to another theatre, but apparently the staff had become aware of what I was up to. An employee stopped me in a corridor between theatres and asked to see my ticket. A few other patrons were staring at this exchange. As I fumbled in my pockets, pretending to look for a ticket that didn’t exist, I realized that I probably couldn’t hope for a more surreal ending to my outing than being publicly shamed by a 16 year-old girl in an oversized, plum tuxedo holding a flashlight and broom. Slightly embarrassed, I ended my surrealist excursion.
Commentary
I would like to begin by describing the ways in which this movie-going experience differs from more traditional ones. Moving from the first two or three theatres felt like just that—moving from two or three theaters. This early part of my experience was, for the most part, frustrating. It was very difficult to cope with the desire to “just watch the movie,” to understand the images in the context of a plot. I’m inclined to think that Breton is correct when asserting that, “our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over sentiments”. In retrospect, this portion of my experience highlights the enthralling, almost hypnotic, sway narrative film can exercise over its audience.
After leaving the third or fourth film, I began to grow aware of a slightly uncanny effect of the rapid movements in and out the theaters. Typically, when I leave a theatre, there is a very brief period of time (30 second, maybe) during which the darkened world of the theatre and its movie refuse to yield their influence over me to the banal world of everyday experience. It is an experience I can only compare to those foggy moments that are between sleep and wakefulness. For me, the effects of this transitional period from a movie to real life were heightened and prolonged by this experiment. This combined with a growing disorientation that I believe originated with the confusion created by the necessity of randomly moving among the multiplex’s many identical corridors. The cumulative effect was a kind of mild anxiety that hastened me to return to the darkness of a theatre, and once there, this same anxiety seems to have had the effect of intensifying the emotional and imaginary import of the events on the screen.
I also became keenly aware of other audience members. Each time I entered a new theatre I was gripped by a kind of paranoia; I had an unshakable suspicion that the other viewers were aware that I was up to something out of the ordinary. I could almost imagine the censure of the rest of the audience. I should comment here that there was an aspect of this experience that felt transgressive in some way. Before this experiment, I do not think I fully appreciated the social dimension of seeing a movie publicly. In a sense, when we enter a movie, we enter into a pact to forge a shared experience with the others around us. I repeatedly violated this pact. Even at the time, I was aware that I was secretly enjoying a unique experience to the exclusion of those around me. It was both alienating and exciting.
It was this sense of excitement that characterized the later portion of my fugitive spectatorship. I recall, that after leaving one of the last few movies, I was impressed by the sense of freedom that I derived from considering the role arbitrary chance had to play in determining what would come next in personal film. Rather than having the potential of my cinematic encounter restricted by a preceding narrative, the possibilities seemed endless. It was left up to me to pick a new theatre and determine what might be next. In this respect, each of my possible choices became imbued with a sense of mystery.
There are several ways “fugitive spectatorship” affected the way in which I actually received the content of the films. First, as discussed above, the process induced a kind of dreaminess that both relaxed my more critical faculties and intensified my responses to the films. However, I believe this surrealist approach functions primarily by decontextualizing the onscreen events and images. I observed two effect of this decontextualization. First, removing scenes from their own context and pairing them with other previously unrelated scenes creates a sort of ironic distancing effect. For example, the juxtaposition of the saccharine, melodramatic mother/daughter exchange with the half-baked attempt at gothic suspense of the cave scene created an inverse effect. The former scene was no longer sentimental and the latter was no longer scary; instead, the combination of the two becomes comic. The second effect of surreal film-going is to remove any symbolic meaning imposed upon the image, thus creating an effectively blank slate on which the viewers imagination might play. Within my experience, the final image of the sliced apple offers an example of this effect. I’m almost certain that within the original film, the apple’s appearance is cleared up by the plot’s exposition (some drivel about it being placed there by the villain, a serial killer who grew up on an orchard, no doubt). However, freed from such associations the apple struck me as an image of both deep mystery and profound, yet inscrutable meaning.
To begin putting my foray into “fugitive spectatorship” into artistic context, I would like to compare my results with intentionally surrealist art. Luis Bunuel’s and Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou provides a point of comparison. Just as the “film” I witnessed, Un Chien’s strangeness assaults the eye through absurd non sequiturs. For example, a scene in which a man falls from his bicycle is followed by the image of a dead donkey rotting in a piano. However, Bunuel and Dali’s film is held together by a consistency in style and tone that is absent from the cinematic collage that I saw. Another point of difference is the fact that, while both films use abrupt juxtapositions of multiple images to create a sense of strangeness and dissonance, only Un Chien Andalou consistently creates this effect with single images. The scene in which an army of ants emerges from the palm of a man’s hand is one example of a self-contained surrealist image from Un Chien that was never paralleled in my experiment. I believe this ability to construct freestanding surrealist images stems from the fact that, although it may not be strictly logical or rational, there is an awareness and intelligence informing and crafting the images of Bunuel’s and Dali’s film. For example, in the movies most famous scene, a cloud slides across the moon. Then, mimicking the cloud’s movement, a razor slices the open eye of a woman. In this juxtaposition of images, we see the imaginative associations of the directors’ minds at work. Although, associations can be made between the images from the films in my experiment, they would be my own. This is the most important difference between these two surrealist approaches to film. In the case of Un Chien Andalou, there is at least a trace of an artist’s intent to be interpreted and analyzed. With respect to “fugitive spectatorship” attempts at critical analysis are essentially creative acts that reveal more about the critic’s own mind and psyche than anything else. Perhaps Wilde’s aphorism about the critic best sums up the surrealist spectator’s relationship to film. “Those who go beneath the surface [of art] do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
Conclusion
The question of “fugitive spectatorship’s” value remains. In what way is it worthwhile to meddle with films that others have labored to create and render as full, self-contained works? And where is the reward in altering the established modes of spectatorship that have functioned for so long? While my own experience does lead me to believe “fugitive spectatorship” is in many respect jut a novelty, a surrealist game, I also believe it offers certain benefits to both audiences and the cinematic medium in general. First, it liberates viewers to experience movies on a personal level. I feel that this is of prime importance, given that mainstream movies are produced to be encountered by a mass audience. The surrealist spectator is thus able to reassert a degree of individuality in the face of a system that would reduce them to an insignificant part of an anonymous crowd. Second, by reemphasizing the importance of the image, “fugitive spectatorship” redeems cinema as an essentially visual medium. By ridding the image of its reliance on narrative and preconceived notions about meaning, the surrealists realize and deliver upon what film theorist Andre Bazin sees as the prime value of the cinematic apparatus. “Only the impassive lens, stripping the object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.”
