Surrealist Film: The Stuff of Dreams

Surrealist Film: The Stuff of Dreams serves as an adequately comprehensive survey of an artistic movement that strove to approximate the workings of the unconscious mind through images on film. The goal of the surrealists—or those who pursued "super-realism" in art—was to suggest a world "bereft of all reason," with its creative impulse arising from the trauma and sociopolitical unrest brought on by World War I. Seeking to break away from the conventional linear narrative pioneered in film by the likes of Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Griffith, the early surrealists—proponents of Dadaism, emphasizing the irrational and incongruous—rocked the European art world with groundbreaking films that remain powerfully evocative even today. Intended primarily for academic use, this 39-minute program features Alan Williams (author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking), who provides a concise, no-frills overview of surrealist cinema and its most important milestones. While the source materials used here aren't of the best quality (probably taken from university collections and archival prints that have seen better days), they're sufficient to the task at hand, which is to introduce viewers to the basic tenets of the surrealist movement, its emergence in Paris in the early 1920s, and the filmmakers and films that defined surrealism in its purest form, including Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or), Salvador Dali (who contributed the surrealist dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound), Fernand Léger (Ballet Mechanique), and Man Ray. Overall, this is a fine primer on surrealist cinema, and one that will nicely complement shorts collections such as Avant Garde (VL Online-9/05) and Unseen Cinema (VL-3/06). Recommended. Aud: C, P. (J. Shannon)