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have they no other purpose than to be this Marie, this Jean, and this PetitPaul?
It's not possible! There must be something more."
Certainly there is something more.
The cinema is its herald.
' Francis Poietevin (1854-1904) was a minor Symbolist poet.
' A reference toJacques Copeau's famous Theatre de Vieux-Colombier, which he founded
in 1913 with the help of the writers associated with the Nouvelle Revuefranfaise.
'Jean Choux (1887-1946) was a Swiss journalist and film critic who directed a haJfdozen
films in Switzerland and France between 1925 and 1929, and then hit the jackpot
withjean de la Lune (1931).
JEAN GOUDAL, "Surrealism and Cinema"
Translated by Paul Hammond in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Suma/ist Writings on the Cinema,
ed. Paul Hammond (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 49-56. Reprinted by permission.
The original French text first appeared as "Surrealisme et cinema" in La Revue hebdomadaire
(February 1925), 343-57.
ANEW TECHNIQUE is born: immediately the philosophers come run.fining,
armed with false problems. Is it an art?-Is it not an art?-Is it
even worthy of interest?
"In short," some of them say, "the cinema is only a perfected form of
photography." And they refuse to credit the new invention.
The indispensable extremists assume the other position. They tell us,
"Not only is the cinema an art, it will, moreover, gradually absorb all the
other arts" (Monsieur Marcel L'Herbier, in a lecture at the College de
France, repeated in Geneva during October 1924 at the showing in that
town ofL'Inhumaine (1924}, previously published in La Revue hebdomadaire
in 1923). The proof: the cinema takes the place ofarchitecture (30 meters
devoted to the palaces in The ThiefofBagdad (1924}), music (a Negro jazz
band goes through the motions for 20 meters), dance (25 meters on a tango
by Valentino). Were they to draw the obvious conclusions from their ludicrous
logic they would have us believe that in future our meals will be
replaced by the image ofCharlie Chaplin and the Kid tucking into a plate
ofpancakes.
"Given its basic technical strictures, how do we see the future ofthe cinema?"
Now that's a more realistic question. To establish the correctness of
it, to begin to answer it, we need briefly to consider the evolution of the
other arts.
We see each of them in their turn follow the same general pattern.
First, they escape literary contamination (the renunciation of figurative
painting, of thematic music); next they renounce the constraint of logic,
considered an intellectual element restricting sensory freedom, in favor of
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inquiring after their guiding principles in terms oftheir technique (Cubism,
musical impressionism).
(You can already foresee the third stage: thirsting for total liberty, artists
will thrust aside the last support of technique and claim the right to bring
into play, without any modification, the very material forming the basis of
their art.)
We do not want to conceal the excessive simplification of these views or
the dangers inherent in them; but nobody can contest this conclusion: in
the evolution ofevery art there comes a moment, which may or may not be
deplored, when the artist ignores every command of intellectual or logical
origin in order to question the technical possibilities of his art. To us this
moment appears to have arrived for the cinema.
Let us open a short parenthesis here on a literary movement whose
origins are not recent, but which manifests itself at present in a very noisy
way.
We know the essential character of the Surrealist theses (we find an authentic
expression of them in Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism
{1924}): that the unconscious activity of the mind, on which general attention
has been focused through the work of thinkers like Freud and
Babinski' or the novels ofauthors like Marcel Proust, has become the keystone
of mental life. The artist's principal target is henceforth to search for
a reality in the dream superior to that which the logical, therefore arbitrary,
exercise of thought suggests to us. On the one hand Surrealism presents
itself as a critique of existing forms of literature, on the other as a
complete renewal of the field and of artistic method and even, perhaps, as
the renovation of the most general rules of human activity: in short, the
absolute overthrow of all values.
You might think that objections to Surrealism (about which, however,
you cannot deny the relative fruitfulness) are not lacking. Monsieur Andre
Breton, even, shows himself to be ecstatic about the obstacles which already
present themselves: "To its conquest {surreality} I go, certain of not
getting there, but too heedless of my death not to calculate a little the joys
ofsuch possession."
The potential difficulties seem to us capable of being subsumed under
two principal headings.
First, an objection as to method. It is not easy to determine if the Surrealists
situate a superior reality in the dream itself, or in a sort of union or
adjustment, difficult to imagine, of the two states, dream and reality. In
both cases the same objection arises. Ifyou admit that dream constitutes a
superior reality, there will be insurmountable practical problems in attaining
and fixing this dream. As soon as consciousness succeeds in rummaging
through the unconscious you can no longer speak of the unconscious. On
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the other hand if you accord a superior reality to a mystical fusion of the
real and the dream, one cannot see by what means one can make two areas,
by definition incommunicable, communicate with each other. (Our intention
of progressing quickly here may lend too schematic an allure to our
arguments. Furthermore, our real objective is not a critique ofSurrealism.)
The second order of objection touches more profoundly on the antilogical
ambitions ofSurrealism. Men have had the habit for so long now of
using a language to communicate with each other that one asks if they can
ever renounce this kind ofusage. In short, what we call reason is the part of
our mind common to all men: if it is to disappear will we not lapse into an
individual, incommunicable mode of expression? "I believe more and
more," writes Monsieur A. Breton (Manifesto ofSurrealism), "in the infallibility
of my thought in relation to myself." Monsieur A. Breton is right;
but why then have this "spiritual and mental mechanism" of Monsieur A.
Breton's, once fixed in its absolute ingenuity valid only for Monsieur A.
Breton himself, printed and published? Is it not so that we can make a
comparison between his mind and our mind, and is this comparison even
possible without some essential reference that only reason and logic can
supply?
One fact seems remarkable to us. The objections we have just sketched
out lose their value as soon as one applies the Surrealist theories to the domain
of cinema. (That the theorists of Surrealism have wanted to apply
their ideas to literature, that is to say just where they are most contestable,
should not be too surprising since the same pen suits the theorist and the
poet.) Applied to the technique ofcinema the correctness and fecundity of
the Surrealist thesis is all the more striking.
The objection to method (the difficulty of uniting the conscious and the
unconscious on the same plane) does not hold for cinema, in which the
thing seen corresponds exactly to a conscious hallucination.
Let's go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the
darkness. On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen
where for two hours it will remain fixed. Life in the street outside no longer
exists. Our problems evaporate, our neighbors disappear. Our body itself
submits to a sort oftemporary depersonalization which takes away the feeling
ofits own existence. We are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square
meters of white sheet.
But we must beware of vague analogies. It is better here to go into de-
tails.
Monsieur A. Breton, wanting to establish the superiority of the dream,
writes: "The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by whatever
happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility arises no more." And,
he asks, "what reason, what reason better than another confers this natural
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allure on the dream, makes me welcome unreservedly a host ofepisodes the
strangeness of which strikes me as I write"?
The answer to this question lies in what Taine2 used to call the "reductive
mechanism of images." When we are awake the images surging into
our imagination have an anemic, pale color which by contrast makes the
vigor and relief of real images stand out, the ones, that is to say, we get
through our senses: and this difference of value is enough to make us distinguish
the real from the imagined. When we sleep our senses are idle, or
rather their solicitations do not cross the threshold of consciousness and,
the reducing contrast no longer existing, the imaginary succession of images
monopolizes the foreground; as nothing contradicts them we believe
in their actual existence.
Awake, we imagine the real and the possible all at once, while in the
dream we only imagine the possible. The Surrealists see an advantage in
what, they say, one is used to seeing as inferior. Without going into the
legitimacy of this paradox, let us return to the cinema. There we see a
whole host ofmaterial conditions conspire to destroy this "reductive mechanism
of images." The darkness of the auditorium destroys the rivalry of
real images that would contradict the ones on the screen. It is equally important
to ward off the impressions that can come to us through our other
senses: who has never noticed the special nature of music in the cinema?
Above all else it serves to abolish a silence that would let us perceive or
imagine auditory phenomena ofa realistic order, which would damage the
necessary uniqueness of vision. And what spectator has not been embarrassed
at times during the showing ofa film at the attention he was giving,
despite himself, to the music? In reality the only music that would suit the
cinema would be a sort ofcontinuous, harmonious, monotonous noise (like
the humming of an electric fan), the effect of which would be to obdurate
the sense of hearing in some way for the duration of the show.
Someone might object that these are conditions common to all forms of
spectacle and that even in the theater the darkness is there to facilitate the
audience's concentration on the stage. But let us observe that the individuals
performing on a theater stage have a physical presence that strengthens
the trompe l'oeil of their setting; they have three-dimensionality, they live
amidst the noises of normal life; we accept them as our brothers, as our
peers, while the camera aspires to give the illusion of reality by means ofa
simulacrum of a uniquely visual kind. An actual hallucination is needed
here which the other conditions ofcinema tend to reinforce, just as, in the
dream, moving images lacking three-dimensionality follow each other on a
single plane artificially delimited by a rectangle which is like a geometrical
opening giving on to the psychic kingdom. The absence of color, too, the
black and white, represents an arbitrary simplification analogous to those
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one meets in dreams. Once again let us note that the actual succession of
images in the cinema has something artificial about it that distances us
from reality. The persistence of images on the retina, which is the physiological
basis of cinema, claims to present movement to us with the actual
continuity of the real; but in fact we know very well that it's an illusion, a
sensory device which does not completely fool us. Ultimately, the rhythm
of the individuals we see moving on the silent screen possesses something
jerky about it that makes them the relatives of the people who haunt our
dreams.
We must add one last analogy. In the cinema, as in the dream, the fact
is complete master. Abstraction has no rights. No explanation is needed to
justify the heroes' actions. One event follows another, seeking justification
in itself alone. They follow each other with such rapidity that we barely
have time to call to mind the logical commentary that would explain them,
or at least connect them.
(Summary considerations, no doubt, but ones that allow us to make
short work of certain illusions about the advisability of adding "improvements"
like color, relief or some kind of sound synchronization. The cinema
has found its true technique in black and white film-forget threedimensionality
and sound. To try to "perfect" it, in the sense of bringing
it closer to reality, would only run counter to and slow down its genuine
development.)
The cinema, then, constitutes a conscious hallucination, and utilizes
this fusion of dream and consciousness which Surrealism would like to see
realised in the literary domain. These moving images delude us, by leaving
us with a confused awareness of our own personality and by allowing us to
evoke, if necessary, the resources ofour memory. (In general, however, the
cinema only demands from us memory enough to link the images.)
The cinema avoids the second order ofdifficulty raised by Surrealism just
as happily.
Though the complete repudiation of logic is forbidden language, which
is born ofthis logic, the cinema can indulge itself in such repudiation without
contravening any ineluctable internal necessity.
"The strongest image is the one that has the greatest degree of arbitrariness,"
declares Monsieur A. Breton, who cites, among other examples,
this image from Philippe Soupault: "A church stood dazzling as a bell."
The word church, encompassed, by virtue of language, within a system
oflogical relations, just as the word bell is, makes the very fact ofpronouncing
these two words, of comparing them, evoke these two systems, makes
us make them coincide. And, as they are not juxtaposable, the reader bridles
at accepting the comparison.
On the other hand when the cinema shows us a dazzling church then,
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without transition, a dazzling bell, our eye can accept this sequence; it is
witnessing two facts here, two facts which justify themselves. And if the
two images succeed each other with the necessary rapidity, the logical
mechanism which tries to link the two objects in some way or other will
not have time to be set in motion. All one will experience is the almost
simultaneous sight of two objects, exactly the cerebral process, that is to
say, that suggested this comparison to the author.
In language the foremost factor is always the logical thread. The image
is born according to this thread, and contributes to its embellishment, its
illumination. In cinema the foremost factor is the image which, on occasion,
though not necessarily so, drags the tatters of reason behind it. The
two processes, you see, are exactly inversed.
The above tends to demonstrate that not only does the application of
Surrealist ideas to the cinema avoid the objection with which you can
charge literary Surrealism, but that surreality represents a domain actually
indicated to cinema by its very technique.
Just leaf through the dreamed poems Monsieur A. Breton has collected
together at the end of his Manifesto, under the title ofSoluble Fish, and you
will see, perhaps, that the surest way of making the public accept them
would be to treat them like film scenarios.
The adventures of the crate penetrated by human arms, sliding down
hillsides, bashing against "trees that cast bright blue sunlight on it," then
running aground on the first floor of a run-down hotel, and which is found
to contain only starch, and the mysterious voyage· of the barque which is
the poet's tomb following the closing of the cemetery, and the tribulations
of the lamppost, and the chase after the woman who has left her veil with
her lover, a source of miracles and inexplicable bliss, so many marvelous
tales with enough anacoluthon inevitably to shock the reader, but which,
brought to the screen, would perhaps be accepted with delight by the spectator.
The latter would see in its teeming lapses oflogic no more than thousands
of details, comic and strange, all ingenious.
It is time cineastes saw clearly what profits they may gain in opening up
their art to the unexplored regions of the dream. Up till now this has only
been done intermittently, as if by default. They should lose no time in imbuing
their productions with the three essential characteristics of the
dream, the visual, the illogical, the pervasive.
THE VISUAL
The cinema is already so by force of circumstance.
It will remain so exclusively.
(There is nothing for it to fear, we repeat, from the paltry attempts at
phonographic synchronization.)
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THE ILLOGICAL
Everything that is foolish about cinema is the fault of an old-fashioned
respect for logic.
Sentimentality is the respect for logic within the framework of feeling.
(All elegance, all unselfconsciousness results from the severing of one or
more links in the traditional chain offeelings.)
The feuilleton is the respect for logic within the framework of episodes.
(I term feuilleton any sequence ofevents whose unfolding, using basic characters
and situations, can be understood by the average concierge.)
Slowness is the respect for logic within the framework of situations and
gestures.
Etc.
THE PERVASIVE
But if you are to bring to the screen only various illogical series of images,
assembled according to the most capricious associations of ideas,
don't you risk alienating the public?
First, we reply that we are suggesting only one possible direction for the
cinema here. Other ways remain open besides this one. Bit by bit the education
of the public will occur.
Next, we feel we must not lose our footing through complete incoherence.
Man is only interested in what is close to him. I am interested in my
dreams, despite their coherence, because they come from within me, because
I find a particular quality in them belonging no doubt to what I can
recognize in them ofelements ofmy past life, though arbitrarily assembled.
These memories are my own; but I have difficulty in identifying them. For
want of a better word this is what I mean by the expression: the dream is
pervasive.
This property of the dream is strictly personal, one can see that. How
can a film, which must address itself to thousands ofspectators, manage to
be pervasive?
This is the place to reintroduce the human dimension.
One of Surrealism's points of departure is the observation that everything
that emerges from the mind, even without logical form, inevitably
reveals the singularity of that mind. Man retains his personality (all the
more so perhaps) in his most spontaneous productions.
A film, then, will have a sufficiently pervasive and human character because
it will have come from the brain ofone of my peers.
We now come up against a serious problem. In the actual process ofcinema,
a film does not have one creator, it has two, three, ten, fifty. One man
supplies the scenario, which usually consists ofan extremely brief outline.
This scenario is taken up by the director, who develops it, fills it out with
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detail, in short brings it to the level of practical realization. It remains to
note the contribution of each artist, the suggestions of the costume and
prop departments, the requirements of the lighting technicians. During
the course of such a many-sided collaboration doesn't the work risk losing
the singular quality it owed to the individuality of the author, the singularity
of its first conception?
This difficulty is, we believe, only temporary and soon tends to disappear.
It is due to the exceptional conditions created by the too-rapid growth
of the cinema. The cinema has met with such success since its beginnings
(it is barely thirty years old, remember) that it has had to cope with demands
disproportionate to its means. The public expects new films every
week. To create them is the work ofmany. You employ whomever you can.
Let us give the division of labor and the necessary specialization the time
to find their way. Then, beginning with the original cell, the source idea
born in his mind, the cineaste will be able to supervise it, thanks to a technique
he must be master of, until it is seen on the screen without the idea
being bungled by a commercial organization concerned only to exploit it.
On that day the cinema will have its artists, and the question whether or
not "the cinema is an art" will thereby get an affirmative response difficult
to contest.
The cineastes are beginning to see the light.
It isn't too hard to see indications in their most recent productions that
would confirm our previsions, yet with what awkwardness is this Marvelous
in which the cinema finds its real voice still spoken of. Will results come
from the comedy film side? We have memories of certain American films,
almost without subtitles [intertitles}, in which girls, irresponsible individuals,
and animals let their whims, of the most diverting fantasy, take control
of them. Do not the recent Chaplins betray the desire to construct a
simplified setting which no over-precise detail can localize (Charlie Chaplin
being universal, the locations he performs in could be anywhere)--and
also the preoccupation with creating a dream atmosphere which is believable
and makes possible the extraordinary gestures ofthis unfortunate with
the little mustache and big feet. Remember the strange chapel with its
strange congregation in The Pilgrim [1923}, where Charlie, the bogus pastor,
delivers that strange sermon; and in Payday [1922}, Charlie, the mason
in his cups, returning to a far-off lodging house that proves impossible
to get to, and that nightmarish rain, and those futile, unreal attempts by
the drunk to get on a tram which has no destination and will always escape,
full ofeternal commuters, back into the anonymous night.
Besides this burlesque Marvelous, Charlie's unique atmosphere, there is
a place for that faery [/eerie] Marvelous certain films have already brought
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us, the essential elements of which would be the geometry ofline and the illogicality
ofdetail.
The Marvelous in the cinema, unable to utilize the infinite resources of
color, must count above all on the resources of lighting and line. Just as in
the world we inhabit no line is absolutely geometrical, so a resolutely geometrical
stylization creates a surprising atmosphere.
In The ThiefofBagdad, for instance, two details strike the spectator forcibly:
the gate of the town that opens and closes through the connecting
and disconnecting of identically formed panels, and Douglas Fairbanks
soaring above the unreal clouds on his scleroid horse. These two images
have the admirable manifest artifice of the dream.
In the same film, on the other hand, the heavy-handed Americans,
wanting to show us a monster, have laboriously sought verisimilitude and
concocted a sort of enormous lizard, instead of painting in, in broad
strokes, a clearly fantastic creature ofgeometrical cardboard. The Germans
made the same blunder when they sought to represent Cerberus guarding
Brunhild's castle (in The Nibelungen {1924}). They constructed a complicated,
naively realistic mechanism needing sixteen men to make the huge
thing move. What effort and money expended, not necessarily in vain, but
they missed the whole point!
At least we have a success in the laboratory set F. Leger designed for
Monsieur L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine. The effect of the machines used to bring
the loved woman back to life is striking, the Cubist decor coming alive and
moving in a clever frenzy.
Let us quote Monsieur A. Breton again: "No matter how charming they
may be, a grown man would think he were reverting to childhood by nourishing
himself on fairy tales, and I am the first to admit that all such tales
are not suitable for him. The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be
made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the stage of
waiting for this kind ofspider." It is the fineness of this fabric we think of
when calling for the illogicality ofthe detail. It is not without unparalleled
sorrow that man, crushed by a thousand years of logic, will renounce the
principle of identity. The American faery that we find in this same Thiefof
Bagdad (flying carpets, flames, monsters) is not much more courageous
than Perrault's, whose fairies didn't go quite so far as to change a pumpkin
into a horse or a rat into a coach, but prudently changed an animal into an
animal, an object into an object. "There are," adds Monsieur A. Breton,
"fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue." Who will
write these tales if not the cinema?
The preceding pages, we repeat, aim only at suggesting one possible direction
for the cinema.
As for the concessions needed to suit public taste, we do not think it
PART FOUR 1925-1929
useful to insist on them. There will always be enough industrialists to keep
up the old traditions, to go on adapting novels to be acted out by boxing
champions and France's most beautiful midinettes.
What the cinema has produced over a quarter of a century justifies all
our hopes. One does not fight the forces of the spirit.
JEAN GOUDAL (1895-?), as far as is known, composed just this one essay on the cinema.
'Joseph Fram;ois Felix Babinski (1857-1932) was best known for his studies on hysteria-for
example, Dimembrement de l'hysterie traditionnelle, pithiatisme (Paris: Semaine medicale,
1909).
' Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) was an influential literary historian and critic whose positivist
theory of literature attempted to explain literary works in the context of race, place,
and time period.
PAUL RAMAIN, "The Influence of Dream on the Cinema"
From "L'lnlluence du reve sur le cinema," Cinia-Cini-pour-tous 40 (1 July 1925), 8.
IF ONE TAKES inspiration from the ideas ofSigmund Freud on dreamwhich
is "untranslatable in words, [and} can only be expressed by means
ofimages"-it is quite obvious that one is correct in believing that the current
cinema is based on dream under all its guises: both the dream that is an
unconscious creation ofmoving images during sleep and the daydream that
is a subconscious creation of the waking state--two forms which have the
same cause according to certain psychologists. Moreover, inspiration is associated
with dream: like dream, it is a spontaneous manifestation of the
unconscious or subconscious which is translated into images.
Now, this-quasi-conscious, if one can say that-use of dream appears
constantly in the majority ofartistic films or real "cinema," whether it occurs
as content, as means, or merely as a sporadic element.
To cite the films which are dreamlike or use dream images would be
time-consuming, there are so many: from Sjostrom's Charette fantome [The
Phantom Carriage, 1921} to Rene Clair'sFantomedu Moulin Rouge[1925} and
Midsummer Night's Dream (in preparation),' by way of the same author's
Entr'acte [1924}, a film which has to be regarded as a type ofdream but an
incoherent one, which makes it all the more interesting. L'Inhumaine
[1924} also is of an oneiric order. As for the German productions, from
Caligari [1919}, which is a distorted vision, the oneiric delirium ofa madman,'
to Waxworks [Paul Leni, 1924}, The Hands ofOrlac [Robert Wiene,
1924}, and Warning Shadows [Arthur Robinson, 1923}, dream turns to
nightmare and nightmare to hallucination.
If the cinema is dreamlike, the reciprocal is also true: dream is like the
cinema. Without entering here into what I could call the physiology ofthe
cinema, I will show briefly how dreams and cinema are merely different,