Surrealist Cinema: Politics, History, and the Language of Dreams

Surprisingly, the canon of Surrealist cinema is comprised of only a few films, with the addition of a small number of subsequent works deemed “Surrealist” in inspiration. The total cinematic output of Surrealism is actually dwarfed by the sheer volume of painting, poetry, and discursive texts produced in and around the Surrealist movement. The existence, however, of such a small number of truly Surrealist films belies the central position that the cinema holds in the aesthetic and political project of Surrealism, for it is precisely through the concern with cinematic representation—its specific language, strategies, and effects—that the Surrealists were able to work out crucial problems of mediation between the individual and the collective, the unconscious and the social—between “fantasy” and “reality” so to speak.1 In discussions of Surrealism it seems almost axiomatic to subscribe to a division between the “realms of dream, myth, and the unconscious” on the one hand and discourses of the “social, political, and intellectual” on the other. (In fact, the Surrealists' militant assault on traditional forms of logic and reason would seem to imply this.) And yet, importantly, because of its peculiar “impression of reality” and the unprecedented psychic engagement of its viewer, the cinema came to provide a way out of the theoretical impasse created by conceiving a distinction between “real” events (the reality of history) and the unconscious world of desire.

In this context, which is the context of the cinema as an apparatus and as an institution, to acknowledge the political impact of Surrealism is to redefine the political itself, to consider the discourse of the psyche as one among a variety of discourses (economic, social, ideological, and so forth) which intersect to form the social field. Surrealist filmmakers used strategies of disruption, provocation, and disjunction not only