[Youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=A_jXxHeVpMQ]
If… (1969) – Lindsay Anderson
Go on. Look at me. Look at my eyes. I’ll kill you. Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and my eyes get bigger and bigger. And I’m like a tiger. I like tigers. Rrrrah!
Previous “World Cinema Classics“
Over at ArtandPopularCulture book of the month is:
Anthology of Black Humor (1940) – André Breton
While I am antipathetic to André Breton as a person – his misogyny, his homophobia, his arrogance, his misguided tyranny – I have learned to appreciate his work of tracing the literary and artistic antecedents of surrealism. In this book he successfully delineates a corpus of writers that have shaped the sensibilities central to cult fiction.
Un cadavre (A corpse) is a 1930 virulent pamphlet against André Breton organised by Robert Desnos to which dissident surrealists such as Georges Bataille contributed. Its title was based on a 1924 pamphlet by the Surrealists against Anatole France. Read more here.
The quote in the title of this post was taken from the Louis Aragon contribution to the 1924 pamphlet and translates as: “Have you ever slapped a dead person?”
Mr. Bataille loves flies. Not we: we love the miters of old evocators, the miters of pure linen to whose front point was affixed a blade of gold and upon which flies did not settle, because they had been purified to keep them away.” -André Breton
The photograph of the Papier colant et mouches is by J.-A. Boiffard, first published in 1930 as an illustration for George Bataille’s article “L’esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,” in Documents, 1930. No.8, p. 488.
Via Contact Images by Georges Didi-Huberman
See Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism and toilet philosophy.
Artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Nabokov and Raymond Roussel have been chess enthusiasts. Hans Richter and Jean Cocteau dedicated a surrealist film to it called 8 x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements which is featured on Google Video here. The music is quite nice, it sounds like a medieval/Renaissance/English folk rock harpsichord mix. Enjoy.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktaDmv_MkjI]
The Blood of a Poet (1930) – Jean Cocteau
I’ve posted on the surrealist film Un chien andalou which Luis Buñuel calls A desperate and passionate call to murder but want to pick up on it again to share some macabre and other details.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mBU4KQEWcw]
A ‘seduction’ scene
In this ‘seduction’ scene we see a man going after a woman, she recoils, he finally catches up with her and gropes for her breasts, she pushes him a way, but finally gives in overcome with desire, while he is stroking her breasts her dress disappears to reveal her naked body, causing him to gaze with pleasure into the void, she pushes him away a second time.
Imagine the scene: somewhere in 1929 Luis Buñuel is on set directing Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff in the clip above. He has on a phonograph a recording of Richard Wagner‘s Liebestod which he plays on the background. Little did he know that both protagonists, in a bizarre twist of fate would later commit suicide. Pierre in 1932, Simone in 1954. Not an actual Liebestod, but macabre enough.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNC4kF1e470&NR=1]
Full clip with music by Mogwai
There is so much to be said of this film, watch it for the ‘razor slits the eyeball scene‘ or for some of the early uses of the jarring jump cut. Enjoy.
Le Minotaure was a Parisian bookstore founded by Roger Cornaille, located at number 2, rue des Beaux-Arts.
