Category Archives: surrealism

Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism

I stumbled on the document excerpted below by researching the 1934 quote by André Breton “Have professed absolute surrealism“, and it got me to modify my page on Surrealism and give more prominence to my perennial favourite and “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille.

Apparently American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.

When considering Spanish Surrealism, André Breton’s Freudian-based models of automatism and subconscious manifestations predominantly occupy the majority of the attention given. While these frameworks are at least partially relevant within the scope of the early twentieth-century poetry and art, other models that have been overlooked deserve due attention. Namely, the philosophical approximations concerning informe (formlessness), “the excremental,” and “the ethnographic” as developed by the French thinker Georges Bataille–a renegade surrealist–are of great importance and need elucidation. Even though critics such as Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster have elaborated on these Bataillean motifs in their examination of contemporary art, the influence of these theories in early twentieth-century Spain has not been extensively examined. The contention here is that Bataille’s ideas of the twenties and thirties amplify our understanding of the literature of the poets of the literary Generation of 1927 in Spain, many of them so-called surrealists. In Michael Richardson’s words, “Bataille’s understanding concentrates on elements [like ethnography and informe] within surrealism that few critics have recognized, and thus gives us a new perspective on what surrealism may mean”.

… This dialogue [between France and Spain] is evident when considering Hispanic avant-gardists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alejo Carpentier, and others, who continually cross borders and establish a correspondence between the Parisian, Hispanic, and Catalan artistic ambiences. Of particular interest here is a detailed examination of this rethinking of the surreal (in Bataillean terms) in one of the most disputed works of the period on the Spanish front: Federico García Lorca’s 1929 collection of poems Poeta en Nueva York. –David. F Richter via ~david.f.richter/Informeing%20Lorca2.pdf

Robert Monell on Alain Robbe-Grillet

Anicée Alvina in Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974)

Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s 1974 Glissements progressifs du plaisir… breaks numerous aesthetic and cultural boundaries and is not an easy film to watch as I found out during a mid 1970’s screening in Manhattan, with Robbe-Grillet in attendance, where I suddenly found myself so repulsed by the film’s transgressive imagery and atmosphere that I had to suddenly bolt the theater for fresh air. In the lobby I found myself faced with Robbe-Grillet himself, who was awaiting the post-movie discussion. He smiled as our eyes met for a second. I wanted to apologize or explain, but I didn’t say anything. He seemed to understand and proved to be a very modest and witty commentator on his own work. —Robert Monell

Anicée Alvina died last November. She was 52.

Anicée Alvina est morte le vendredi 10 novembre 2006, à l’âge de cinquante-deux ans, a-t-on appris hier. Comédienne par passion, plus caméléon que carriériste, « plutôt du genre rock’n’roll », selon ses propres termes, Anicée Alvina, l’égérie d’Alain Robbe-Grillet et de Gérard Blain, avait réussi à mener un parcours exigeant et multiple, passant même un moment à la chanson et à la scène au sein du groupe de rock Ici Paris. –via Le coin du cinéphage

Staying with Alain Robbe-Grillet, I just found a very interesting interview with him:

A.R.-G. Quand on [Alain and Catherine] s’est mariés j’étais pour la fidélité conjugale et c’est elle, tout de suite, qui m’a expliqué que c’était une idée assez sotte et probablement peu viable, que les messieurs avaient besoin de chair fraîche, et les dames aussi. Que ce qu’il fallait, c’était s’entendre bien. Le premier livre de Catherine, L’Image, écrit en 1957 peu avant notre mariage, endossait mes fantasmes sado-érotiques de la même façon que le livre de Dominique Aury, Histoire d’O, décrit, en réalité, ceux de Jean Paulhan. Peu à peu, Catherine a découvert qu’elle aimait inverser le fantasme et même, maintenant, se spécialiser dans la domination. Elle est une dominatrice passionnelle, le contraire d’une professionnelle, il n’est jamais question d’argent et comme c’est assez rare, sa cour est très étendue. —lire.fr

Serendipity

Searching for kafka+gogol+nose+metamorphosis (inspired by Todorov’s likening of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Gogol’s The Nose) I re-find Alan Gullete. And via Alan I find Danill Kharms whose photograph below is striking to say the least.

Daniil Kharms, photo credit unidentified

Daniil Kharms (1905 – 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Kharms lived in debt and hunger for several years until his final arrest on suspicion of treason in the summer of 1941. He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1. and died in his cell in February, 1942 — most likely, from starvation. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniil_Kharms [Nov 2006]

Via Alan Gullette http://alangullette.com/lit/absurd/ who I’ve mentioned before here. His literary entry page features pages supernatural, surreal, absurd, et al literature.

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki
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Book Description
Before Toshio Saeki worked in his current palette of bright colors, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary color. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki’s disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. Early Works also includes the panel-by-panel replication of a Saeki manga story. Japanese Text Only

Please note that Catherine Robbe-Grillet has contributed to this book.

More here and here and more Japanese erotica here.

Story of I (1997) – Jo Anne Kaplan

Story of the Eye is easily one of the most enduring texts of the 20th century, I just discovered this version which was new to me:

GB, 1997, 23 Min.
Jo Anne Kaplan, London

A woman sits alone in a bare, white-tiled bath, reading George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. The bizarre events described by the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold, she becomes the “eye” of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, “Story of I” plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside-out. The eye in the vagina, seen through blood, urine and tears, looks at itself in the mirror. —http://www.transmediale.de/97/english/25.htm [Nov 2006]

In a major Hayward Night for the Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition, animate! joins forces with Halloween to present The New Flesh, a visceral evening of musical and cinematic interventions exploring Georges Bataille’s trademark themes of sex and death, and the legacy of his dissident surrealism in popular culture.

The New Flesh provides a rare chance to see the highly explicit and provocative mistress-piece Story of I (1997, UK, 21 mins), Jo Ann Kaplan’s improvisation on Georges Bataille’s infamous Histoire de l’Oeil. The film is a gender-twisting meditation on the erotic extremities of human desire, a highly explicit journey through the sexual foundations of Western visual culture and the intimate terrains of male and female bodies. With a feminine hand, Story of I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina and, seen through the blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror. —animateonline.org [Nov 2006]

See also: Story of the Eye

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park
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I saw this on MTV Europe (an Asian cinema feature) yesterday evening. Impressive, but not as good as for example Alex van Warmerdam. All in all a surreal, film noirish, arty affair.

The previous Korean film I had seen was the 1999 Lies, which I had chosen because of its subject matter (although the respresentation of which disappointed me). What I liked best about Lies was its breaking of the fourth wall: excerpts from interviews with the author and cast are sometimes inserted between scenes and we see a girl filmed after the ‘cut’ signal of a particularly emotional scene (she continues crying).

After having seen these two films it appears to me that these two Korean filmmakers take the art of art film as seriously as European filmmakers did in the sixties.

Wikipedia: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

See also: revengefilm2002Korea

Metamorphoses

Unknown engraving of Heliades turning into trees

Metamorphoses of any kind have always interested me because of their uncanniness. I recently re-viewed The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) by Roger Corman in which a plant becomes a carnivore, and after it has eaten a number of people, the last buds of the plant open and reveal the faces of the people it has eaten. Voilà, man is crossed with a flower –> metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis is a frightening and intriguing concept which can take many forms: crosses between humans and plants, objects and humans, etc…

A particular variety of metamorphosis is people turning into furniture. So I found two stories in which humans transform into chairs: the French libertine novel Le Sopha, conte moral (1742) by Crébillon fils and Japanese short story The Human Chair (1925) by Edogawa Rampo. In both stories a man becomes a sofa, in the former quite literally so (by a curse), in the latter, a man hides in sofa to feel the persons who sit in him.

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various

Sade / Surreal (2001) – Various
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Found the excellent German non-fiction book titled Sade / Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild. It is a 2001 book on Sade published by Tobia Bezzola, Michael Pfister, Stefan Zweifel with text by Michel Delon, Ursula Pia Jauch, Tobia Bezzola, Jacques Mayer and Stefan Zweifel.

Porte de sortie du parc des plaisirs, de la chasse du Prince
One of the many illustrations that grace the book above, image sourced here.

Why is it excellent. Lots of illustrations. I will give the list of all the work I was not familiar with:

See also: Sadesurrealism

Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill

Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983) – Frank Northen Magill
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Search terms used: Christine Brooke-Rose, Scholes, Todorov

Before proceeding too much further, however, it should be noted that horror and fantasy do have qualities in common. They both require that readers engage, according to W.R. Irwin in The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976), in a conspiracy that agrees to suspend the rules of everyday (8-9). Readers must invest strong psychological belief in the literary worlds that are presented. Gary K. Wolfe, in his essay “The Encounter with Fantasy” (in Schlobin ed.), correctly points out that this is more than the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Samuel Coleridge first observed and so many scholars have slavishly followed since (including J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-Stories”). —FANTASY VERSUS HORROR In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature via http://wpl.lib.in.us/roger/F-VS-H.html

See also: fantastic literature