Illustration of German pulp fiction novel by Karel Thole
Carolus Adrianus Maria Thole (1914, Netherland – 2000, Italy) is a Dutch painter. He is one of the best-known european illustrators of science fiction and the fantastique. Influenced by painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí or René Magritte his style is instantly recognizable.
See also: le fantastique
American author Dennis Cooper is a prolific blogger and he dedicates today to Georges Bataille with 11 posts:
Zazie dans le métro (1960) – Louis Malle
I viewed the French film Zazie dans le métro (1960, an adaptation of the Raymond Queneau novel) by Louis Malle yesterday, and once again I enjoyed the DVD extras (can DVD extras be considered as secondary sources or paratexts?) more than the film itself. The film is a typical nouvelle vague product (Philippe Noiret self-referentially explaining in the scene where the taxi meter spins fast forward: “Qu’est ce que tu veux, c’est la Nouvelle Vague” (eng: “What do you know, this is the Nouvelle Vague“)).
Visual experience: a pop art styled colorful bonanza of surreal visual gags. Noiret’s wife Albertine is played by the beautiful Carla Marlier and one of the protagonists is Paris (the Eiffel tower scenes!) itself.
The DVD extras feature an interview with Philippe Collin, first assistant director, in which he explains the influence of Tex Avery (he did his thesis on Avery) and the influence of American photographer William Klein (Mr. Freedom, see picture below) and his focus on graphic design, advertising neon, etc…
Publicity shot for Mr. Freedom (1970) – William Klein, reproduced on the cover of Midi/minuit fantastique nr. 20 (clicking on the picture brings you to the Midi/minuit fantastique page, where all the covers are reproduced)
Final assessment: Psychological realism 2/10, Oddity value: 7/10, feelgood factor: 7/10 (I did get bored a bit.)
Exercises in Style (1947) – Raymond Queneau
I’m in the midst of reading 1001 Books and I am in 1947 now. Time for a bit on Raymond Queneau. Using The Reading Experience as quality qualifier method explained in my previous post I came up with two interesting posts:
via Native Sensibilities:
“But then we Americans inhabit a culture that seems to find “literary” writing in general (much less the “complex negotiations” of a Perec) to be suspiciously “effete.” That American postmodernists might seem laggardly in their capacity for game-playing and their delight in “incongruity” when compared to a Georges Perec or a Raymond Queneau would no doubt strike certain no-nonsence American readers and critics as outlandish. Too many American writers disdain “psychological realism” or good old-fashioned storytelling as it is. Thus, except through the admirable efforts of publishers like Godine (publishers of Perec) or Dalkey Archive, we probably shouldn’t expect to see books by such unmanly Europeans make much of an incursion on American literary life any time soon.”
via More on Oulipo
” The Oulipo – in full, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature – was founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. “
April 1929, first edition of Documents
Undercover Surrealism explores the ’subversive climate’ of the dark undercurrent within Surrealism in the late 1920’s spearheaded by Georges Bataille. The exhibition draws together work by Picasso, Miro, Masson, Giacometti as well as imagery from the magazine Bataille edited from 1929 to 1930 called DOCUMENTS :
“..a shocking and bizarre juxtaposition of art, ethnography, archaeology and popular culture in such a way that overturned conventional notions of ‘primitive’ and ‘ideal’. Bataille described himself as Surrealism’s ‘enemy from within’… ”
The exhibition ran at the Hayward Gallery till the 30th July 2006.
Via Desert and Sea
Robert Benayoun, photocredit unidentified
Image source here
Érotique du surréalisme (1965|1978) – Robert Benayoun
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Robert Benayoun wrote in the tradition of Ado Kyrou, Eric Losfeld, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, with an absolute disregard for the perceived boundaries between low and high culture. If you follow the source link of the photograph, there is a Spanish article on Benayoun’s work Érotique du surréalisme.
Regarding the publishing house of Eric Losfeld, Éditions Le Terrain Vague, I’ve always wondered if there were German and British equivalents of it. In the United States houses such as Grove Press come to mind, but I know of no equivalents in Germany or the UK.
PCL linkdump has a trailer (listen to those drums) from the 1978 film Don and via Greencine comes the Google video of Man Ray and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy.
More on Dreams and the people who made a new soundtrack for it:
“This is a Story of Dreams mixed with Reality”.
When Marek first showed me Hans Richter’s film ‘Dreams that Money Can Buy” as a potential project, I knew from this introductory salvo that I was in. It’s a difficult, deeply flawed film in many ways but it is also remarkable, extraordinary, ground-breaking, massively influential, comic and poignant in turns. It says things about Surrealism, film, art, the American Dream, dreaming in general and the emergence of therapy-practitioners as the new priestly elite, that hadn’t been said before – and possibly haven’t since. It captures the mysterious, confusing, meaningless-meaningfulness of Dreaming in a way that few films have – apart from perhaps David Lynch’s work – and it’s obviously no coincidence that Lynch himself has declared it as a major influence. —theclerkenwellkid
Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) – Man Ray, Hans Richter
I wrote this summary on Wikipedia, feel free to contribute:
Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.
Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.
It won a special prize at the 1947 Venice Film Festival.
See also: surrealism in film
David Hudson at greencine reports on a new film by Jan Švankmajer.
Here is the trailer.
Wikipedia has this:
Lunacy, also known as Sílení is a 2005 film by Jan Švankmajer. The film is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.
And here is a sample of Švankmajer’s sculptural work:
Beethoven by Arcimboldo (1993) – Jan Švankmajer
image sourced here.
Aug 2006 update: The Evening Class has two excellent posts: one with YouTube footage here and one on Lunacy here.
Surrealist Writers
Precursors: Lautréamont . . . Rimbaud . . . Roussel . . .
Surrealists: André Breton . . . Dalí . . . de Chirico . . . Desnos . . . Duchamp . . . Leiris . . . Peret . . . Queneau . . .
“Everything leads us to believe that there is a certain state of mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, height and depth are no longer perceived as contradictory.”— André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)via http://alangullette.com/lit/surreal/
Update: After the comment of a discerning reader, I’ve decided to include a bit more of this article:
These are only my favorites, but there were and are many other excellent Surrealist Writers, including: Louis Aragon, Rene Daumal, Paul Eluard, Jacques Prevert, those listed below and others…
Other Surrealist Writer Sites
- Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), member of the surrealist group from 1938.
- David Gascoyne (1916-2001) English poet whose translations introduced the French surrealists to the English-speaking world in the 1930’s and 40’s. Considered a member 1926-39.
- Philip Lamantia (b. 1927) American poet who associated with the surrealists and inspired the Beat poets.
- Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) has been provocatively called “the only true American surrealist.”
- Among women writers active in the surrealist movement, one might list Nancy Cunard, Claude Cahun, Meret Oppenheim, Gisele Prassinos, and Valentine Penrose.
Other Surrealist and Related Sites
- Bohemian Ink has pages dedicated to “underground” contemporary writers.
- Infosurr: Actualités du surréalisme et de ses alentours (Paris)
- Magnetic Fields — home of Aesthetic Automatism, ARTlab, EAR de Jour (a Journal of Enactive Aesthetics Research Blue Feathers), Surrealists in Minnesota, etc.
- No More Words: A Non-Glossary (referenced above as Mutt), dictionary or encyclopedia of “terse factoids” and a few short excerpts covering all the major Surrealists.
- La Page Oulipo is another Oulipo site, created by Bill Allombert, Estelle Souche and Philippe Bruhat (French).
- Surrealisme.nl
- Upland Trout
Surrealist Art Sites
Institutions and Organizations
- Surrealist Art at the Louvre WebMuseum.
- The Surreal Gallery is a graphically rewarding sight.
See surrealism
