Surrealist Objects and Cinema

Introduction

In order to provide a clear picture of the inspiration behind my theory of the hybrid object, this chapter will explain the notion of the surrealist object in greater detail, describing it in its various manifestations and explaining how it fits into a larger scheme of surrealist thought. I will then go on to highlight, in a shorter section, the ways in which the hybrid object differs from the surrealist object and why, in the context of film, this must be so. The chapter will conclude with a brief analysis of Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou (1929) in order to examine the way in which objects were used in a surrealist film. I will argue that although these may be considered a form of surrealist objects in cinema, they would have to be developed further and ultimately transformed if they were to make the transition from the context of short experimental films to that of the relatively popular narrative feature film after the advent of sound.

The notion of the surrealist object

Crise de conscience: crise de l'objet

In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton said that the movement's success or failure could be judged based on whether or not it succeeded to 'provoquer, au point de vue intellectuel et moral, une crise de conscience de l'espèce la plus générale et la plus grave'/'provoke, intellectually and morally, the most widespread and serious crisis of consciousness'. The surrealists sought to achieve this 'crisis of consciousness' through diverse means, all of which shared the basic characteristic of demonstrating and investigating the power of the unconscious: early surrealist experiments in automatic writing highlighted the creativity of the unconscious, and dreams, when interpreted, showed that the unconscious held valuable information about individual desire. From 1928, Breton began to speak of a 'crise de l'objet'/'crisis of the object' in Le Surréalisme et la peinture/Surrealism and Painting (1928), Qu'est-ce que le surréalisme?/What is Surrealism? (1934) and 'Situation surréaliste de l'objet: situation de l'objet surréaliste'/'Surrealist Situation of the Object: Situation of the Surrealist Object', a lecture which he gave in Prague in 1935. Like surrealism's more general 'crisis of consciousness', a crisis of objects would take place by demonstrating and attempting to increase the intervention of the unconscious in relation to objects.

The inspiration behind the surrealist object

The sixth canto of Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror found beauty in 'la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'un parapluie et d'une machine à coudre'/'the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table' and inspired the surrealists to define a surrealist object as one which brings together two objects in a place common to neither one. Lautréamont's image was considered to describe a surrealist object because objects were defamiliarised by taking them out of their usual environment: this would lead the viewer to stop ignoring these objects as a familiar part of everyday life, and to imagine a new relationship that these objects might have with their new environment. The juxtaposition of an object with another object with which it is not usually seen will lead the viewer to consider how they might be related: hence the significance of the word 'dissection', which suggests more than looking for a common bond between the two objects and instead considering how they might be used in combination, as one object.

Basic characteristics of surrealist objects and their relation to the unconscious

The surrealist object based on Lautréamont highlights three fundamental features common to all surrealist objects that the surrealists would go on to define: defamiliarisation, association and mysterious power. It was through these fundamental features that all surrealist objects demonstrated the intervention of the unconscious in relation to physical objects in waking life. In order to understand the way in which defamiliarisation, association and mysterious power are related to the unconscious, it is necessary to look to The Interpretation of Dreams, a text with which the surrealists were very familiar. In this text, Freud explained that dreams are formed based on two key processes: condensation and displacement. Objects that appear in dreams may be there because they connect a number of different thoughts: the unconscious has selected these objects not because they are necessarily important per se, but simply by virtue of their chance frequency in thoughts that are significant to the dreamer. The process by which the unconscious selects an object to represent more than one thought is called 'condensation'. Displacement refers to the way in which that object, when it appears in the dream, takes on the importance of the thoughts connected to it. The reason why dreams have a power to impress and disturb the dreamer is that, as Freud explained, while the 'manifest content' (that which actually appears in the dream) may appear ridiculous, the 'latent content' (the original thoughts) offers us important insights into ourselves. There is a mystery to dreams and their power to move us, however, because condensation and displacement make it very difficult to discover the dream's latent content, otherwise known as 'interpreting the dream'. Freud said that dreams are 'scant, paltry, laconic in comparison to the range and abundance of the dream-thoughts' and that, as a result, 'one is never certain of having interpreted a dream in its entirety'.

In the context of surrealist objects in waking life, processes of association and defamiliarisation are characteristic of the unconscious and thus point to or elicit its intervention: just as the unconscious is skilled in discovering a common element linking two important thoughts in a dream (condensation), so it will easily intervene to find similarity between objects in waking life (association). The shock of seeing an object in a new environment, or otherwise defamiliarised, also evokes the way in which the object of condensation circulates bizarrely through a dream, acting as visual representative of the original thoughts while remaining semiotically dissociated from them. The bizarre and sometimes inexplicably powerful effect of the surrealist object is comparable to the way in which unimportant objects in dreams seem inordinately important because they have taken on the significance of the thought that they represent (condensation and displacement). Breton said, in relation to a surrealist object's associations, 'malgré mon effort d'objectivité, je n'oserais prétendre avoir extrait le meilleur, ni le plus significatif'/'in spite of my...