The Inhabitants of Mythology

- part 1 in a triptych february 2014

People we meet seem human. In fact, they are often the best approximations we have of human beings. Ourselves? Not so much. We'll never know if we are monster, god, illusion, parasite, host, world, "creative nothing"... ("They say I'm human. That surprises me." "Je est un autre")
    Usually, people we meet act autonomously. They do interact with us, so we can (in a wide sense) manipulate them, but their actions are partly unpredictable. They act partly out of chance and objective necessity, and partly out of something called "free will"; their groping self-understanding and self-rationalisation, strategical (usually careerist) "life choices" and various narcissistic needs for achievements, revenge and acknowledgment/confirmation.
    Sometimes they invade our imaginary world. One notices in dreams and reveries. There, they don't act out of their own shortsighted motives. They act partly out of our needs, but mostly out of the inner dynamics of their character. They have a particular meaning and a particular striking potential.
    In our imaginary world they tend to become part of mythology.
    Still, this population have particular problems. Especially since the relationship between the biographical person and the imaginary person is underdetermined. The imaginary person is separate, has a life of its own, but since it is based on a largely intuitive assessment of the potential of the biographical person, then increased knowledge about the biographical person, as well as real changes in relationship brought about by the biographical person, may either be integrated into a revision of the potential and actually change the imaginary person, or it may be considered irrelevant to that potential and ignored.

Perhaps the most widespread "method of mythologisation" consists of looking for and developing mythological implications of the people met. Under dramatic circumstances in life this is remarkably easy, and indeed people will very willingly act out their "hidden identities" as gods and witches and vampires and secret agents; this is one of the basic mechanisms in paranoia and accessible to everyone. Fantasy stories based in the contemporary world very often rest on this idea, and ETA Hoffmann was basing an implied metaphysics on it which runs through many of his stories. Modern followers have often focused on the paranoid idea that some of the people in our surroundings are gods in fetters or in disguise. I don't know much modern fantasy, but famous examples are Jean Ray in "Malpertuis", Jack Kirby in the "Eternals" saga, Neil Gaiman in "American gods" and in the "Eternals" relaunch, China Mièville in "Kraken". But note also for example "Häxprocessens åskbetingelser" by yours truly.

 Then there are other recruitment bases for mythology than the people we meet.
    One is the spontaneous characterisation in dreams. Through means of creativity that are unconscious yet considered normal, one creates human beings, partly out of fragments and interpretations of people met.
    Another one is the character galleries of novels and classic mythology; of newspapers, ads and various other superficial appearances of celebrities. These do not have the physical appearance of real human beings, but their distinct determinations and lack of privacy makes it easy to imagine their realness, if so desired their humanity, and they may start developing imaginational autonomy and become mythological. (And, as we already noted, they might merge with people we meet, or at least occasionally possess them.)

On one level, this is of course how characters in classic mythology are mythological as well as modern celebrities, by having this combination of simpleness and significance to them, they are readily available as projection surfaces for desires and identifications on a collective level. And wherever that is realised, they therefore tend to transgress their simpleness which might be seen as only a trap.
    In fact, they work very much according to the same mechanisms as symbols. In principle: they are sticky peaks in the imaginary landscape which our fantasies, desires and associations tend to bump into, drawing from their potential to produce meaning, new connections, and emotional intensity, beyond the exhaustible and serving as something like a combination of beacons and stepping stones in the imaginary world and therefore in our orientation in the world on the whole. In fact, the relationship between symbols and mythological characters is far from elucidated. Perhaps mythological characters is just a particular class of symbols. Or a parallel case. I don't know how to circumscribe the realm of symbols.
    In many individuals, the action of the mythological characters is limited to very unsystematic, brief and pedestrian fragments of reverie, and support in rational and semi-rational modelling. People with a particular interest in the imagination or in fetishism will probably cultivate a pantheon with a little more effort, and pay more attention to the instances where characters "break through" to seemingly deliver a "message". In some people this means collecting the characters as idols or pinups or perhaps as specimens in an inner museum which itself becomes a zone of possibilities. Or an imaginary "reference group" to consult for even practical choices in life ("voices-in-the-head"-style, very useful up to the point where they start having a treacherous agenda without that being obvious). In other people, systematically developing them through experimental means such as surrealist games. In yet others, they will be utilised in the production of extensive narrative. Within this area, there is a fundamental difference but in practice pretty much of an uninterrupted continuum between on one hand free-roaming reverie, where events disenvelop entirely according to their inner dynamics, and on the other hand literary fiction, where the author imposes a more linear storytelling by sticking to an overall plan and limiting the character gallery as well as the behavior of the characters to what is considered rational as well as congruent with the plan.
    I'm sort of a novelist; weaving daily continuations and variations to reveries and dreams into an ongoing polyphonic world of imagination which seems no less real than the life biographically acted out. Occasionally I write such stories down but usually I prefer not to, partly because it takes a lot of time, but mostly because it is a nuisance to have a lot of book manuscripts lying around that people nag on you to work hard to try to get published or equally hard to publish yourself. Nevertheless, this particular method of fantasising is something that could be looked more closely upon as an example in this context: but that would be an essay in itself. Ok, I have started writing it, but I don't know if I'll finish.

 Then let's go into a completely different sphere to see another mythological recruitement base, in surrealist research: game suggestions, chance suggestions, interpretation.
    Sometimes we are looking for phantoms, imaginary friends, new members, helpful spirits, talker ghosts, ouija board broadcasters, etc; sometimes they tend to take shape when we are not looking. These are a particularly interesting category because it is not just their utilisation but also their origin which is fundamentally collective: one sees all the early steps in "autonomous entities assuming shape". Being early steps, they are very often not subjectively or emotionally convincing, they are scraps of spirits being born.
    Very often it is just a particular constellation of external characteristics or determinations. Indeed the spirit is usually shown not in its directly palpable form but only through a particular set of attributes which seems to presuppose a spirit and therefore might effectively conjur up a spirit. A bundle of traits which suggests a certain necessity; it may be the subjective necessity of the visionary paranoid, the methodical necessity of the surrealist at play, or the hidden but obvious necessity of poetry, which breeds this spark of autonomous life within these sketchy borders.
    While those, indeed fewer, entities who are more insistent may intrude in our lifes with an autonomy that makes them sometimes subjectively very scary, and this indeed one of the things that are called ghosts in everyday language.

 Yet another recruitment base to mythology, remarkably powerful, is film. Similarly to novels and celebrities, the determinations are made particularly distinct and privacy is abandoned, but similarly to people we meet, film characters appear real. That's why film characters often are the most powerful mythological candidates today. They are real and mythological, just like gods and heroes are said to have been for people in antiquity. They have flesh and movement and atmosphere and one must assume they have a history and a sense of autonomy. And there is certainly a trace of truth (as long as we don't stay to elaborate on it or expect the analogy to be very detailed!) in the popular slogan that film is still the major form of collective dreaming or collective fantasy.
    Of course, a realised film character is realised only through a script and through an actor (as Christian Andersson pointed out in passing in his brilliant essay about the Emma Peel character); the two of them are less important in forming the personality of the character, but they need to live up to it to bringing it to life. But the major components are not the same as the basic components: the major components are the components of imaginary and mythological life: realness, atmosphere and dynamics, the ability to invoke a completely convincing personality (often far more distinct or far more available than the neurotic constructions of personality in biographical humans), a completely convincing history (which may or may not be referred to), and a completely convincing extraordinary (surreal, or supernatural, if you like) significance to their appearance and actions and future; a significance which may be one that ties in with concerns, wishes and fantasies that are present and take them further, or one that seems exemplary in reminding about the greatness of scope of the reasonable tasks and the greatness of implications of everyday actions as an inspiring critique against many petty everyday civil concerns.
    But then of course it is only through one's creative response that some of this potential mythological life starts being realised, and that needs to be triggered by some specific correspondences, usually in the form of intermingling with ongoing analytical or emotional processes elsewhere in biographical or mythological life, and very often in the form of a specific attraction, which will sometimes be very similar to everyday passionate attraction, or, as some try to put it as bluntly as possible, erotic object choice.
    This difficulty is further emphasised by all those film characters which seem to follow the actors that play them rather than the named characters in the script. Many of the most powerful mythological characters from film are indeed actors who are such oracles that it seems like regardless of what role they play, they actually incarnate one and the same character, who is a spirit they're channeling, a character that lends itself to playing all these different characters in different films (similar or dissimilar). The character may even follow the actor in his/her civil life, who knows? (Nobody knows, because it is intensely uninteresting to follow actors in their daily lives.)
    My major uncertainty is where to draw the line to sift away some of the fixations that appear to be perhaps more of actual long-distance love interest than mythological sensitivity. But isn't it on a mythological level that this type of long-distance love interest makes sense? Obviously, yes, I don't know where to draw the line. There is a line. Some attractive actors are just interesting to see because they are attractive and seem real. But then, what is attraction actually? Could we turn it the other way round? Is it perhaps the case that many instances of everyday attraction too are rather cases of sensibility to mythological potential and passionate curiousness in this potential than personal attraction aiming for romance, sex or pair bonding? I can easily recall instances of passionate interest in people where such responses would seem irrelevant. So are there even instances where one would gladly follow any dynamics of events triggered into romance, sex or pair bonding even though the passionate interest is more that of mythological curiosity than personal attraction? Isn't that one particular aspect of the general phenomenology of love, and one that is commonly exalted in surrealist or other concepts of romantisation or erotisation of everyday life?
    I see a lot of film. I'm exalted by characters and actors which can be preliminary grouped for example under the following headings:
    Fully formed mythological beings
    Haunting amoeba-like unknown creatures
    Revelations from outer space
    Utopian playmates (including those imaginable in family terms)
    Human overloads
    Revelations of overwhelming beauty
    Demonic surrealist characters
    Incarnations of aspects of the self
    Examples? You want examples? That's an essay of its own. Ok, I have started writing it, but I don't know if I'll finish.

MF

Remarkable richness of reality

Horror cinema and surrealism

Partial in favour of horror? To this crime I plead guilty. Friends of mine have noted that I will seek out and enjoy odd remarkable scenes and atmospheres even in such movies that are quite obviously poorly done, poorly held together, largely banal, or quite despicable. There is an important overall lesson hidden here, in that surrealist appropriation of cinema is shamelessly hedonistic in the sense that it focuses on anything that manifests and stimulates the poetic spirit, regardless of the quality of the craft, the smartness and brilliance, the cultural value, sociological interpretations, deconstructivist interpretations, deliberate populism, cult value or irony. On the other hand, the banalities I happily endure for the sake of these scattered moments and aspects are dependent on my selective affinity for this particular genre – confronted with the same level of banality in action or science fiction, or especially comedy or porn, it won't take me many minutes to give up the waiting for moments of poetic productivity, which are probably there in those genres too.

Nevertheless, I will argue that horror is one of the major forms of popular surrealism. It very often represents that necessary fundamental break with realist conventions, both in literature, film and other media, and in life experience. Indeed, in life experience such realist conventions are even more stifling than in fiction, by reducing everything to a banal version decided by the least common denominator, represented by the least ambitious or hopeful reconstruction of a normality, denying all deep ambiguity, the complex sum of possibilities and determinations, the entire sphere of the unknown... This entire sphere of unusual events, overdetermined and multilayered reality, significant chance, adventure and radical doubt, calling all conventional consensus views and all lazy dull habit into question, is typically labelled as "supernatural", and, wherever the contrast becomes acute with the conventional reductive interpretation of things and thus the strategy of habitual work-consumption-rest treadmill, as "horrifying". So all of this fiction, the popular representations of this entire sphere of events, the popular imagination about its implications, are typically grouped together under the heading of "horror".

It must be admitted that genre conventions abound in horror cinema too, and a glaring lack of imagination is often all too obvious, but there is also a remarkable breadth of subverting, ignoring and going beyond these conventions, both in low budget fan flicks and big hollywood productions. If fantasy and science fiction seem to have to a larger extent frozen in genre conventions than horror, those two genres have somewhat less surrealist potential in that they typically play in more static "other" worlds, which are very often mere allegories or mere displacements of highly conventional quasirealist-sentimentalist drama into exotic settings and exotic makeup. In contrast, horror typically focuses on the transitions-breakthroughs-ambiguities with the "normal" world of our everyday experience, therefore potentially pedagogic-subversive as to the real exploration of such breaks/portals in real life.

This is something which horror has in common with surrealism, which typically also focuses on such convergence points characterised by ambiguity and poetic productivity. It is this inclusive-integrative-dynamic sense of reality which is a fundament of surrealism, making up the simple etymological sense of its "over-reality" as well as remaining one of the several parts of its continuous identity as historically integrating its experiences and strategies.

But what about fear? Some films make me scared, some don't the least. I think that is an aspect which is usually irrelevant for the fundamental points of horror cinema.

I will not give an overview or history of horror cinema here, nor a list of recommendations, nor a delineation-comparison with horror in other genres such as literature and comics. I will discuss some central aspects of horror cinema from the surrealist viewpoint. In an objective manner – yet inevitably my constellation of emphases will be personal.

The real strangeness of things around us

The basic convergence of surrealism and horror has its growth medium in the weird goings-on in everyday life, in the paranoid-type vigilance triggered by them and enhancing them, the willful or resistant abandoning to the attention towards the unusual, weird and potentially strongly meaningful in the world. This is about all the unusual possibilities conventionally overlooked, all the uncanny atmospheres conventionally denied or rushed through. If some horror movies still tend to lean towards on one hand stark rationalisations (it was all just a scheme carefully orchestrated to scare someone) or to bland psychologisations (it was all just imagination), it is far more common to retreat to a kind of loose piecemeal extra-scientific ideology: ghosts, spirits, powers, the supernatural – but what is that? Just a class of interpretations, ranging from lame rationalisations to imaginative mythologisations, of manifestations of the unusual and unknown in everyday life.

It is one of the main points of surrealism to not deny the unusual phenomena and their dynamism, but still reject all these more or less religious poor explanations, avoid succumbing to premature rationalisations. In the movies, let them go on with their fairytale concepts, they're not fooling us, we know that the dynamism of weird happenings, chance and significant casual events is an aspect of life itself, and such a dynamism can be remarkably effectively simulated and savoured in the particular fiction of the horror movie. It contributes to teaching us to see. It orchestrates and emphasises those poetic atmospheres where everything is hanging in suspense and anything seems possible, the moments of the surreal. On the most simple level this is obvious in films of hauntings; all these haunted houses, the poltergeists, the insistent messages and the chaotic disturbances. It's partly very banal, still often very effective, sometimes orchestrating a liberation of the anti-utilitarian, fetishistic or just poetic surrealist sense of the object, sometimes luminous juxtapositions, constellations of things, true poetic images, classic surrealist assemblage. A literally convulsive beauty is sometimes achieved in the very "over-the-top" absurdness of many stories; where strange events and convergences, personal tragedies and emotions are so densely accumulated together with the unfettered expressionism of blood and gore (for this particular line, Re-animator (1985) remains a centerpiece). In a way this is the old formula of Walpolian Gothic, plausible human reactions to implausible courses of events, the mechanics of the mind encountering the world of inclusiveness where anything is possible, the so-called paranormal or maybe the surreal. Yes, on an aesthetical level, this is clearly a kind of expressionism, but since surrealism is not an aesthetic it doesn't mind employing other aesthetics for its purposes...

Another particular point is very strong in 70s horror movies, when theatrical conventions are long abandoned but conventions of realist cinema are still not adapted; the filmmakers have the means to tell a story realistically yet they refuse for the sake of the uncanny atmospheres. They just need to take the time to zoom in on the weird details, to allow extended moments of suspense between lines of dialogue, between action and reaction, between moments, to just skip some of rationalisations or uninteresting details. Neither the directing nor the acting achievements strive primarily to give us some illusion of reality (which is just conventional anyway), but primarily to create atmospheres. This is why the much denigrated Boogey-man (1980) is such a gem, and one of the several reasons why Dario Argento is the greatest horror director today is that he has retained much of this non-realistic storytelling since the 70s.

The notion of atmosphere is partly vague – we typically connect it with situations, we may connect it with persons and objects, we definitely connect it with place. As connected to place can also be a point of convergence between horror and surrealism. The sense of "soul" of place, a sort of intense significance which can be experienced at a particular geographically located nexus, is of course what is in horror quickly interpreted as hauntings.

But it is not just haunted houses, be they the classic mansions, ruins or hospitals, or modern office buildings, factories, garages, tunnels and basements; one can find explorations of such creepy or uncanny atmospheres also in forest glades, beaches, corn fields, old trees, mountains, lakes and bogs, boats, metro systems, open squares, etc – any such place which may be associated with such an atmosphere in real life. (But that old mansion does remain a privileged place; I can't say 60s classics like The Haunting (1963) and The Innocents (1961) have lost any of their direct appeal – and modern examples like, say, Darkness (2002), The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), House of Voices (2004), Saint-John's Wort (2001), The Orphanage (2007), remain so exciting regardless of the various particular deficiencies in the scripts.) What the specific historic factors are that make these places abandoned or obsolete yet charged with meaning and unresolved conflicts varies, and will contribute much to the interpretation and less to the experience.

There are many horror films which are "site-specific" in that they probably really are the product of someone having visited a creepy place, noting "geeze, this place is scary, someone ought to make a horror movie here", and actually having gone ahead and done it. Such films (two random examples picked from the pile: Death Tunnel (2005) of an American haunted sanatorium and Catacombs (2007) of the Parisian catacombs) can actually be seen as a neighboring subgenre of the surrealist documentary-style poetic exploration of atoposes and abandoned sites. They just wanted to convey the real atmosphere of the place, and chose to do it through the piece of fiction it inspired in them.

Those depths of the minds

What is called "psychological horror" is often effectively cultivated in cinema, and also often makes sense from a surrealist perspective. Again, we may not always consider it to be scary, and we may not consider it to be a deviation from a desirable normality, but instead we may see it as more or less admirable, inspiring and informative manifestations of the real ambiguity of things and the actual accessibility of the unknown. The very paranoid-type vigilance connected with the noticing of the unusual details or the atmosphere of place, typically sooner or later leads to some kind of questioning of the self, or rather of that self-righteous phantom which is the supposed monolithic detached integrative distinct individual person. To what extent does the creative mind participate in forming the reality we perceive as external? To what extent do others partipicate in the processes we regard as our own thinking? To what extent do parts represented within us have not just distinct interests from each other, but also different modes of perception and lines of reasoning, to what extent do they have secrets from each other?

Faced with unusual enough events, most people, in a horror film like in everyday life, will ask "Am I going mad?". But doesn't madness then just become a type of hastened rationalisation, just like it was to invoke "spirits", "ghosts" or "forces"? Is just losing control, losing illusion of control, which is the scary thing, or does it have to trigger a particular acute contradiction? And the often fairly obvious psychoanalytical interpretations we can cook up – just because we can point out patterns and mechanisms that will account for the type of phenomena manifested, they nevertheless remains toothless in accounting for the very dynamism of their phenomenology. (Freud just started breaching this didn't he?) But from a surrealist viewpoint it is arguably this phenomenology and its poetic productivity which is the starting point. The worlds they invite us to, how these are included in the field of possibilities. For philosophers, such basic questions are cerebral exercises; for children, madmen and poets they are undetermined and flesh-real: Are my parents actually evil monsters? Is it all a conspiracy? Is someone hiding under my bed? Are they all dead? Am I dead? Do we embody mythological forces and play out some grand drama we don't understand? Was it I who killed my friend? Is it I who am the monster?

The beyond

Parts of this, questioning the delimitation of the self and the mind, have already started looking out at more vast perspectives. And this is perhaps another aspect of horror, the "beyond" – that which far exceeds our understanding and our schemes, Lovecraftian horror, the overwhelming. Perhaps this is an element where it is not possible to do as I have done so far, to calmly claim that surrealism and horror are interested in all the same things, only surrealism wouldn't necessarily care if they are scary or not and may in fact possibly regard the fear as merely a simple reaction against losing control when faced with the unusual – be it pleasureable or not, be it childish for proving the existence of such thresholds or admirable for being a symptom of the seriousness of the contradiction. For if the overwhelming is calmly savoured or sprightly investigated, it seems like it maybe wasn't really overwhelming, but either just an aspect of poetic hedonism in general, or something we have categorised in advance. And indeed, this perhaps remains one of the fundamental differences between religion and poetry, whether one is happy with fitting those glimpses of the strongest psychic dynamism into a traditional and socially utilisable rationalisation, or letting them remain unexplained and dynamic. Sometimes just a bit too dynamic. Difficult to handle. The centrifugal force, the vertigo – the shards of everything broken in the process...

This can be things that are just far too big, too close or too rich, as in a fit of fever or a drug trip. It can also be those situations where it is simply not possible to understand the motives of everybody else, simply not possible to communicate with them. This is when the paranoia has become not just a method but a full framework which paradoxically creates a thick transparent film between oneself and the rest of the world; it has such a wealth of meaning that it isn't possible to grasp, it isn't possible to interact with in some way which makes sense to oneself. This may be cosmic schemes, alien elder races, or it may be, as in those settings which are maybe the most scary of all; those that are very close to the common alienated interactions of our everyday life, in the streets, in the shops, at work and at school, and especially at home. All the modern zombie films, no hope, no communication, and all the most horrifying family drama, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as the unsurmountable portal star. Such critique of the family is an example of the sometimes very sharp or profound social criticism in horror. That aspect might be interesting and enjoyable, but again, just like the manifold forms of black humour, and, I dare argue, fear itself, is probably not among the central points making up the attraction of the genre itself.

The body the monster

Finally, to return to another perhaps solidly surrealist point which is indifferent to fear and focuses on poetic phenomenology, there is the monster. The unusual creature, the physical exception, the individual whose being expresses its deviation and strangeness, the body turned image and image turned flesh; the central horror hero.

The transformations into these strange creatures, both physically and mentally, both the ontogenetic metamorphosis and the possession or the empathy, in whichever form, the transformation remains a fundamental trope of poetic phenomenology. (Bachelard's discussion of the animalness in Lautréamont is a classical discussion of this that makes much sense to horror cinema). The metamorphosis in itself; the unfolding of viscera and skin into strange new shapes, these fragments and suggestions of insects, of genitals, of larvae, of trees, of ferocious beasts, of dinosaurs, all the morphological gore.

Monsters are fantasies in physical shape, and they are mythology in its irreducible parts. Strange beings. In this the two categories of monster and superhero often overlap, at least with the classical "film monsters" and the Marvel comic book monsters of the 70s, or with many of the present-day antiheroes, paranormal investigators etc. I've been so impressed by the constellation of moving physical manifestations of weird fates in 13 Ghosts (2001) specifically as a superhero group, and film monsters like Freddie Krueger and Pinhead the Cenobite are commonly recognised as either superheroes or some kind of rockstars. Clearly, with classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, just like with modern comics mascots like Hulk and Hellboy, it is very existential, about monster-being; the phenomenology of the outsider. This has a sentimentalist aspect, where one is always at the risk of giving up the dynamics by suddenly becoming accepted into the fuzzy community of the normals, and then a fairly uninteresting destructive dynamics in the resentment in realising that one wasn't fully accepted after all. More importantly, monsterdom has a shamanistic-Rimbaudian aspect, this systematic disorder in the senses, the strange series of hardships and pains and pleasures, in order too see more clearly. The poet role. One we perhaps have to approach to the extent we want to make ourselves available to all these unusual phenomena, this wide range of possibilities, this abundance of meaning, which characterises horror, and even more poetry.

Again, the surrealist potential in horror appears to have little to do with to what extent it invokes horror. The most important part is that it is a relative free zone from many realistic rationalisations and constrictions, and therefore in fact will be able to show us more of that which is actually real, and be poetically productive in much the same way as reality itself is – if we only allow it.

Mattias Forshage

(published in Patricide #3 2011)

Film criticism

There was at some point I was giving a presentation of the major surrealist interest in film in the 50s:

"In this decade, not so much film was produced by surrealism. Far more was being done with developing the surrealist interest in cinema-going, with many surrealists specialising in film criticism, applying more or less surrealist principles. In fact, film criticism based on the bretonian formula that "criticism must be a form of love" is a very distinct genre. To begin with, it brings the viewers subjectivity into the stew by way of desire, through emphasising the romantic, fetishistic and atmospheric. Through this it also sheds light on cinema-going as a poetic ritual and as an analogue to dreaming. It assumes a certain love of lowbrow popular genres, especially horror but also all kinds of boyish adventure and including science fiction, eroticism and sometimes pornography, absurd slapstick comedy, etc. It keeps looking out for the, in fact rather common, elements of mad love and everyday revolt. Then in the process, it also assumes a sharply polemical edge against its contemporary pretentious auteur cinema and formal avantgardism (and the criticism hailing such cinema and technical mastery of the craft) - while also in advance disarming the future tendencies of preferring high-budget hollywood commercial cinema for the sake of its technical skilfullness, as well as the "turkey" nerdism favoring obscure lowbrow genres for being obscure and technically poor rather than for their actual content."

This made me eager to state my own thoughts about a surrealist attitude in the area in a letter to a friend:

Film has to show something interesting. It simply has to have a counterpart in, intervene with, act reciprocally with, a visual-imaginative desire. Film is there for visualising fantasies. From a certain viewpoint, a lot of Hollywood film thereby is founded on conditions which can be fully shared from a surrealist viewpoint. In order to be worth showing on film it has to be somehow "unheard of". It has to show something unusual, preferrably even never seen before, it has to be attractive, terrifying, beautiful in an unusual way.

Therefore there is nothing to object against the overflow in cinema of grand effects, strange landscapes and constructions, odd monsters, wish fulfillments, ingenious mutilations, attractive women and men. I cannot understand how some people can deny that horror film (at least from german expressionism to contemporary ghost drama and uppdated monsters) and super hero film (at least from Fantômas and Douglas Fairbanks to contemporary Marvel heroes etc) would be surrealist genres due their own internal dynamics, since they are there for showing unseen fantasies. (One argument against myself there is using fantasy and science fiction as counter-examples – they are exactly as promising from a theoretical viewpoint, but in practice more often than not just bore me...) The problem is of course that these elements are often used in a purely conventional way, as signs for a conventional content, rather than for something unusual that they could become left to their own power.

This is particularly acute regarding the attractive women and men, the stars, which from a surrealist viewpoint do have a strong fetishist interest, and in certain films are allowed to live out the concrete ambiances that their looks may give rise to, but in a larger number of films are mere clichés, either as naive sandwich signs or as smart self-referring signs. Surrealist interest in film has traditionally not had reason to avoid wallowing in the fetishisation of actors with different types of interesting emanation, stars that really have been able to become mythological creatures, but whether this is a still useful route today is certainly worth a critical discussion (we've had some inconclusive rounds of discussion about this in the Stockholm group).

Another aspect where reserves are necessary is action. Yes, strange courses of events and exaggerations are interesting, but usually speed is used merely as a tool to catch attention, and in that function usually does not therewith correlate with a corresponding dynamism (in the sense of importunate richness in possibilities). And dynamism are often entirely lacking also in the musical meaning, as meaning-generating variations in tempo and volume.

On the other hand there is no need for us to dwell too much on the issue of ideology. Everybody knows that the film industry is a immense industry and a key aspect of american ideology export, this is self-evident but also so general that it can be disregarded. It is simply rather uninteresting that it is possible to decode a reactionary message from more or less every single movie on the repertoire. Messages on that particular level are everywhere around us, and have no immediate importance for that which is the main points of the appropriation of such products. For what is interesting is whether it realises and challenges real desire constellations, or if you will "popular needs", in a dynamic way, whether it generates unusual ambiances and emancipatory fantasies, in the process. (Possibly with an exception for the most idiotic genres of all, like military- , college- and family movies that very eagerly serve to concretely legitimise, sentimentalise and humanise unbearable human conditions, and could be dismissed in their entirety. Or else there might actually be concretely dynamic moments even in them to find for those who were able to withstand it.)

I also don't believe in fantastic realism. Or, hell, why not, just pour it on. Whatever is it anyway? Is it simply Kusturica? Fellini? Hasse & Tage? Anything with colorful characters and much noise? Isn't this just to pick up Buñuel at his most predictable and remove any conventional or unconventional controversial ingredients? Isn't this the particular moment when the desire for the unusual is tamed, is hitched to the cart of reconciliation, when it all becomes "goodtime"? (This is another part where I disagree with myself; in most cases nothing makes me so furious as "goodtime" does, but sometimes I'm enthusiastically pulled along too.)

But the everyday fantastic, or perhaps situational poetic, that is much of the point with film on the whole. Finding visual expressions of the unusual moments in life. The abysses. The fields of possibilities. The trembling atmospheres. Quite a lot of this is found in romantic films and conventional "drama", but just as much or more in east european film and in many famous west european directors works from the 60s and 70s, displacing genuine old romanticism in modern and at first sight trivial environments, with a wide awake eye, the compulsory creativity of errant desire always hinting at the immanence of the marvellous. (One of the points here is to get to my fascination with early Wenders, which I was surprised to find controversial in my circles.)

Unusual characters, unusual environments, unusual courses of events, unusual atmospheres. Strange constellations of objects. Suspension, emphasising the formlessness and tangiability of desire.

I would also like to emphasise that the surrealist perspective does not have any preferences regarding such genre designations as documentary, feature film and art film; is obviously interested in them all and often finds it very difficult to distinguish between them at all. If from a schematic representation of the general consensus view documentaries are supposed to aim at being pedagogical, feature film to be entertaining and art film to be aesthetical; surrealism entirely lacks respect for these ambitions and will expect from all of them to be just as much poetical rather than aesthetical, wondrous rather than entertaining, and investigative rather than pedagogical.

The surrealist film critic perhaps simply acts as a hedonist; is bored by brilliance, is impressed by unusual atmospheres and unusual fantasies, is unhamperedly fetishist in the appropriation of the situations, objects and human beings that are exposed, as if they were mere elements in one's one dream. Which they, methodologically speaking, in fact are.

/MF

Surrealism and film

In summer 2004 Michael Richardson distributed an enquiry about surrealism and film as one of his means of research for his book Surrealism and cinema, which appeared in 2006. The following is Mattias Forshage’s reply to the enquiry. It has been edited for the present purposes, not only in minor changes to clarify intentions but also both in explicating some ”internal” surrealist allusions, adding a little piece of background information in some places, and also in an extension of the paragraphs about horror film (which was made in the course of an exchange about the book after its appearance, to emphasise my dissatisfaction of Michael’s quick dismissal of modern horror movies).

Now Michael’s book is strongly recommended for anyone interested in the subject of surrealism and cinema, or of surrealism and popular culture, or of the poetic potential of film on the whole. It seems to have been originally intended as an attempt of bringing Ado Kyrou’s classic study Le Surréalisme au cinéma up to date, but in the end it also, on top of this, offers valuable information and perspective on a lot of older stuff as well, particularly the surrealist involvement in the french film industry of the 20s and 30s (most notably the Prévert brothers but also others), the surrealist aspects of documentary films, and (again) Luis Buñuel.

"I am in the process of writing a book on surrealism and cinema. This will attempt to bring the story of surrealist cinema up to date, engaging with what has occurred since Kyrou wrote his book and critically thinking about the various ways in which the relationship between surrealism and cinema has been considered. As part of this, it would be helpful to know the views of current participants in surrealism to the following questions:"

It would have been good to write a group statement instead of an individual one, but both the scope and the specific sensibilities of each individual’s cinematographic experience seem different enough for a collective statement to have to perhaps exclude the better quantity of interesting observations. So this is an individual statement, and it is very much out of what I learned as a surrealist cinéaste in the 80s and can only partially recollect now, with some recent additions, but lots of obliterated findings in-between, so several of my best examples are probably not there.
I have included a number of swedish examples, but if you’d need further suggestions regarding swedish cinema I’d be happy to provide some more examples and some overview, for both before and after 1963. It is a pity that Kyrou did not emphasise the contradiction, included in the classic surrealist ”Voyez… ne voyez pas…” tract, of Stiller on the surrealist side and Sjöström on the antisurrealist. And it is really a mistake of him to mention ”Lattjo med Boccacio” of ”Casinogänget” from the swedish revue cinema instead of the usually much better, more delirious, absurd and sometimes radical works of Povel Ramel or Nils Poppe. Etc.

"1. Kyrou asserted that the cinema experience is fundamentally surrealist. Do you consider this still to be true, or have changes in the way the cinema is experienced (due to the development of TV, video etc., and the emergence of the multiplex for example) made this no longer the case?"


I believe the cinematographic experience has retained its surrealist characteristics and surrealist potential in its traditional form of ritual of the dark room in the theatre. Some people have individually developed creative ways of utilising movies or other animated material on TV, video, computers, virtual reality etc, but all that seems still to be on the level of purely personal methods and I´ve never heard of or experienced such phenomena of broader interest. The development of the images industry and desire-simulation industry in general have of course influenced the ways of watching, but probably primarily in terms of making other types of use of the cinema common, not in extinguishing the possibility of the ”oneiric communion” or ”experimental dreaming” of traditional watching. The quantitative impact of different ways of viewing is more of a question for sociology, and distinguishing the other specific uses of cinema in various social interactions (possibly revolt too) is more of a question for anthropology. We’ll dream on. Many do it along with us.

"2. Which film makers working today (or since 1963, when Kyrou made the last revision of his book) do you consider to express a certain surrealist sensibility? What aspects of their work do you consider ‘surrealist’?

3. Which films made over the past forty years do you particularly consider display evidence of an involuntary (or even voluntary) surrealism? In what ways?"

Actually, if we reply in the affirmative to the previous question, and generally agree with Kyrou’s and others’ notion that cinema is a field of great surrealist potential, a potential which is quite widespreadly partially fulfilled – then it becomes less important to delineate and name the relatively ”more surrealist” films. It could perhaps be more interesting to discuss phenomenology of reveries, associations, suggestions in cinema-viewing, or certain more or less widespread cinematic elements, or such yet unrealised. However questions such as these target my personal historiographic and collecting inclinations in an irresistable way and I’ll keep namedropping.
I’m not able to discuss these two questions separately, since I don´t see the distinction between ”conscious” and ”unconscious” surrealist spirit as being of great interest (except for cases of actual communications and collaborations, of course).
Out of educated sloppiness some might expect ”conscious” surrealist spirit in european-style auteur cinema, and ”unconscious” in commercial Hollywood cinema, but that’s obviously an obscuring prejudice. Let´s just say that the auteurs and the Hollywood directors alike have access to – and are actually very often inspired by – visions and fantasies out of the surrealist tradition as well as poetic visions etc out of their own minds. Then the film industry is probably too money-intensive for anyone to be able to keep up any mentally subversive aims throughout the process, the auteurs will focus more on satisfying critics, academics and bureaucrats while the hollywoods go for money – but images will survive, and new possibilities will emerge from the encounter with the spectator. (Actually I believe it might be slightly easier for people in Hollywood to stick to personal visions and subversive aims, since entertainment industry will try to enlist a lot of things it can’t understand or morally support in search for what might be or become the latest trend, while the auteur side of the business require long hard conditioning in current aesthetic values.)

When Kyrou revised his book in 1963 he had the opportunity to name a few directors who were then the young among auteurs, whom subsequently have added both gold and dirt to their merit lists while having become top-dog auteurs. He included for example Antonioni, Bergman, Wajda, Kubrick, Malle and Resnais, and as far as I remember not Kurosawa, Pasolini, Lindsay Anderson, Tarkovskij etc. Of course they all produced surrealist atmospheres now and then and a Kyrou would probably have made a case of trying to snatch them back from the embracing hands of the academia. This would probably also be true of the great mannerists; Greenaway, Jarman, Cronenberg. Regarding all of these we may have endless discussions about what’s empty gestures and what’s true imagination. I do regard some of their films as candidates for surrealist masterpieces, but I suspect it’s much connected to individual cinema experiences and personal associations that perhaps don’t matter much here.
Of somewhat more general surrealist interest I’d call some of Wim Wenders’ work (his unscrupulous and serious curiosity in Alice in den Städten and Falsche Bewegung (but also in Wings of Desire!) seems to represent a strong candidate of a romanticism for the present) and most of Werner Herzog’s, but I’d start speaking of undisputable surrealist values only in the cases of Peter Weir’s australian films, of much of Polanski’s work (his first movies were noticed by Kyrou, but they are quite different from the later ones, where I personally give ”The Tenant” the highest rank, the perfect surrealist thriller of paranoiac personal mythology), of the neo-bunuelian Jodorowsky, and also of the swedish low-budget director Håkan Alexandersson (both in his full-length films and in his earlier children’s TV serials, most in collaboration with Carl-Johan DeGeer, he persistently combined the traditional surrealist unexpected with burlesque absurdism, psychoanalytic humour and low materialism (dust & dirt, lumpenproletariat, incapacity), while his later shorts are usually more of individual lightnings of black humour. He collaborated with the Surrealist group in Stockholm on Stora Saltet and sadly, recently died).
A new genre that can’t pass unnoticed is the modern fairy tale of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, and occasionally others. While they now and then keep plunging into banal sentimentality or naïve effect show-off, the fundamentally surrealist character of their imagery and vision is undisputable (put perhaps traditional enough not to have much to teach us?).
Another important contemporary genre, which is more problematic, is intelligent dystopian action. Inspired by the best SF authors and often also by radical theorists, these films (Matrix, Fight Club, Total Recall, Robocop etc, also including Carpenter’s classic They live! and probably even older films) disclose successive layers of sensory and social manipulation and thus suggests real conspiracies and inspire attempts to break out from spectacle and brainwash. Of course they are part of a ”radical chic” fashion, actively recuperating radical theory, but as the situationsts pointed out recuperation has dual edges, and the radical elements widely distributed as commodities may very well backfire and turn against society again. Another important question in this connection is whether purely paranoid visions are necessarily restricted and repetitive, or represent a line of imagination capable of poetic blossoming like others. (It was indeed a revelation to find in Michael’s book the startling fact that Paul Verhoeven had been involved in the dutch surrealist group!)
These new genres do also (along with other genres and most notably super hero films like Hulk, Daredevil, Spiderman and Spawn – and also Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon!) profit from the fact that computer animation nowadays is sufficiently good to convincingly visualise most fantasies, including long-dreamt and all kinds of ”true” (in a Bachelardian sense) ones. In early cinema (and low-budget and ”artistic” cinema) such wish-fulfillments could be equally convincing when only hinted at or symbolically represented, but for a long time the overall ambition has been to show explicit visualisations, and only recently this ceased to be an obstacle and instead turned into a possible lever of new fantasies.
For similar reasons I always appreciate a good natural catastrophe on film. Though I’m dissatisfied with how little use is made of landscapes and animals, both as acting agents and as objects of wonder and oneirism. Well, a lot of stories play in rainforests and mountains (perhaps fewer in deserts, polar areas and at sea?), and some domestic animals get their share of exposure with their tricks, but it’s rather rare to see these elements in their own right unless we turn to documentaries where it’s almost always accompanied by ridiculous rationalisations and banalised versions of recent scientific theories (”popular science”). There are numbers of exceptions though, and I’ll mention a swedish example each of creative use of landscapes and animals: landscape in Troell’s Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd, an epic of Andrées obsessive quest for the north pole; animals in Kristersson’s Pica pica, a portait of the life of the magpies in a Stockholm suburb without added narrator’s voice.
The subject of love isn’t one of the big issues in contemporary western cinema. Since at least one case of heterosexual severe romantic attachment is a compulsory ingredient in most types of movies, poetically inspired/inspiring elements in this sense may be found where they are least expected, like in horror or super-hero movies. On the other hand the ”romance” genre seems to be the perhaps worst place to look, usually having less to offer than superficially sentimentally preaching conformism and family values, thus being entirely antiromantic.
What we are used to regarding as a perfectly surrealist film is one where love is combined with imagination and revolt and at least one of these elements goes far beyond common acceptance. Most often this is done by psychologically portaying the reality-transforming potential of obsessed male desire, which gets rather tedious and probably isn’t as emancipatory as was once thought, but nevertheless have made several directors stage their most surrealist visions (including one that may not have reached international attention; the best movie by Arne Mattson, a swedish director mentioned by Kyrou, Skyltdockan about a night watchman falling in love with a mannequin). It would seem that binding the element of love closer with the element of revolt keeps yielding better results like Papatakis’ Les Abysses and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly creatures, (from Sweden Alfredson’s Tic-tac and Moodyson’s Fucking Åmål - both somewhat lacking in imagination but still quite beautiful), and finally the most beautiful cinematic eulogy of revolt ever made (which the Stockholm group in Stockholm suggested for the Leeds surrealist film festival in the 90s and keeps returning to), Claude Faraldo’s Themroc.
And while we are speaking about wish-fulfillment I should add something about pornography: if for a moment disregarding the social and moral implications of the genre it’d still seem that it’s almost exclusively devoted to simplistic wish-fulfillment in the most banal, unimaginative and degrading way.
Buñuel’s late movies show at the same time the triumph and the limits of traditional surrealist cinema. Fundamentally built upon the element of surprise, they proceed through industrious gags and absurdities (actually rather close to popular ”misconceptions” of surrealism); drawing on dreams, simplistic anti-bourgeois sentiments, more or less outdated anticlerical reflexes and murky banal eroticism. They are beautiful, marvellous, instigative, but they also represent an obvious cul-de-sac.
So, finally I get to the field where I still detect most of surrealist imagery and atmosphere, which is horror. More than anywhere else, the realisation of the imaginary, and the proximity and ambiguity of the border between everyday life and the fantastic, supernatural or just the extremely unusual and intense, is the main theme in horror movies, and several of the basic surrealist strategies and themes are also horror standard elements: obsessive imagery, objective chance, paranoiac-criticism, the search for unusual experiences, analogical thought, dreaming, and the whole aggressive side of wish-fulfillment; furthermore, the uncanny, assemblage objects, strange juxtapositions, the life of objects poutside the utilitarian sphere, new myth, old myth, inventing creatures, the return of the repressed, creative rage, automatism and medialism, etc etc. Horror movies actually seems to be the only field in contemporary cinema where the unknown is invoked, and associations without rational excuses are allowed and sometimes abundant.
If the 60’s remakes of the classic monster movies (and the whole Hammer output) were weaker than the originals, they still have surrealist qualities, and even more so have Corman’s Poe adaptations. Both these are mentioned by Kyrou I think but continued throughout the 60s. Then Romero’s zombie films and Hooper’s beautiful Texas chainsaw massacre revived the genre, and if we disregard the commercially successful but poetically weak Halloween (and its whole subsequent subgenre of ”psychopath thrillers”) and the Exorcist(which is quite boring but perhaps might be important for those who still get excited by simple blasphemy?), this soon led to what might be regarded as the surrealist masterpieces of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Hellbound and Wes Craven’s A nightmare on Elm Street & Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and Dario Argento’s entire work (Argento himself explicitly recognising his work as surrealist).
The boundaries of the genre are delineated by "transitory" subgenres of for example splatter comedy (where Wes Craven and Peter Jackson made poor stuff, while Sam Raimi and especially Stuart Gordon made good things), horror fantasy (including Tim Burton among others), horror SF (including the Alien sequel and Tobe Hooper's Life Force), and a sort of manneristic dystopian perverse-daliesque aestheticism running wild (with which I mostly mean Cronenberg; a personal vision of the kind that may or may not be annected for surrealism depending on one's taste and criteria). Again I'm not interested in discussing the pointless psychopath thrillers. Even high-finance Hollywood horror can make atmospheres and good fantasies; like in some of the remakes of monster classics, in bagatelles like The Others (for sure poorer than its source of inspiration The Innocents but nevertheless!), and even in cheap adaptions of computer games like the recent Silent Hill (despite stupid script flaws).
The thing is that the elements in my long list above do occur widely in the genre. But of course many of the worst ones are characterised by bad directing and bad acting, standardised scripts, simple genre markers, quite cheap startle/disgust shock effects, sometimes cheap fan-complementing allusions, sometimes rampant misogyny and pointless sadism, etc. But horror movies, like it or not, must be recognised as the genre which even in its most conventional form retains the largest numbers of surrealist elements!
MF