Sight & Sound
Book Description
The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions in this anthology document Surrealism’s scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement.
Publisher comments
Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior — as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies.
As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle’s latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life — there, to provoke new adventures.
