The search for a picture illustrating Mallarmé’s impersonality led me to one of the books most profoundly influencing my own views on film: Michel Ciment’s Kubrick.
There I reread the interview  on The Shining from which are taken the following excerpts:

Michel Ciment: Don’t you think that today it is in this sort of popular literature that you find strong archetypes, symbolic images which have vanished somehow from the more highbrow literary works?

Kubrick: Yes, I do, and I think that it’s part of their often phenomenal success. There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story’s realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.

Ciment: This kind of implication is present in much of the fantastic literature.

Kubrick: I believe fantasy stories at their best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology formerly did. The current popularity of fantasy, particularly in films, suggests that popular culture, at least, isn’t getting what it wants from realism. The nineteenth century was the golden age of realistic fiction. The twentieth century may be the golden age of fantasy.

(…)

Ciment: Who is Diane Johnson who wrote the screenplay with you?

Kubrick: Diane is an American novelist who has published a number of extremely good novels which have received serious and important attention. I was interested in several of her books and in talking to her about them I was surprised to learn that she was giving a course at the University of California at Berkeley on the Gothic novel. (…)

Kubrick: A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analysed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

(…)

Ciment: It seems that you want to achieve a balance between rationality and irrationality, that for you man should acknowledge the presence of irrational forces in him rather than trying to repress them.

Kubrick: I think we tend to be a bit hypocritical about ourselves. We find it very easy not to see our own faults, and I don’t just mean minor faults. I suspect there have been very few people who have done serious wrong who have not rationalized away what they’ve done, shifting the blame to those they have injured. We are capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, and the problem is that we often can’t distinguish between them when it suits our purpose.

(…)

Ciment: You are a person who uses his rationality, who enjoys understanding things, but in 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining you demonstrate the limits of intellectual knowledge. Is this an acknowledgement of what William James called the unexplained residues of human experience?

Kubrick: Obviously, science-fiction and the supernatural bring you very quickly to the limits of knowledge and rational explanation. But from a dramatic point of view, you must ask yourself: ‘If all of this were unquestionably true, how would it really happen?’ You can’t go much further than that. I like the regions of fantasy where reason is used primarily to undermine incredulity. Reason can take you to the border of these areas, but from there on you can be guided only by your imagination. I think we strain at the limits of reason and enjoy the temporary sense of freedom which we gain by such exercises of our imagination.
more…

I’ve just spent a terrifying year: my Thought has thought itself and reached a pure Concept. All that my being has suffered as a result during that long death cannot be told, but, fortunately, I am utterly dead, and the least pure region where my Spirit can venture is Eternity. My Spirit, that recluse accustomed to dwelling in its own Purity, is no longer darkended even by the reflection of Time.
Unfortunately, I’ve reached this point through a dreadful sensitivity, and it’s high time I wrapped it in an outward indifference, which will replace my lost strength. After a final synthesis I have reached the stage of slowly acquiring that strength — you can see I am unable to distract myself. But this was even more the case a few months ago, firstly in my terrible struggle with that old and evil plumage, which is now, happily, vanquished: God. But as that struggle had taken place on his bony wing which, in death throes more vigorous than I would have suspected him capable of, had carried me into the Shadows, I fell, victorious, desperately and infinitely, — until at last I saw myself again in my Venetian mirror, such as I was when I forgot myself several months before.
I confess, moreover, but to you alone, that the torments inflicted by my triumph were so great, I still need to look at myself in that mirror in order to think and that if it were not in front of this desk on which I’m writing to you, I would become the Void once again. That will let you know that I am now impersonal and no longer the Stéphane that you knew, — but a capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself, through what was once me.
Letter to Henri Cazalis, 14 May 1867 from: Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (ed. and transl. by Rosemary Lloyd)

Hitchcock signed the virtually unknown Alec Coppel to the San Francisco project … There’s no compelling evidence to suggest why Hitchcock chose Coppel.
Dan Auiler, Vertigo – The Making of a Hitchcock Classic

All following excerpts are from: The Sandman by E. T. A. Hoffmann
(transl. by John Oxenford)

Eyes here’ eyes!’ roared Coppelius tonelessly. Overcome by the wildest terror, I shrieked out and fell from my hiding place upon the floor. Coppelius seized me and, baring his teeth, bleated out, ‘Ah – little wretch – little wretch!’ Then he dragged me up and flung me on the hearth, where the fire began to singe my hair. ‘Now we have eyes enough – a pretty pair of child’s eyes,’ he whispered, and, taking some red-hot grains out of the flames with his bare hands, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes. My father upon this raised his hands in supplication, crying: ‘Master, master, leave my Nathaniel his eyes!’

A very tall and slender lady, extremely well-proportioned and most splendidly attired, sat in the room by a little table on which she had laid her arms, her hands being folded together. She sat opposite the door, so that I could see the whole of her angelic countenance. She did not appear to see me, and indeed there was something fixed about her eyes as if, I might almost say, she had no power of sight. It seemed to me that she was sleeping with her eyes open. I felt very uncomfortable, and therefore I slunk away into the lecture-room close at hand.

So it was. Clara had the vivid fancy of a cheerful, unembarrassed child; a deep, tender, feminine disposition; an acute, clever understanding. Misty dreamers had not a chance with her; since, though she did not talk – talking would have been altogether repugnant to her silent nature – her bright glance and her firm ironical smile would say to them: ‘Good friends, how can you imagine that I shall take your fleeting shadowy images for real shapes imbued with life and motion ?’

Quite indignant that Clara did not admit the demon’s existence outside his own mind, Nathaniel would then come out with all the mystical doctrine of devils and powers of evil. But Clara would break off peevishly by introducing some indifferent matter, to the no small annoyance of Nathaniel. He thought that such deep secrets were closed to cold, unreceptive minds, without being clearly aware that he was counting Clara among these subordinate natures; and therefore he constantly endeavored to initiate her into the mysteries. In the morning, when Clara was getting breakfast ready, he stood by her, reading out of all sorts of mystical books till she cried: ‘But dear Nathaniel, suppose I blame you as the evil principle that has a hostile effect upon my coffee? For if, to please you, I drop everything and look in your eyes while you read, my coffee will overflow into the fire, and none of you will get any breakfast.’

Olympia appeared dressed with great richness and taste. Her beautifully turned face, her figure called for admiration. The somewhat strange bend of her back inwards, the wasp-like thinness of her waist, seemed to be produced by too tight lacing. In her step and deportment there was something measured and stiff, which struck many as unpleasant, but it was ascribed to the constraint produced by the company. (…) Nathaniel was quite enraptured; he stood in the hindermost row, and could not perfectly recognise Olympia’s features in the dazzling light. He therefore quite unperceived, took out Coppola’s glass and looked towards the fair Olympia. Ah! then he saw, with what a longing glance she looked towards him, how every tone first resolved itself plainly in the glance of love, which penetrated, in its glowing career, his inmost soul. (…)The hand of Olympia was cold as ice; he felt a horrible deadly frost thrilling through him, and at the same time it seemed as though the pulse began to beat, and the stream of life to glow in the cold hand. And in the soul of Nathaniel the joy of love rose still  higher; he clasped the beautiful Olympia, and with her flew through the dance. (…) Oh, thou heavenly splendid lady! Thou ray from the promised land of love – thou deep soul, in which all of my being is reflected!”(…)Now Coppola flung the figure across his shoulders, and, with frightful, yelling laughter, dashed down the stairs, so that the feet of the figure, which dangled in the ugliest manner, rattled with a wooden sound on every step… – she was indeed, a lifeless doll.

They were crossing, at noon, the streets of the city, where they had made several purchases, and the high steeple of the townhouse already cast its gigantic shadow over the market-place. “Oh,” said Clara, “let us ascend it once more, and look at the distant mountains!” (…) The two lovers stood arm in arm in the highest gallery of the tower, and looked down upon the misty forests, behind which the blue mountains were rising like a gigantic city. (…)

Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket—he found Coppola’s telescope, and he looked on one side. Clara was before the glass. There was a convulsive movement in his pulse and veins,—pale as death, he stared at Clara, but soon streams of fire flashed and glared from his rolling eyes, and he roared frightfully, like a hunted beast. Then he sprang high into the air, and, in the intervals of a horrible laughter, shrieked out, in a piercing tone, “Wooden doll—turn thyself!” Seizing Clara with immense force he wished to hurl her down, but with the energy of a desperate death-struggle she clutched the railings. (…)  Heavens—Clara, grasped by the mad Nathaniel, was hanging in the air over the gallery,—only with one hand she still held one of the iron railings. (…)

The people collected at the sound of the wild shriek, and among them, prominent by his gigantic stature, was the advocate Coppelius, who had just come to the town, and was proceeding straight to the market-place. Some wished to ascend and secure the madman, but Coppelius laughed, saying, ” Ha, ha,—only wait—he will soon come down of his own accord,” and looked up like the rest. Nathaniel suddenly stood still as if petrified; he stooped down, perceived Coppelius, and yelling out, ” Ah, pretty eyes—pretty eyes!”—he sprang over the railing.

When Nathaniel lay on the stone pavement, with his head shattered, Coppelius had disappeared in the crowd.

Therefore one goes from pure science to applied science worthy of La Palisse: a statement of what is visible to the mortal eye (it is always a matter of mortal eyes, hence vulgar and very flawed, even supposing them reinforced by the scientists’ microscopes; and the sensory organ being a cause of error, the scientific instrument simply magnifies that sense in the direction of its error).
Alfred Jarry: The Days and the Nights (transl. by Alexis Lykiard)

While the tonal, the totality of conscious existence, shapes the individual being, the tonal is in turn shaped by the nagual, by everything it is not, which surrounds us like a mold. The tonal tends to shut out and deny the nagual, which takes over completely in the moment of death… the role of the artist is to make contact with the nagual and bring a part of it back into the tonal in paint or words, sculpture, film or music…
Q: Would rubbing out the word result in immediate exteriorization from the body?
A: Yes.
Q: How can this be accomplished?
A: At first automatic exercise.
William S. Burroughs: The Retreat Diaries

The naualli, or magician, is he who frightens men and sucks the blood of children during the night. He is well skilled in the practice of this trade, he knows all the arts of sorcery (nauallotl) and employs them with cunning and ability; but for the benefit of men only, not for their injury. Those who have recourse to such arts for evil intents injure the bodies of their victims, cause them to lose their reason and smother them. These are wicked men and necromancers.
Father Sahagun

The pagan priests made use of an ointment composed of insects, such as spiders, scorpions, centipedes and the like, which the neophytes in the temples prepared. They burned these insects in a basin, collected the ashes, and rubbed it up with green tobacco leaves, living worms and insects, and the powdered seeds of a plant called ololiuhqui, which has the power of inducing visions, and the effect of which is to destroy the reasoning powers. Under the influence of this ointment, they conversed with the Devil, and he with them, practicing his deceptions upon them. They also believed that it protected them, so they had no fear of going into the woods at night.
Father Augustin de Vitancurt

This was also employed by them as a remedy in various diseases, and the soothing influence of the tobacco and the ololiuhqui was attributed by them to divine agency. There are some in our own day who make use of this ointment for sorcery, shutting themselves up, and losing their reason under its influence; especially some old men and old women, who are prepared to fall an easy prey to the Devil.
Father Augustin de Vitancurt

To practice this art the sorcerers, usually old women, shut themselves in a house, and intoxicate themselves to the degree of losing their reason. The next day they are ready to reply to questions.
Father Joseph de Acosta

All quotes from Daniel G. Brinton: Nagualism – A Study in Native American Folklore and History

The sirens sing when reason sleeps.
Max Ernst

And the version by This Mortal Coil which almost made it into Blue Velvet.

A key scene in Blue Velvet was intended to feature “Song of the Siren” by This Mortal Coil, but when the rights to the song proved prohibitively expensive, it was suggested that Badalamenti compose a pop song in the same style, with lyrics written by Lynch. Because the song required a vocalist with a haunting, ethereal voice, Badalamenti recommended Julee Cruise, who had sung “like an angel” in a New York theater workshop that Badalamenti had produced. The result of their initial collaboration was “Mysteries of Love,” which figures prominently in Blue Velvet’s closing scenes.
Read more on Julee Cruise’s Myspace

Reason is a light which makes me see things as they are not.
Francis Picabia

In order to know your exact position in this respect, suspend the action of your will, and watch the passing current of your thoughts and feelings, as a shepherd, half-sleeping, views the river flow by.
I refer to the state of reverie. We can determine, in a general way, what is the tendency of humanity, when relaxing the control of the will, it gives itself up to reverie, and the man allows the human nature in him to have its course. God forbid that I should ignore the pure dreams of many young maidens, or the noble aims which fire the imagination of many young men ! Brilliant flashes and bright gleams dart into our souls, but alas! these gleams and flashes too often serve only to discover our darkness.
Ernest Naville

All colours disappear in the night and despair has no diary…^[1]
Charles Robert Maturin

In his foreword to the English translation of the  first systematic survey of film noir, Panorama du Film Noir Américain, film historian James Naremore remarked that surrealism “had always been crucial to the reception of any art described as noir“. The inauguration of the word noir as an attribute to describe an art occured with the labelling of  the French Gothic novels as Romans noirs (black novels) around the 1820s.  They were  probably named as such by Pigoreau, a French bookseller and publisher whose books circulated in  cabinets de lecture (a type of commercial rental library which came to rise after the French Revolution).
A first proof for Naremore’s statement can be found in the infatuation of many surrealists  with Gothic novels. André Breton for instance, who avidly collected them, once described them as follows.

… these books were such that you could take them and open them at random, and there would continue to rise from them some fragrance or other of dark forests and high vaults. Their heroines, badly drawn, were impeccably lovely. You had to see them on the vignettes, prey to freezing apparitions, starkly white in those caves. Nothing could be more stimulating than this ultraromanesque, hypersophisticated literature. All those Castles of Otranto, of Udolpho, of the Pyrenees, of Lovel, of Athlin, and of Dunbayne, crevassed with great cracks and eaten by subterranean passages, persisted in the shadiest corner of my mind in living their factitious life, in presenting their curious phosphorescence.
Breton, Communicating Vessels

Breton’s reading of Gothic novels wasn’t limited to a search for stimulation or inspiration. Some of these novels he considered as quite congenial to the surrealist project. The following passage attests that already the prototype of the genre – The Castle of Otranto -  written by Horace Walpole, shows  many similiraties to surrealist automatic writing.

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.
Horace Walpole: letter to William Cole 9 March 1765

Although Walpole’s romance was a commercial success in its time, it would soon be criticized for its implausibility and incoherency. And so it took roughly twenty years until someone would follow in Walpole’s  footsteps. De Sade for instance observed that the real fad with the Gothic novel would only start around the time of the French revolution.

This genre was the invevitable product of the revolutionary shocks with which the whole of Europe resounded. For those who were acquainted with all the ills that are brought upon men by the wicked, the romantic novel was becoming somewhat difficult to write, and merely monotonous to read: there was nobody left who had not experienced more misfortunes in four or five years than could be depicted in a century by literature’s most famous novelists: it was necessary to call upon hell for aid in order to arouse interest, and to find in the land of fantasies what was common knowledge from historical observation of man in this iron age.
de Sade, Idées sur les romans^[2]

Breton shared de Sade’s opinion. The Gothic novel proved to be for him “the ideal key to this latent content, the way for us to explore the secret depths of history that disappear beneath the web of events.”^[3]
Some of the Gothic writers,  Ann Radcliffe for instance, would begin to trace back the  supernatural events in their novels to natural causes. Breton preferred the efforts of M. G. Lewis “who couldn’t be praised more for abandoning himself trustfully to his lyrical exaltation regardless of the final  plausibility of his tale.”^[4]  He recognized that the fantastic elements of a novel like The Monk serve as an instrument of cognition, because it is “at a point where human reason loses its control, that the innermost emotion of a human being has every chance to express itself…”^[5] Maturin’s Melmoth eventually “possessed the abundance of light, which is necessary to  let appear in it the problem of problems: that of evil“^[6].

Around 1935 Breton himself would use the adjective in an expression which “only afterward (…) took its place in the dictionary” – L’humour noir (black humour). It was defined by him on the basis of Hegel’s notion of objective humour and Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious.  According to Breton it presents a “superior revolt of the mind” against the oppressive aspects of the reality principle. The meaning in common parlance has somewhat shifted as it designates all kinds of comedy that are dealing with a breach of taboo. But Breton was anxious to exclude “stupidity, skeptical sarcasm, light-hearted jokes…” from his definition. Even more important was that black humour had to be devoid of all sentimentality. For him this undertaking was by no means a mere diversion from other activities but an essential aspect of surrealism.

Given the specific requirements of the modern sensibility, it is increasingly doubtful that any poetic, artistic or scientific work, any philosophical or social system that does not contain this kind of humor will not leave a great deal to be desired, will not be condemned more or less rapidly to perish.
André Breton, Lightning Rod, preface to the Anthology of Black Humour

As definitions of humour hitherto proved to be rather elusive, Breton compiled an anthology to illustrate his concept.

The Anthology of Black Humour contains examples by many precursors, kindred spirits and fellow travellers of surrealism. Among the 45 authors who made it into the final selection are Jonathan Swift, de Sade, Lautréamont, Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché. Shortly after its publication  in 1940, a period in which Breton  felt its theme situated very well, the German troups invaded France and the book was banned  by a censorship board formed by the  Vichy government.

In 1948 Julien Gracq wrote an essay on André Breton, in which he gets to the bottom of this predilection of  the surrealists for noir, this “magic word, cut off from any real connection to anything tangible, capable of the most disconcerting transfers by its essential adjectival virtue.” Apart from roman noir and l’humour noir he found the following formulas in Breton’s writings: “magie noire, musée noire, lavoir noir, diamant noir, dieu noir, sang noir.”
Gracq whose own works reveal a preference for the black word elaborates further in his essay:

One even feels the urge to name exclusively as ‘epithet of nature’ an adjective, which reveals so openly the emotive core, less that of the object than that of the subject. And probably even more the moral than the emotive core, or more precisely the inclination, the descent, the fatal predestination, which directs all  the manifestations of being and all of its projections and which can only assume its full meaning  from the decisive intervention of the sacred…

In a conference titled The surrealist religion which was held by Georges Bataille in 1948,  he took Gracq’s ideas as a starting point  and emphasized most notably the sacrilegous connotations of black:

It is not simply a matter of black water or black blood, but of a black heart and this black element dominates, carries it off and ensures some sort of tearing away from the world which we once dominated. (…) And in addition to these characteristics, the ideas of breaking with the past dominate the destiny prepared by surrealism for the first time in the perfectly black figure of Sade.
Georges Bataille, in The Absence of Myth

The surrealist’s dismissal of traditional mores based on Christian morality has provoked many scandals. In one of his darker moments Breton claimed that the simplest surrealist act would consist in shooting at random in a crowd. Bataille linked this remark to the Malaysian tradition known as Amok. It is not by chance that Bataille  chose an act for comparison  which is inexplicable by Western standards (or does “culture-bound syndrom” explain anything?). After all he uttered in the conference his belief that “the quest for primitive culture represents the principal, most decisive and vital, aspect of the meaning of surrealism, if not its precise definition”.

The postwar anxieties in France seemed to provide a fertile ground for such a quest, at least concerning popular culture. The French were very receptive to the arrival of the first crime stories of the American school of hardboiled  writers like  Woolrich, Thompson and Himes.  Marcel Duhamel introduced these and many other authors to the French public in his successful publishing imprint – The série noire, a title suggested by his  friend Jacques Prévert. In  their very loose translations – some were executed for instance by Boris Vian – the bleak contents of these novels and the immoral behaviour of their protagonists  seemed to mirror perfectly the experience of moral ambivalence under German occupation and afterwards. In Duhamel’s description of a typical série-noire-novel  it becomes clear, that his preference goes against whodunnits or deductive reasoning which dominated the crime genre since the renunciation of Walpole’s Tohu wa bohu.

The mind is rarely conformist. The likable detective  does not always solve the mystery. Sometimes there is no mystery. And sometimes there’s even no detective at all. So what? … Instead, there is  action, anxiety, violence – in all its forms and particularly the most abhorrable  -  beatings and killings. As in good movies, feelings translate into actions, and  readers fond of introspective literature should look out  for a completely different  field of  activity. There is also love – preferably of  the brutish kind – inordinate passion and hatred without mercy. In short, our goal is simple: to keep you from sleeping.
Marcel Duhamel (1948)

In the summer of 1946  five films with very similar content and style hit the cinemas in France within a week. These were  The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, The Woman in the Window and Murder my Sweet. The critic Nino Frank immediately responded in his article L’aventure criminelle to their “dynamism of death” and termed them film “noirs”.  Raymond Borde and  Etienne Chaumeton, the authors of the aforementioned Panorama du Film Noir Américain (1955), also make no secret of their passion for its “ceremony of killings … one of the richest in the entire history of cinema”. Like Duhamel, who not incidentally wrote the preface for their book, they appreciate the incoherency of the often overcomplicated plots and the gratuitous violence of the noirs. What in their opinion makes  the  films  different  to their literary equivalents, is that the “screen is a magnifiying mirror…and a single act of violence, artfully suggested, has more impact than a text in which the crimes mount up”. This lends to many films noirs an oneiric quality which exceeded in the opinion of the authors mere aesthetics and proposed “a psychology of crime that isn’t without its echoes, in another domain, of that worldly psychology so appreciated at the end of the nineteenth century: both shed light on forbidden worlds”

Borde and Chaumeton brought up the question if the series of film noirs is “an involuntary testimony to a civilization that seeks its equilibrium?”  The need to reenact violent situations in the mind, could it be an attempt to reintegrate parts of the human personality which were disavowed in the wake of a uniliteral Enlightenment?^[7] Maybe “black is not that black”, as Paul Valéry said.
Since the Renaissance the task to control our “animal” instincts was transferred from religion to reason. But the total repression of the monsters that the sleep of reason produces seemingly had a contrary effect. Major Dundee a film by Sam Peckinpah, certainly himself an expert in screen violence,  very nicely exemplifies this irony. A dialogue comments on the attack of French troups on a Mexican village:

Potts: Them boys in the pretty hats make the Apaches look like missionaries.
Tyreen: Never underestimate the value of a European education.

But to whom it may belong to accomplish the “equilibrium” of western civilization, to control the controller?  In so-called primitive societies where totemism prevails there seems to be a place for entities like the nagual. The absolute reversal of reality experienced by  shamans, brujos or mystics  seems to belong very much to the realm of noir as Breton, Gracq and Bataille understood it.
I close the post with one of the Fang people in Central Africa relating what might be an experience of our darkness:

When one eats iboga, one makes a short sojourn in the world of beings that are beyond evil. There are no more sexual relations, nor men or women, nor whites or blacks … one sees the past, the present, the future …
in René Bureau, La religion d’eboga^[8]

1 Breton used this quote as epigraph for his preface to the 1954 French edition of Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

2 Mario Praz, introductory essay for Three Gothic Novels, 1968.

3 Breton, Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism, in Free Rein 1995.

4 Breton, preface to Melmoth ou L’Homme Errant, 1954.

5 Breton, Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism, in Free Rein, 1995.

6 Breton, preface to Melmoth ou L’Homme Errant, 1954.

7 I  lifted the term “einseitige Aufklärung” from Brandlmeier, Thomas: Fantômas – Beiträge zur Panik des 20. Jahrhunderts, 2006. This slim, but very insightful book alerted me once again to the special signification of noir for surrealism.

8I found this quote in Hans Peter Duerr’s Traumzeit – Über die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation.
This book never directly adresses any topics discussed in this post, let alone surrealism. But in my opinion it runs on a parallel track. Centering on accounts of druginduced “flying”, be it from “witches” in the middle ages or from numerous tribes all over the world, it  shows that these people had  a view on “the other” that totally differed  from that of the  finders, keepers of psychology, who would term it the unconscious. Thus instantly relegating it to a role as dustbin of the consciousness just as indigenous peoples under  scrutiny of ethnologists would for a long time only be considered in terms of their purported lack.

Additional references:

Lenk, Elisabeth: Kritische Phantasie
I would suggest that in some of her texts (and even in person) she forges a bridge between Adorno and Breton.

The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend is by Winsor McCay.

The photo by Nikola Vuco is from www.serbiansurrealism.com

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