Our Darkness
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. Continue reading ‘Our Darkness’
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Tags: black humour, film noir, gothic novel, roman noir, surrealism
Many thanks to Au carrefour étrange who did me a great favour.
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The Priests They Called Them
These two handsome seminarists in Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne are Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georges Bataille in the flesh. Being an extra wasn’t Bataille’s only foray into movies. He wrote a screenplay under the title of La Maison brûlée about a peasant (modeled very clearly after Bataille himself) who marries a woman five days after he has met her for the first time. His fellow villagers are against the marriage as they suspect him to be the murderer of his father as well as that of his first wife and of his female cousin who all died under dubious circumstances. Although rather tame and conventional in comparison with Bataille’s other writings the scenario has some nice touches. It’s conceived as a thriller and contains some elements reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (which also features a burnt down house prominently, for instance). Another Laurence Olivier vehicle, William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, definitely made a lasting impression on Bataille. He would identify himself with its protagonist Heathcliff:
I come from Helder, where I have seen Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff, living with Cathys spectre just as I wanted to live with Laure’s ( Colette Peignot.) spectre … On Saturday, in La Vaissenet, I thought of Wuthering Heights. I had even thought about it in Ferluc. I suppose that this travelling around in mountain cabins made me forget my disgust for “comedies”.
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At Documents you can see Germaine Dulac’s film The Seashell and the Clerygman. Also featured are a text of Antonin Artaud who wrote the screenplay in which he writes favorably about Dulac’s adaptation and an account which fuses various testimonies of the film’s premiere with the surrealists protesting violently against the film. The post closes with the following question:
What happened between the glowing praise Artaud wrote on October 29th, 1927 and the premiere on February 2, 1928? Did Artaud see the film die on the cutting room floor? Or did the Surrealists hijack the premiere, did they take advantage of some critical remarks Artaud might have made about the film to create a row?
Artaud’s later remarks on the film would remain contradictory. In a letter to Jean Paulhan, written in 1932, he expressed his conviction that Seashell was a better film than both L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and that they borrowed heavily from it. On the other hand he felt disenchanted that he was kept from participating in its filmmaking process. He wouldn’t even get a credit as a screenwriter but merely as dreamer, as the caption was “rêve d’Antonin Artaud”. This would especially outrage him as he …
… proposed not a translation of the dream and its content, but an exhaustive investigation of the systems of dreaming, to discover their mechanisms and their structures in collapse. In this way, he wanted to reconstitute the violence and independence of dreaming, as a process directly projected into cinematic imagery; his aim was to ‘realize this idea of visual cinema where psychology itself is devoured by the acts’.
Stephen Barber, Blows and Bombs
But did Dulac betray Artaud’s intentions? When comparing Artaud’s source to the film one must say that she transmitted its content onto the screen quite faithfully and some of the scenes are still impressive, but there are only glimpses in it of the raw energy which Artaud imagined for his film- and theatreprojects and to which he would refer as “barbarity” or “theatre of cruelty”.
Germaine Dulac belonged – together with Abel Gance, Jean Epstein and Marcel L’Herbier – to a more formalist streak of French avant-garde directors called the Impressionists. A movement to which surrealists were openly hostile. Jacques Brunius for instance referred to their style as a “a fashion, a box of tricks, a set of easily copied mannerisms. (…) any anecdote from a novel, however vulgar, may be accepted or chosen as long as it is disguised by an exuberant ornamentation of technical effects to ‘look visual’ . A further outstanding characteristic of this school: total lack of humour.”
Desnos – by other accounts the main perpetrator at the premiere of Seashell – made clear that the directors who were appreciated by the surrealists had different aims:
When René Clair and Picabia made Entr’acte, Man Ray L’Étoile de Mer and Buñuel his admirable Chien andalou, it was not a matter of creating a work of art or of a new aesthetic but of obeying profound, original impulses, in consequence necessitating a new form.
Maybe the most original criticism came from the British Board of Censors which refused Seashell on the grounds that it is “so cryptic as to be meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.’
Continue reading ‘A Funny Thing Happened on His Way to the Movies’
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Désœuvrement
“Restent à définir les conditions de la lutte, puisque tant est que la jeunesse et le risque de désœuvrement absolu que nous courions nous l’ont fait engager.”
“It still remains to define the conditions of the fight, since both youth and the risk of absolute idleness that we took led us to start it.”
André Breton, Pourquoi je prends la direction de la Révolution Surréaliste
La Révolution Surréaliste N° 4
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Gone to Croatan
I’m leaving for my holidays. So there will be no posts for a couple of weeks.
Just one thing though. What do I think of writing which covers the same ground as I do, but in a more coherent and academic way? Well, I very often appreciate it.
Or as Henri Rousseau said to Picasso:
We are the two greatest painters of this era: you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern style!
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MUSIC TO READ CRASH BY
Cover of the “Warm Leatherette” single by The Normal
Daniel Miller on his song which is based on J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash:
“Warm Leatherette” got a much better response than I thought. I didn’t think anyone would like it at all, and I did it as a hobby, really. It was in l978, right after Punk had started. The music at the time was quite unusual — apart from a few groups like Kraftwerk, that kind of electronic music wasn’t really being used. It was before the Human League. The people who’d read the book recognized the imagery of the lyrics instantly, and the rest just thought I was some kind of sicko. I made up a few hundred copies of the single, which was all I expected to sell. I would have been pleased to sell them all! But a reviewer at Sounds, which was the most forward-thinking magazine of the time, called it “Single of the Century” and the demand grew. It sold a few thousand and then it got to America and all these strange radio reports started filtering through. It got on K-ROCK and Grace Jones did a cover of it. It never was a huge hit — it became a cult record. http://finelinefeatures.com/crash/cmp/warm-interview.html
And J.G. Ballard on Grace Jones.
R/S: Surrealists have also influenced photography in the direction of inventive manipulation and juxtaposition —
JGB: There was a feature in Time Out about — I don’t know whether she’s American of Jamaican — the singer Grace Jones, who’s a black singer with a sort of robotic appearance — a very powerful character. She sings a song called “Warm Leatherette,” which I gather is based on Crash. Her manager, eminence grise (Jean-Paul Goude - Ombres Blanches), is a photographer who has lived with her for five years. He gave her her image. He takes photos of her in, say, a running pose, and then cuts the photo at various points so that each thigh and leg and arm is cut; next he puts in little inserts that make her arms longer and legs longer, then retouches them so that the woman, in reality, would have to be about nine feet tall. But you don’t realize this, because she’s posed against naturalistic backgrounds like hotel rooms, and because it’s so beautifully done. He’s published a book of photos on Grace Jones, and they’re extraordinary. She’s sitting on a chair or lying across a bed, with an extra three inches of thigh or leg. Bizarre….
From Re/Search # 8/9: J.G. Ballard
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Thinking Made Me Do It
A couple of days ago I received the ‘Thinking Blogger’ award from Esotika Erotica Psychotica. I don’t know if I deserve an award with such a name as it took me quite a while to understand that I received it.
Well, I accept this award (which is basically a meme) because I’m in such good company and because it looks cute. Documents who was also honoured by Esotika wrote a really interesting essay on chainletters for this occasion so I advise you to read it.
The rules are as follows:
1. If, and only if, one gets tagged, one is obliged to write a post with links to five blogs that make one think,
2. One must link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. And one may display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’.
Esotika imposed on himself a rule which I’ll try to follow as well.
I’m not going to name any blogs that have, to my knowledge, already received the award. Of course, I don’t read every blog on the internet, but I figure the addition of this rule can help generate more linkage for more people!
This one’s hard because almost everyone on my blogroll already has the award. Here are my tags:
La main gauche
La main gauche made me aware that there are present day equivalents to Grandville and Alfred Kubin and that Joel Peter Witkin isn’t necessarily the last word in staged photography.
The laughing bone
A cross between the Amok catalogue and National Geographics. In Sean Casey’s blog you’ll find fascinating articles on spermaceti, diableries and the most beautiful assortment of skeletons.
Cartoon Modern
I found this blog while collecting material about UPA for one of my posts. I’m usually not prone to nostalgia but Amid Amidi’s devotion for the animation of the fifties brings us back to a golden age in this field.
Sedmikrasky
I got the feeling that ’The Thinkin Blogger’ award doesn’t go very far beyond the anglophone world. So, although my Spanish is virtually non-existant, I award the filmblog Sedmikrasky (the original Czech title of Daisies), because his selection spanning from Busby Berkeley to Michel Gondry seems to reveal a kindred spirit.
This Jazz Ain’t Free
I recently became interested in the short short story. Here is one by Fredric Brown for example.
The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
Oliver’s blog is very minimalistic, too and I must admit that this kind of restriction has something really disquieting and mysterious.
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Meet the Kyrous
Still from Un honnête homme directed by Ado Kyrou
Just found out that Jahsonic is currently reading Ado Kyrou’s Le surréalisme au cinéma. Readers of my blog will be aware of my penchant for this author. I think it was in Ian Buruma’s Behind the Mask where I read about the distinction being made by the Japanese between their own wet (humane, emotional, intuitive) sensibility and the dry (cold, rational, intellectual) western culture.
Well, Kyrou didn’t shy away from being wet (Incidentally the only translation of Le surréalisme au cinéma I know of is into Japanese).
But today’s post will concentrate on his son Ariel Kyrou, who wrote a book on electronic music, which has been quite a success in France – Techno Rebelle. http://www.d-i-r-t-y.com has a very interesting interview with him, conducted by Bernard Mordano, which reveals that his approach to the history of modern music is very much in the tradition of his father’s thought.
When reading Ariel Kyrou’s book … one realizes that the twentieth century’s opposition serious music/ popular music is a great stupidity. The most interesting artists fell between those stools, creating avant-garde art without knowing it.
And so his book is not limiting itself to the genre of techno, but to “the inventiveness which electronic music brought with it”. In this vein it covers everyone from Luigi Russolo, Edgar Varèse and John Cage to Kraftwerk, Lee Perry or Afrika Bambaataa, albeit in a non-linear form reminiscent of hypertexts.
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My Education – Prologue
Recently I had some clicks on my about page. As the informations on this page are sparse, I’ll roam in future posts through the topography of my childhood and adolescence with special consideration of its media-landscapes.
In this one I’ll concentrate on my mother and her interests before I was born, for the simple reason that my father hasn’t been talking too much about the interests he had in his youth.
Both my parents were born and grew up in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which was a republic of Yugoslavia when they were young. If you want to catch some of the charm Zagreb had in that time, see Orson Welles’ The Trial, as a great part of it was shot there.
WHELDON: Why did you shoot so much of the film in Yugoslavia?
WELLES: It seems to me that the story we’re dealing with is said to take place “anywhere”. But of course there is no “anywhere.” When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn’t go to Czechoslovakia because his books aren’t even printed there. His writing is still banished there.
WHELDON: Would you have gone to Czechoslovakia, were you able?
WELLES: Yes, I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague. But you see, capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with it’s roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire wasn’t the only reason why we shot in Yugoslavia. The other reason was that we had a big industrial fair to shoot in. We used enormous buildings, much bigger than any film studio. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.
http://www.wellesnet.com/trial%20bbc%20interview.htm
Josef K. in Zagreb
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