und lass uns ewig sein

Personal collection of movie reviews / analyses / thoughts.

[personal-intertitles]

Un Chien Andalou: Surrealist film and the relationship between art and the viewer

What I love most about this movie is how wild it is (as a result of Dalí and Buñuel) and what that meant for movies. Because of what was going on in the world of visual arts at the time, with various radical forms of modern art well underway, the creation of cinema yielded a unique opportunity. It could either be relegated someplace else and taken up by traditionalists and given a more formalized start, but the modern artists at the time quickly snatched up the medium for all of the possibilities it held. From the beginning, as 1929 is still very early for cinema, it was used as a method to push art and shock people, very clearly standing on the shoulders of modern art movements. Un chien andalou’s entire intention is to defy logic, and Dalí and Buñuel showed how cinema can be used to do this. They felt no need to discover Academy-like principles to govern art, although the Hayes Code will later search to restrict it in other ways. Sergei Eisenstein, at the start of his essay “Through Theater to Cinema”, mentions this radical liberty: “In the early 1920s we all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready-built city; there were no squares, no streets laid out; not even little crooked lanes and blind alleys, such as we may find in the cinemetropolis of our day. We came like bedouins or goldseekers to a place with unimaginably great possibilities, only a small section of which has even now been developed.” And in this unmapped territory, films like Un chien andalou are made and go on to have an extensive impact instead of being an oddity quickly and destructively dismissed. There is something to be said about how they could have taken cinema in any direction, there was nothing stipulating that they do this or that, no established expectations or codes, and they really ran with it, they did not hesitate.

Love letter aside, I’ve also always struggled with surrealist pieces. In a movie that defies logic, how can such beautiful and complex analyses be written? I read an excerpt of a PhD thesis by Sabina Stent posted to Silent London (link down below for those interested), and the thesis is titled “Women Surrealists: sexuality, fetish, femininity and female surrealism”. In it this excerpt, she makes a very compelling argument that analyzes certain symbols like hands in the movie, but also referencing other movies and backing it up with a Freudian logic. And although I fully believe any analysis is a good analysis backed by evidence, and there is no “right” or “wrong” when trying to find the meaning in art, only the “unsupported”, how is this possible? I know Dalí and Buñuel have a history of stretching the truth into something a bit more fantastic, but how could such a nuanced and thoughtful argument be so well woven into a twenty-one minute short that was supposedly made to make zero sense, no matter how hard anyone tried? In reality, scholars like Stent have made very good sense of the movie. It’s a frustrating tension that can never be truly resolved, as it deals with artistic intent which is never truly discoverable.

But perhaps this very tension is a surrealist point. I still have an impulse to find a meaning, to make sense of it, to read essays like Stents, and try and piece together an understanding. As human beings, we see the world and want to categorize and analyze to better equip ourselves for how to act in it and what we might have to respond to. But we seem to have succeeded, at least in part, where I would expect to just find a bunch of frustrated scholars pulling out their hair. Is the message here then that there is meaning to be extrapolated everywhere? Then what significance can we assign to that meaning, if anything? It seems to be, that even a work of art meant to leave us dumbfounded and disturbed with no benefit, we can interact with it and benefit. The emphasis then appears on the relationship and interaction itself, the one between the piece and the viewer. What a radical statement, then, that they very act of actively engaging the piece is maybe more responsible for any new understanding and benefit than we originally gave it credit for, differing credit more to the piece itself.

*The post was a guest post made by Sabina Stent to the website Silent London, using an excerpt from her PhD thesis for the University of Birmingham, and titled the post: “SURREALISM, SYMBOLS AND SEXUALITY IN UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929) AND L’AGE D’OR (1930)”, with a link to her full thesis at the start of the article. You can find it here: https://silentlondon.co.uk/2014/03/14/surrealism-hands-and-sexuality-in-un-chien-andalou-1929-and-lage-dor-1930/

[personal-intertitles]

Communism and Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Unfortunately, this will be a  short commentary on Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), as I am slipping further and further behind schedule.

What struck me most about this movie, is how deep down the communist propaganda runs. I’ve read one too many stories where Russians, especially under Stalin, in Soviet Russia are only communist on a superficial level. These people maybe used to be truer communist revolutionaries, but then their sentiments shifted to more of a survival technique and a belief that any changes would wreck what stability they had. The concern was more about appearing communist and a supporter of the government than actually believing in it all. Perhaps Eisenstein’s dedication is more of a symptom of how early this movie was made, being released only eight years after the 1917 revolution. This makes me want to research more into where Eisenstein stood later in his life, and whether the confiscation and destruction of Ivan the Terrible III by the state in 1944 jaded him at all, although I doubt if he felt that way he committed it to writing, or even then that those supposed writings would have survived seventy years after his death.

Battleship Potemkin does survive, however, and as a beautifully made movie with a clear communist propaganda intent. It has all of the elements of a communist message: power of the masses to overthrow the corrupt and wealthy leadership, the ridiculousness of religion and how it is used as a tool to oppress the masses, and that this revolution must be done violently because the corrupted government will not restrain their violence. Certain techniques in the movie itself heighten this message: no characters are developed beyond a symbolic status lending the movie to a more ensemble feel, the only colored image in the black and white movie is of the shipmen raising a red flag once they have gained control over the ship, and the bookend quotes from Lenin that are simple enough for someone with a basic reading level to understand.

But his essay “Through Theater to Cinema” underscores how deep his communist beliefs run, in that he uses it as the foundation for which he sees the world. In one of the first pages of the essay, he says: “The apparent arbitrariness of matter, in its relation to the status quo of nature, is much less arbitrary than it seems. The final order is inevitably determined, consciously or unconsciously, by the social premises of the maker of the filmcomposition. His class-determined tendency is the basis of what seems to be an arbitrary cinematographic relation to the object placed, or found, before the camera.” To him, the ultimate product of the film (and all art and interaction on a larger scale) is determined by a class consciousness, and therefore implying that his work is no different. He has a strong feeling of destiny in this sense, and his depiction of the 1905 mutiny could be seen as an example of how the revolution was inevitable, that there were events leading up to and foreshadowing the 1917 revolution. And in the violence of the communist revolution that he endorses, it seems he backs an idea that violent disruption is needed to bring the world closer to peace. The violence and chaos of the mutiny and the Odessa staircase is tragic but also unavoidable and necessary, from this point of view, to bring about a better world and prevent this from happening in the future, and potentially on a larger scale.

*The essay was found in Jay Leyda’s edition of Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, where the essay was originally published in 1934, and is quoted from the translation by Paya Haskelson. A PDF of the entire book can be found here: https://monoskop.org/images/7/7c/Eisenstein_Sergei_Film_Form_Essays_in_Film_Theory_1977.pdf

[personal-intertitles]

Ambiguity and Free Will in the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

In 1920, Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari debuted in interwar Germany. In the movie, Francis tells an old man the story of something terrible that happened to him. In a tiny German town, carnival man by the name of Dr. Caligari hypnotized his servant to try to murder multiple people, including Francis’s friend and his fiancée Jane. Francis, with the aid of others including the police, unmasks Dr. Caligari as the director of an insane asylum who is bent on imitating another Dr. Caligari and his murderous sleepwalking servant from the 1700’s. Francis’s story to the old man ends, and Francis himself is revealed to be a patient at the asylum, along with the sleepwalker and his supposed fiancée, and Dr. Caligari as the director who ends the movie by stating now he knows how to cure Francis. The only reasons the audience might have to distrust Dr. Caligari come from a story told by a mental patient potentially just with a potentially active imagination, as multiple people from the asylum appear to be unrealistically reimagined in his story. Despite the unreliable nature of the main narrative, Dr. Caligari’s character fails to be completely trustworthy in the final scene as a result of the sudden juxtaposition of his evilness in the main narrative with the character who has an innocent air to him but lacks evidence to calm our suspicions. Is he planning on silencing Francis? Has he used his power of authority to promote a truth that suits him and subdue Francis? Or was Francis’s story simply that of a madman with an active imagination? To what extent are we willing to have faith in the goodness of authority?

This uncertainty presents a tension—the audience has no certainty in the ending, and any certainty they might have is easily undermined. Weine intentionally prevents the ability to easily break down and understand the movie. For example, the movie features highly stylized sets, typical for German Expressionist movies where the sets, often partially motivated by tight budgets, represented the dramatic emotional states of the characters instead of any reality. This would easily be exaggerated in a story from an asylum patient—representing the terror and fictitious nature of his story, a product of the imagination with a corresponding unrealistic set. But the sets are not entirely realistic in the main narrative, preventing the assumption that everything is back to a straight-laced reality. For example, in the opening scene, tiny branches hang around Francis and the old man like spider webs, and, in the closing scene, the wallpaper and staircases are stylized, and more noticeably stylized is the room Francis is taken to and restrained by the asylum workers and Dr. Caligari. A more convincing frame narrative, in terms of cementing the main narrative as a crazy fantasy and the frame as reality, would show the audience a thoroughly realistic set, one with very plain and sensible doors and chairs and sets. Also, Dr. Caligari would be more actively cleared of Francis’s accusations. Instead, the audience is left with the juxtaposition of a crazy Dr. Caligari, as described by Francis, being restrained by asylum workers and put in a straight jacket, with this director in the main narrative who still comfortably holds his power and seems to be working to cure his patients. The director does nothing to actively absolve himself, but instead there are no incriminating details, leaving any paranoia about the director unfounded in terms of the main narrative. From these tensions about reality or imagination and good or bad, the ambiguity is deeply woven into the movie and the characters.

The sleepwalker, Cesare, stands as one of the most concentrated examples of this tension. The main narrative describes him as a patient of the asylum who was admitted because of issues with sleepwalking. Dr. Caligari then proclaims that he can use this to his advantage in order to “learn if it’s true that a somnambulist can be compelled to perform acts which, in a waking state, would be abhorrent to him …. whether, in fact, he can be driven against his will to commit a murder”. Cesare becomes his slave, entirely denied of his own person free will in favor of becoming a mechanism for Dr. Caligari. Weine’s set up denies Cesare any free will, but in that sense, also absolves him of any culpability of his actions. After trying to kill Francis’s fiancée, Cesare drops dead, and no time is wasted blaming Cesare; instead, the people who were pursuing him immediately go after Dr. Caligari. Cesare is portrayed, then, as Dr. Caligari’s tragic puppet who he has completely and consuming control over.

Cesare’s essence as a person, his own power to choose his own actions or at least be aware of them, is violated by Dr. Caligari. This, given the context of interwar Germany, seems to be symbolically criticizing a system of authority where others become mindless cogs in a machine, where the hunger for power of the authorities corrupts and eradicates the souls of the people. Cesare, for example, drops dead when being chased by Francis and others after trying to kill Jane. Once separated from his master, who entirely controls him and therefore he has no ability left to function on his own, he then dies. There is a forbidding tone to this—once part of the system, your soul is sold, and there is no escape except death. They have no potential for rehabilitation into society because they lack the basic component of a distinct human being—an idea of free will. But the death of Cesare does not seem to be just punishment, but instead a tragic fate, as the people do not persecute him, but rather his master.

Weine systematically shows through Cesare how people in a system are robbed of their free will, and, with this, responsibility for their actions. It seems to be a nervous justification for collaboration, a discussion amplified post-World War II, assuming the collaborators had no choice but to submit, and the power-hungry authorities eagerly consumed them as means to an end. Through this perspective, when can we ever trust authorities? Are we easily subjugated? The only way to prevent this proposed violation and destruction of people would be if we viewed the situation from a comprehensive but entirely detached point of view. But how obtainable is this? Dr. Caligari’s narrative seems to be the victorious one, because despite however much we might believe Francis or at least doubt Dr. Caligari, Francis’s placement in an insane asylum prevents any confidence in what he might say. When violence uproots society, as WWI did and Francis accuses Dr. Caligari of doing, can there ever be a satisfying conclusion? Can we ever be confident in the victor’s version of the events, and is an objective truth ever possible?