SURREALISM
Surrealism is everything to discover using the mind as an infinite source of imagination. It emerged in Europe around 1920 and beyond creating literature, art or philosophy, its real purpose was to explode the social order and transform life itself.
As defined by Andrè Breton in the Manifesto of 1924, surrealism is a “…psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposesto express –verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought…”
And in the absence of any control, carried out by reason, they accepted every initiative linked to the free expression of feelings and instincts.
Arising from the Dadaists, the Surrealists established a research within the subconscious, claiming the feeling and the instinct as animportant part of human personality. Luis Buñuel expresses in his autobiography that surrealism was an aggressive morality that exalted passion, mystification and black humour, rejecting all existing values.
SURREALISM AND CINEMA
Surrealism was never a “film movement”; for surrealists going to the cinema was an experience similar to a dream, laying on the edge of realities. What got theminto cinema was its quality of revealing the unconscious, without destroying the mystery of it; it was a medium that hadn’t been “putrefied” under tradition or aesthetic pretension.
The film, centred in the image, was a medium for the surrealists to place the eye in a state of receptivity and turn it able to see in a savage way, while keeping the content hidden in the back of the images.SURREALISM AND BOURGEOISIE CULTURE
The bourgeoisie is the social middle class that got their power out of employment, education and wealth. Marx defines this class as the owners of production in a capitalist society ; the bourgeois revolution the industry and modernized society, but also sought to monopolize the benefits by exploiting the proletariat and creating revolutionary tensions.
An interestin popular culture was constant in surrealism. From the beginning of the movement they were concerned about the situation of contemporary society; they expressed against the bourgeoisie that they perceived as a decadent culture immersed in the commercial apparatus of modern era.
Surrealism was a dissident movement that was first conceived as an uncompromising response to both the ideologicalnumbness of the bourgeoisie and the intolerant insight of Communism.
Most surrealists came from good families; they were bourgeois revolting against the bourgeoisie. Their principle aim was to find means to disrupt the smugness of the dominant cultural traditions and establish the basis for a new way of thinking; and they figured out that the realization of this modern mythology could beaccomplished effectively by film.
LUIS BUÑUEL AND THE BURGEOISE CULTURE IN HIS FILMS
Luis Buñuel is considered as the first surrealist filmmaker. He related to surrealism for its moral sensibility and its communal sense.
Beyond the avant-garde experimentation with poetic and scandalising images of surrealists, Buñuel turned himself into a storyteller of everyday life trying to move profoundly thespectator.
Buñuel’s trajectory was intensely committed to the denunciation of inequality in a humoristic way.
He was particularly interested in bourgeoisie because its good manners required the repression of desire. And although he was raised in it, he couldn’t stand it for the social and economical power it had. The hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie appearance both entertained him and bothered him.Buñuel considered the problems of human society to lie within the human psyche; it wasn’t that he particularly disliked bourgeoisies, as he once stated “I like all people; I don’t like the society that certain of them have created”, but he was wondering how decent people could create such a perverse society.
Inside Buñuel’s film production “L’âge d’or” stands out for revealing the minds of the…
