Much in the spirit of surrealist films that I am about to celebrate, this post will consist of a main highlight followed by several items of interest.
Many see the birth of surrealist film as the famous premiere of Un Chien Andoulou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), a movie co-authored by Salvador Dali and the movement’s poster boy, Luis Buñuel. Surrealism is primarily known as a modern art movement in which artists (through a mixture of free association, the expression of the unconscious and a pledge to anarchic thought) undermine the taken-for-grantedness of everyday reality and instead look toward the vast worlds of human dreams. Un Chien Andoulou gives dialectical montage and inertia to this artistic tendency, in the process doing such wild things as showing ants overwhelm a human hand, having various painful things happen to members of the clergy and, most famously, depicting the slicing of an eyeball. Luis Buñuel is perhaps the only director to have constantly worked in this register for his entire career. Today I was lucky enough to view his final film, Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977), a movie that perfectly depicts the tensions felt by a man in love with an almost unreal woman, confoundingly played by two actresses, all amidst wanton terrorist attacks, class warfare, and subtle signifiers pointing toward the inevitable end of bourgeois hegemony. Attempts at encapsulating Buñuel’s films are often more annoying than rewarding: rest assured that nearly all of his work marvelously subverts convention with its dream logic.
On a less arcane note, a few items of interest. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire hits theaters soon, and could be the movie that pulls the American film industry’s profit margins up by the bootstraps. If it is anything like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it could be both mainstream and mildly artistically satisfying.
Deep Discount DVD is currently having their big 20% off sale. This is the time to pick up any and all of those movies you’ve been putting off buying. Head over to http://www.dvdtalk.com for more information.
Please take a gander at the interview with John Kenneth Muir. His books sheed welcome light on many of the more obscure genre films out there and at the same time bring fresh perspective to big titles.
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