The Subversive Cinema of Dreams

“In the hands of a free spirit, the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. It is the best instrument through which to express the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct. The mechanism that produces cinematic images is, among all forms of human expression, that which most closely resembles the workings of the mind during sleep.” – Luis Buñuel

There is a feeling you receive from certain films; an almost out-of-body experience, something that is most often compellingly odd; something slightly askew that reaches into your head and confuses you a bit while still wholly engaging you at the same time; a heightened Surrealism that you somehow connect with on a purely emotional and instinctual level. This is the cinema of dreams, of the automatic – a cinema which is much too often relegated to the faux art-house crowd or played lamely for laughs, or used out of sheer laziness by what is an otherwise cynical and formulaic writer / director. The history of modern art goes to show that works which contain and exhibit sincere examples of these unnamable qualities are created by, what are perhaps, the genuine magicians of the medium; they are created by the true rebels who are not pandering to the maddening crowds or manipulating audiences with a pre-determined, often malicious, ulterior motive. They are working from honesty and a desire to lay bare the things which, even they, probably do not fully understand, in an attempt to both show audiences things they have never seen before yet still connect to - and to converse with emotions rarely confronted in the majority of films. But even this basic explanation is flawed, as the basis of this expression is not strictly confined to providing situations and images to the audience purely for their own, solipsistic sake. More often than not there is a grander, more concrete ideology driving the work and even if it is unknown by the artist at the time, they are being truly subversive simply by allowing themselves to expose the unknown and the unfiltered subconscious worlds in which the original seeds for the images germinated.

Now, before we go any further, let me make it a point to state that the thoughts contained herein do not in any way attempt to denigrate films which do not incorporate an artist’s subconscious recollections into the film; there are many astounding films which follow and feed a very structured and recognizable narrative linearity and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I simply wish to discuss one certain type of film/filmmaker here today, so please excuse my broad strokes of unbridled enthusiasm.

“Naturally our only recourse was to counter the exorbitant pretensions of this ‘reason’ that, as we saw it, has usurped the place of true reason; and also to save impulses and desires from the grip of repression, which only made them more harmful. To the extent that we stripped old ‘reason’ of the omnipotence it had assumed over the centuries, it is also understandable that the moral ‘duties’ it helped foist on man lost almost all justification in our eyes.”  – André Breton

The avant-garde* was first and foremost created to mock the absurd standards of rationale – the accepted and agreed upon collection of ridiculous bourgeois, sitting-room-culture social mores shamelessly promoted by the ‘moral majority’. By making a concerted effort to break away from and disregard the firmly established forms of discourse and expression by embracing willful irrationality the avant garde automatically performed a subversive act. If artists wanted to speak out against the social and moral tyranny of their country they were suddenly forced to refuse and belittle the basic logical structure of an indefensible institution against which all forms of insurrection were gleefully justified. They desperately had to express all the emotions they had for so long, been forced to hide and apologize for.

The bourgeoisie had an exposed Achilles heel at the time; they would not suffer a personality who refused to play their trite little games of ego and pomp - in the process of being presented with such an individual they would be exposed; strict belief in their standards of social interaction was their weakness. Country and faith, the two iron gloves worn by the wide-spread oppression suffered upon the citizens of the world, naturally became the prime targets of the subversive because they were the gods beyond censure; worshipped by the status quo most openly and most hypocritically. It goes without saying that the system these artists were functioning within had a great aversion to any form of openly discussed thought which fell too far from the banalities of their safe, green-zone of accepted social behaviors.

Therefore the absurd became the rebellion and as it did, it ruptured something and bled generously into the hands of all the artists, inspiring and breeding countless works which would usher in a new renaissance. Modern art was born: an art which held an ideological structure at its center, concerned with the very rights of man; artistic, moral and sociopolitical revolt were unfalteringly interwoven into the works produced by this new avant-garde. They took a wry, petulant pleasure in ruffling the feathers of the stuffy old maids who had stood watch over the doors of the art world for decades. By bringing madness, irrationality, dreams, the automatic – in short, the truth about the human psyche into the various mediums available to them, they created a scandalous weapon which still remains deadly to this day; one which is immune to the attempts to stifle and smother it, merely because it recognizes the absurdity of their fight against the absurd. For it is simply too difficult to fight a man who refuses the very structure of your rational consciousness; so by acting in an unfiltered relation to the “illogical” subconscious, they disarm and confuse and their opponents. They create “unseemly” juxtapositions which debase and defraud the status quo simply by presenting familiarities within an incongruous context. When faced with the horrors of the rational world they came to the unavoidable conclusion that this sordid “rationality” must be relentlessly attacked.

“… It is clear to us that the world’s real torment lies in the human condition, even more than in the social condition of individuals. Be that as it may, this social condition, which is totally arbitrary and iniquitous, acts as a screen between man and his true problems – a screen that we therefore must first and foremost pierce.” – André Breton

Art became the new forum for class struggle; the revolt of youth was now being based around internal, intellectually artistic evolutions; being defiant by allowing them selves to be swept up and exist furiously in an unabashed, purely unpoliced and unashamed mental realm. When it came right down to it, no matter where their artistic sensibilities led back to, what they were fighting against was the homogenization of thought – the subordination of the individual’s mind to the hive, group-think, passively complacent mind-set of the culture at large. Yet even more importantly, social liberation was now considered to be part and parcel with the liberation of the mind. A fight was openly and loudly waged to reconnect with the natural human spirituality which we all innately possess yet society had continually gone out of its way to obfuscate and destroy. A reclamation of one’s own subconscious, a right to think of and openly discuss any idea or thought they may have - with no fear of reproach or condemnation. After all, there is no legitimate reason to be ashamed of thought – thought is completely innocent – thought does not act, does not kill, steal, etc. – thought is extremely powerful of course, but in its logical state it is nothing more than conjecture, a means to an end – the end itself is what differentiates the passage of thought into reality; physical actions with physical consequences.

Therefore the artist cannot separate art and the basic human rights of man. The act of creation is in itself an act of the free man. Their output is always subversive, even when they are being very conservative in their delivery because they use the medium as a vessel to deliver a message, and by simply using the medium to deliver this message they have transcended the innocuous regions of pure entertainment and moved into a pertinent commentary (even if it only remains pertinent to them personally), they have moved into the realm of art. So the avant-garde artist makes films which express messages in such a way that they involuntarily activate and converse with our subconscious and affect us on a level which I cannot accurately name: it is to converse with the phantoms of existence – then it follows: to create film which engages on a psychologically transparent level intrinsically manages to disrupt the status quo.

The world kept spinning, revolutions and revolutionaries were born, raised their voices and died, manifestos were written and burned, people shot and were shot… both sides continued to spin their various webs around the globe… this was still an EXPLOSIVE time, a time when the bounds were being shattered and redefined in frantic fits. Franco’s regime, Mussolini, Hitler, etc. ad nauseam… these rats continued to plague the world with tyrannical nonsense disguised as the rational and just moral high-ground, while the artists continued to bravely toil away under all the rubble that had been thrown onto their lives. They chose to speak, to express themselves instead of remaining silent… and their dissenting voices made them enemies of the state; targets. The original artists who took it upon their shoulders to spear-head a new movement with a new meaning, sought to destroy all conventional social, moral, and artistic habits of thought and perception; they, like Rimbaud, sought to create new colors, new words; Psychic automation as kinetic-flesh-jazz. They represented the mad ones, the evolution of the artistic mind-set into the political sphere, their hands were forced and they became a new breed of soldier; fighting on the front lines with images, words and ideas.

It may all seem stale and commonplace now, yet there was a time when denouncing the church, the government and the entirety of the social structure was a very dangerous and truly explosive act to take part in – these were still the days when you could be condemned, exiled, executed, jailed or attacked by a fascist mob for having the courage to show something as innocuous as a cow sleeping in a woman’s luxurious bed. There were very real, very dangerous consequences for “subversive” actions; therefore nothing was feigned purely for attention or shock value, they spoke out of the pure desire to help free a dangerously repressed society.

Now, what I suggest you ask is: Where do we stand now and even more importantly, where are we going?

“…I demand phantasmagorical films […] The cinema is an amazing stimulant. It acts directly on the grey matter of the brain. When the savour of art has been sufficiently combined with the psychic ingredient which it contains it will go way beyond the theatre which we will relegate to a shelf of memories. two courses seem to be open to the cinema, of which neither is the right one. The pure or absolute cinema on the one hand, and on the other this sort of venial hybrid art.” - Antonin Artaud

Let’s discuss this from here on out.

*For the sake of brevity, this article does not specify the “avant-garde”, but it should (hopefully) obviously refer to the “avant-garde” of the early 20^th century, specifically the DADA movement and subsequently, with a greater focus, The Surrealist party.