![]() Or the way Suspiria (1977) brings unnatural colors over almost everything, yet it still feels real. Take for instance the way the movie The Tree of Life (2011) blends normal sequences of mundane moments with dreamscapes, with hazy memories, and then with psychedelic imagery from beyond the terrestrial plain. What one visually sees in a surrealist film is not so much what is there, but a haze of what can be imagined to be there. While impressionism and surrealism in traditional art history are different movements, they share a common thread because they both distort and play with visual reality in highly subjective ways. Impressionistic, psychedelic, or bizarre cinematography. Sorry to Bother You (2008) is a surreal and meta-movie written and directed by rapper Boots Riley.Ģ. This kind of irrationality underpins great surrealist movies. Similarly, in An Andalusian Dog (1929), the film has no real sense of linear or chronological time but assumes that is normal. For example, in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), the movie is intentionally filled with subtle anachronisms and glitches that give you the feeling that something is deeply off with the setting. Surrealist movies often have strange “Easter eggs,” or glitches, in them that are meant to subconsciously put the viewer in a phantasmagorical state where they are questioning what is reality and what is fantasy. Secret glitches in reality and trippy nuances. It Follows changes seasons without explanation and in a way that is so subtle that first-time viewers miss it.ġ. Mind-bending, crazy and trippy visuals are surely one component, but let’s go even deeper. ![]() Marina Rosenfeld: Mise en scene en scene #1 (Daily Bul, etc.What exactly makes something a surreal movie? What are surreal films? What is the defining characteristic of surrealist cinematic history? Here are the main traits of surrealism in movies.Kenneth Goldsmith: Robert Desnos, “Awakenings” and “Ideal Mistress” (3:21): MP3.Kenneth Goldsmith: Andre Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism” (2:35): MP3.Kenneth Goldsmith: Hans Bellmar, from “What Oozed Through the Staircase” (1:48): MP3.All this is now available at a special PennSound page. I also made a video recording of the final performance - a surrealist game. ![]() Surprised that the event wasn't being recorded, I brought out my smart phone and captured the audio as best I could from the fourth row. The event was called “What Oozed Through the Staircase: A Winter Afternoon of Surrealist Writing and Music,” held in the middle of the surrealist exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday, January 26, 2014. I have folders where images and landscapes wait for me to find a use for them. I have books on magic and mysteries of the world and Jane Fonda’s workout routine and children’s illustrated history books and books about space and land and science. There is something peaceful about cutting along the edge of an image. I cut and glue pictures and patterns instead. I’ll be in no mood for words or for thinking with any depth on a matter. Sometimes writing poems is too much for me. There are no painstaking decisions to make or moments where I completely shut down and question every decision I ever made leading up to this point. I can follow my amateur (nonexistent) visual sensibilities as I piece together the cut-out phrases and headless bodies and mollusk shells, and it brings me simple pleasure. ![]()
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