Looking at the Surreal with Eyes Slit by Terror: Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou and September 11

132 Philosophy of Music Education Review zine, 8 March 2002, 3. http://www.metropolismag. com/html/wtc/wtc_gardner_03072002.html. 6.Ibid. 7.di Paoloantonio, "Loss in Present Terms," 1 59. 8."Girls and Boys Town Offering Patriotism Books to Schools," The Associated Press, NW Education, http://www.nwcn.com/education/NW_010702BED girls_boystown. 1 3c00b52.html. 9.David Osborne, "Americans Find Echoes ofPatriotic Grit in a Defining Image From Ground Zero" Independent News, 22 October 2001 , 1 . 10.Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, "The Pedagogical Encounter of Historical Remembrance," in Between Hope andDespair, 2. 1 1 . Herbert Muschamp, "Filling the Void: A Chance to Soar," New York Times, 30 September 2001 , 37 1 2.David W. Dunlap "From 88 Searchlights, an Ethereal Tribute," New York Times, 4 March 2002. 13.Ibid. 14.de Certeau, "Walking in the City," 110. Looking at the Surreal with Eyes Slit by Terror: Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou and September 11 Candace Yang While the very nature offilm questions the line between dream and reality, following the September 11 attacks, movie critics and news commentators were quick to call attention to the burst of American films of 2001 that cleverly weave fantasy and the real: Richard Linklater's Waking Life, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, andTerryZwygoffs Ghostworld , to name a few. Similarly, news reports and articles often relied on the word "surreal" to encapsulate both the image of the buildings bursting into flames upon impact and the two towers collapsing into a smoking pile of rubble hundreds offeet below, and the mixture ofemptiness , shock, anger, doom, and hopelessness that we felt as we witnessed and rewitnessed the second plane flying into the tower.1 In October, the seventeenth most queried word on Cambridge Dictionaries Online, accordingtoHarper'sMagazine , was "surreal," appearing among the words "serendipity," "retaliate," "anüirax," "succumb," and "debris."2 Half a year later, when Paris's Le Center Pompidou and New York's Metropolitan Museum ofArt opened surrealist exhibitions, the Metropolitan for the first time in two decades,3 was this to clear the historically misunderstood surrealist movement? Or to further delve into the astonishment, wonder, questioning, and shock consuming our lives? Are we still in shock a year later? Inthis essay, I will interrogate how we look at and away from the world, especially inprecarious times. Through the examination of surrealist Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou4 and its filmic manipulation ofviolence, shock, time, space, and spectatorship, I propose that we can take a "cinematic " look at the classroom. This need not give rise to a pedagogy that succumbs to spectatorship and consumerism. Instead, it can be onethat slices open our gaze and cultural screen, as Kaja Silverman refers to our"image repertoire,"5 creating an atmospherewherethere is no room forapathy and the anaesthetic. "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE, or it will not be," André Breton, the founder and premier theorist of surrealism, wrote in Nadja.6 This convulsion ofbeauty is akin to that ofa train, the nineteenth-century inventionthat openedvistasto worlds only previously imagined, bringing exotic places to the palpable screen of a compartment window. According to Jacqueline ChénieuxGendron , Bretonsees"onlyadifference ofdegree between aesthetic and eroticpleasure . . . between the state of being in love and poetic 'furor'."7 Another early twentieth-century French poet, BlaiseCendrars,metricallycapturesthepossibilities of the new technology. He writes: "The rhythms ofthe train/ . . . The noise ofdoors voices wheels grinding over the frozen tracks/ The golden thread of my future."8 Breton strings the same imagethroughadifferent lyric intheclosing lines ofNadja: "Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out ofthe Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists ofjolts and shocks, many ofwhich do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does."9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his account of trains and travel in the nineteenth century, traces the history ofmodem shock to the rise oftechnology Symposium 133 which gave way to new ways to traverse and conquer lands, ultimately leading to the modem army, in which individual soldiers work as a cohesive unit so that single blows can rent and rupture the...