DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

3. Surrealism and the Cinema

Surrealism and the Cinema I n the previous chapters, we explored developments in mathematics, science , and philosophy that suggested to people that, by applying its own methods to itself, reason had exposed its inadequacies as means for unveiling truths about reality. For centuries, the West had believed that nature’s secrets were yielding progressively to reason’s rigorous and painstaking methods. By and large, the principles that Bacon had unfolded in the The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The New Organon, or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620)—principles concerning the application of reason to empirical findings—seemed to be succeeding in unveiling truths about reality. So successful did such methods seem that, by the Enlightenment, thinkers had come to believe that even aesthetic, moral, and religious truths could be discovered through the rational means that Bacon had extolled. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reason was exposed as incoherent (or so many believed). By then, mathematics had retreated from its claims to inform us about reality—or even, as in Plato, about a Higher Reality—and adopted the position that it was simply a formal system: the axioms and theorems of mathematics allowed one to rewrite one string of mathematical symbols as another, but no claims for what those 3 259 Chapter Three 260 strings implied about reality were to be made. Then the revelation that the basis for the formal structure itself was riven with incongruity shook the intellectual world. Saloman’s House, the edifice that Bacon had described in the New Atlantis (1627), a model for that very troubled institution, the modern research university, seemed to be crumbling (as our universities almost certainly are).1 If reason itself was incoherent, its application to empirical findings was pointless. Reason, it seems, had exposed as internally incoherent and without purchase on external reality. Many welcomed reason’s demise. Some believed that another historical irony had emerged: reason had prepared the way for the triumph of imagination that the Romantics had predicted—indeed, many believed that setting aside the rational faculties might allow a noetic process even higher than the imagination to supervene, one that would dissolve all the fixed certainties of the limited bourgeois self and allow a new way of living to emerge. But the idea that mind has no access to truth is difficult to bear, and many sought an alternative, super-rational means to discover truth. Many artists came to believe that noesis—that is, the higher intuition celebrated in spiritual and occult traditions—could serve that function, providing a means for apprehending higher truths. This belief came to be central to the discursive context in which art and knowledge were considered. In the introduction, and again in the second chapter, I set forth my belief that the bone structure of Dada and Surrealist artists’ thoughts on the cinema could be stated in the form of an extravagant inference: the value of art forms depends on their capacity to produce powerful pneumatic effects, and the cinema is the most effective pneumatic device. Thus, against the received view—which is that artists and thinkers were embarrassed early on by the cinema’s lowly provenance and felt awkward about asserting its value—I maintain that there was another strain in the cinema’s early reception, one that proclaimed the cinema to be the greatest art, at least for moderns. The discursive context, which ranked the arts according to their potential for producing pneumatic effects, authorized this excited response, for it was clear to many that the cinema was the greatest of the occult machines. In this chapter we will be examining the Surrealists’ beliefs about art and about art’s relation to the cinema. We will see that Surrealists’ beliefs about an alternative noesis did much to shape their ideas about art and cinema, and that their manifestos offered a series of suggestions about how the other arts should be recast to take on attributes of the cinema. They proposed that the other arts would have to “capitulate to the cinema” (to use Werner Herzfelde’s marvellous phrase)—that is, they would have to adopt the cinema’s methods and borrow its virtues if they were to be worthy of the same attention from moderns as the cinema, which was the top art for a dynamic and urbanized culture. The Surrealism and the Cinema 261 cinema in the early decades of...