The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought (review)

Finkelstein’s study of Parisian surrealism in the 1920s beings with the heady declarations of the young poet Robert Desnos, who extolled “the miracle of the screen” as one of the great pleasures that emerged from “the perfect night of the cinema.” Finkelstein’s book doesn’t stray far from such celebrations of mystery and miracle as it reexamines works by the young poets and painters who formed the surrealist movement in Paris after the First World War. Only in the book’s final chapters does Finkelstein acknowledge the “debacle of the Surrealists’ attempt in the 1920s to join the Communist Party,” as well as the group’s eventual shifts in temperament throughout the later 1920s, 30s, and beyond. Finkelstein’s point of departure is instead a young surrealism still emerging from the cradle of its mysticism wherein, he writes, “there is always a slippage in the writings of Breton and other Surrealists into the uncertain ground of a metaphysical Beyond” (3). The screen—Finkelstein’s name for a set of metaphors and formal conventions drawn from the group’s early enthusiasm for the cinema—offers a “spatial paradigm” for the “various dichotomies informing Surrealist thought.”

The book’s project, in other words, is to offer a new optic for viewing the movement’s works from the early 1920s. The “screen paradigm” outlines a hermeneutics of surface and depth in surrealist writing and art; Finkelstein emphasizes the configuration of physical space in surrealist works, distancing himself from the more conventional scholarly investment in their arrangement (and often dismemberment) of bodies, stories, and objects. Gaston Bachelard—himself a onetime surrealist—treated such notions at length in his 1958 Poetics of Space; Finkelstein’s aim is less to examine how the surrealists theorized the lived experience of physical space, however, than to articulate the formal language through which the leading male participants in the group—Breton, Desnos, Aragon, and Artaud; Ernst, Magritte, Miro, and Masson—adapted cinematic techniques within their own artistic work.

At times, Finkelstein’s formalist approach marks a welcome intervention within the field of surrealist art history. The book does well, for instance, to view Max Ernst’s paintings as formally—rather than biographically, psychoanalytically, or metaphysically—engaged with issues of cognition and unconscious desire for which his work is celebrated; as Finkelstein describes it, Ernst’s delineations of figural space engender “a representation or evocation of a mental space” dedicated to grasping “the reality of the mind.” At other times, Finkelstein’s study risks lapsing into thematic criticism, as when it rehearses the fact that “references to doors and windows abound in Surrealist texts and poems” (62). All the same, it is always the valences of the surrealists’ deployment of such tropes that concern Finkelstein. Breton’s spatial tropes, for example, tend toward expressing his abiding interest in “the hidden recesses of the mind,” whereas Aragon’s appealed to “the darkness of the unattainable reality of existence,” and Desnos’ to the openness of erotic encounters. Finkelstein synthesizes these approaches under the aegis of the screen, explaining that the doors and windows planted in the screen-surfaces of surrealist figuration serve as “metaphorical passageways or thresholds between the two dichotomous realms governing surrealist thought—that of dream and mystery and that of the real” (62).

Finkelstein, somewhat refreshingly, is leery of “applying theory” to surrealist texts and images; he chooses instead to derive, rather than impose, a paradigm for synthesizing its “dichotomous realms.” In doing so, of course, Finkelstein risks overlooking surrealism’s contributions to the very “theory” whose heavy-handed scholarly deployment he seeks to circumvent. The Screen in Surrealist Art and Thought offers a stimulating new framework for interpreting surrealist writing and visual art of the 1920s; it will be of interest to students and scholars invested in the exegesis of surrealist works, as well as the reception of early cinema in France.