SURREALISM

Later on, the Surrealist artists were to do the same with images. The aim of the Surrealists, or ‘super-realists,’ was to reject the normality of ordered existence and show that in dreaming when asleep and by using his imagination when awake, the poet and artist became more real than real, thus super-real.

It is no coincidence that Surrealism in art came to prominence just after Sigmund Freud had been recognised as the greatest psychologist ever with the publication of his book, the Interpretation of Dreams.

Surrealist artists like Salvador Dali, René Magritte and Max Ernst rejected the purist notion of ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ in art and put the meaning of the dream at the centre of their works.

The dream had already been a feature of works by Romantic artists like Francisco de Goya and Henri Fuseli. But these earlier artists had featured the monstrous creations of their own imaginations to create their nightmarish images. The Surrealists, on the other hand, created dreamlike scenarios by juxtaposing everyday objects in unlikely situations.

Consider The Reckless Sleeper by Rene Magritte, (1928, Tate Modern). An androgynous figure lies sleeping in a boxlike formation above an array of objects that includes a bowler hat, a bird, an apple, a candle, a hand mirror and a ribbon tied in a bow.

There is nothing alarming or fantastical about the sleeping subject; the objects are items we may encounter as we go about our daytime business. It is the juxtaposition of the subject and objects that raises questions.

Why has the sleeping subject no visible gender? Why does he/she appear to float above a rock-like formation in which these items appear to be solidly set? What is the esoteric meaning of the arrangement of these items set in stone? Indeed, there is something of the vanitas about these items, i.e., the mirror, candle and blue satin bow. Or does the arrangement have any external meaning at all?

Landscape from a Dream by Paul Nash, (1936-8, Tate Gallery) leaves us similarly unsettled. A giant bird perches at the edge of a cliff that is oddly furnished with a giant mirror and a series of blank frames. We can see it is mirror because of the reflection of the bird in the foreground.

In the reflected landscape the sun appears to be setting but a question arises; is the ball floating in the orange sky really meant to be the sun or is it linked to the other ball-like objects in the foreground? Is the bird wheeling in the sky of the reflected landscape connected in any way to the bird in ‘our’ landscape? And what is a large mirror doing on a cliffs-edge anyway?

It is interesting, too, that these images are in colour. In 1929 the filmmaker Luis Buñuel made Le Chien Andalou, a film where characters step through doors and windows into other times and places. This dissociation of time and place is the hallmark of Surrealism. However, Le Chien Andalou was made in black and white. As cinema progressed directors made more and more use of Technicolor. In 1939, Victor Flemming made the Wizard of Oz.

The bookends of this film, i.e., the sequences at the beginning and end of the story, were filmed in black and white while the fantasy sequences of Dorothy in Oz were filmed in colour. The monochrome aids the suspension of our disbelief in the more ‘realistic’ parts of the story while the use of colour heightens the fantasy of our time in Oz.

For the next decade animated movies and musicals were made in colour while films with more realistic storylines were made in black and white. That colour has triumphed in film today, there is no doubt.

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