Dada (1915-1924)

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Dada (1915-1924)

• Reaction to the Great War disgust,
  disillusionment, disinterest
• Loss of faith in everything beauty, ethical
  values, rationality, social structure, dignity of
  man
• the end of causality
• Essential ideas
• Spontaneity
• Simultaneity (life appears as a muddle of noises,
  colors and rhythms)
• Bruitism (noise-music like a chorus of
  typewriters, kettledrums, rattles and pot covers)
• Negation
• Everything is illusory
• Man is nothing
• Everything is equally unimportant
• Absurdity

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Uses anti-bourgeois shock techniques (épater les
bourgeois)

• Coarse language
• Gross simplifications and exaggerations
• Clowning and acrobatic feats
• Illogical structure and statements
• Contradictions
• Deliberate monotony
• Go to the International Dada Archive at the
  University of Iowa

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Tristan Tzara, Dada manifesto (1918)

• Dada knowledge of all the means rejected up
  until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable
  compromise and good manners Dada abolition of
  logic, which is the dance of those impotent to
  create Dada of every social hierarchy and
  equation set up for the sake of values by our
  valets Dada every object, all objects,
  sentiments, obscurities, apparitions, and the
  precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for
  the fight Dada abolition of memoryDada
  absolute and unquestionable faith in every god
  that is the immediate product of
  spontaneityFreedom Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of
  tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of
  all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies
  LIFE

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Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
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Surrealism

• Direct outgrowth of Dadaism
• André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) I
  believe in the future resolution of two states
  (in appearance so contradictory), dream and
  reality a surreality
• A reaction to the chaotic world seemingly bereft
  of values

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Joan Miró, Dog Barking at the Moon (1926)
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Max Ernst, The Kiss (1927)
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Salvador Dalí, Illumined Pleasures (1929)
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Surrealism

• Aims
• to explore the processes of pure thought, of the
  subconscious (Freud)
• To release the energies that lie deep within us
  and that alone have value
• To obtain absolute freedom of the spirit Total
  liberty of being in a world liberated
  (Communism)
• Features
• A flow of pure thought uninhibited by reason
• Non-conformity
• Disinterestedness
• Automatic writing
• Spontaneity
• Free association
• Fragmentation
• Violent juxtaposition of images
• A poetic structure that creates and imposes its
  own inner structure

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Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)

• Born in 1900 in Calanda, Spain
• Early education by the Jesuits
• Met Dalí and a number of important poets and
  writers during his college years (Residencia de
  estudiantes)
• Had to live most of his adult life outside of
  Spain (France, US, Mexico)

Portrait of Buñuel by Dalí
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Buñuel

• I should like to make even the most ordinary
  spectator feel that he is not living in the best
  of all possible worlds

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Buñuel on Andalusian Dog

• In the film are amalgamated the aesthetics of
  Surrealism with Freudian discoveries. It answered
  the general principle of that school, which
  defines Surrealism as an unconscious, psychic
  automatism, able to return to the mind its real
  function, outside of all control exercised by
  reason, morality or aesthetics the characters
  function animated by impulses, the primal sources
  of which are confused with those of
  irrationalism, which, in turn, are those of
  poetry. At times these characters react
  enigmatically, in as far as a pathological
  psychic complex can be enigmatic. The film is
  directed at the unconscious feelings of man, and
  therefore is of universal value, although it may
  seem disagreeable to certain groups of society
  which are sustained by puritanical moral
  principles.

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More Buñuel

• I do not want the film to please you, but to
  offend you. I would be very sorry if you were to
  enjoy it.

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Forum

• In Andalusian Dog, Luis Buñuel widely uses the
  process of dissociation that is central to the
  surrealist vision of art. This is defined as the
  fortuitous juxtaposition of two disparate
  realities creating an element of shock or
  surprise. The most obvious example of this is
  the juxtaposition of the moon being divided by a
  cloud and the eyeball being cut this contrasts a
  calm and reassuring scene with a violent and
  brutal one. Describe two or three other examples
  of this process and explain how it functions as
  well as your response to it.
• Amanda
• Alexus
• Alonna
• Other?

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• Dreamlike elements?
• Anti-bourgeois elements?
• Recurring themes sex and death
• A Freudian reading of the film (from Gwynne
  Edwards)