#FilmHistory #TheatreStudies #ArtHistory #EuropeanStudies #RussianFormalism #FreudianPsychology #Ingmar-Bergman #Eugène Ionesco
“I believe, in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality--which are seemingly so contradictory--in a sort of absolute reality, or surréalité.”
- André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto
Introduction
The Surrealist movement, born in the 1920s out of the enlightenment of the post-World War I movement Dadaism and the Hegelian dialectical process, commits to an intellectual revolution against bourgeois rationalism. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the unconscious, the Surrealists began to pursue their objectives through multiple artistic experiments, such as “pure psychic automation.” Andre Breton, the leading figure of the Paris Surrealist group, contends that only through automation can “real life”(la vraie vie) be extracted from the material world, one that is full of desire and societal constraints. (Breton, 1972) Branching off from automation, the Surrealist Movement later developed a distinct culture in the arts: characterized by biomorphic shapes, dream-like associations, and manipulation of found objects. These are not only marked in the work of artists as Max Ernst, Joan Miró, René Magritte, and Salvador Dali, but also in literature, cinema, and even politics. In general, surrealists tackle the problem of reconciling the opposites: life and death, reality and dream, consciousness and subconsciousness, and so on. This paper strives to understand the roots of the origin of the Surrealist ideal, to reason its significance in terms of exploration of self-identity, and to argue that Surrealist techniques are continuously used in cinema and theatre works like Persona and Bald Soprano even after the Parisian Group dissolved, which are apparent in terms of their dream logic and the defamiliarization of human experience.