Surrealism and Expressionism

Kade 2022-03-23 09:02:08

Dali and Buñuel's "An Andalusian Dog" and Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet" are representative works of the surrealist tendencies of French avant-garde cinema in the 1920s and 1930s.



There is a kind of temptation and fluke mentality when watching. On the one hand, due to the unknown and irrational nature of experimental films, I am full of expectations for their content and form; and admit his ignorance.



What exactly is a surrealist film, a combination of dreams and fantasies, irrational plots that need no explanation, or an expression of the author's own subjective symbolic meaning? After watching these two films (and only these two films), what impressed me the most was the incomprehensible time-space transformation of the story scenes in the film. This setting is an artificial and unconventional imagination. Theoretically, the surrealist film has added the creative method of stream of consciousness, a kind of subconsciousness, and all the unusual and unimaginable things shown in the film can be explained by Freud's theory. Yet filmmakers don't want the public to interpret what they're trying to say.



Sometimes I hate thinking. Surrealist filmmakers (some also Dadaists) believed in purposeless and unconscious creation. No explanation or justification is required. You don't even need an audience.



Comparing surrealist films and abstract films, although both are experimental films and are incomprehensible to ordinary audiences, abstract films are rational and only express the theme of the film with incomprehensible "numbers". . There are a large number of abstract-themed films in Canadian experimental animation, and the research content is the relationship between sound and picture.



I thought of all the strange dreams I had had before. These dreams are uninterpretable on my own, and probably never will be. For surrealist films, even considering various factors such as the background, experience and standpoint of the film author himself, a complete interpretation cannot be obtained. There are only various possibilities.





Compared with the German expressionist film "Dr. Caligari's Cabin", the film tells the story of the truth that Dr. Caligari used a sleepwalker to murder, and at the end, the hero of the film was transformed into a real psychopath. Expressionism is fully demonstrated in the film's scene arrangement. A large number of deformed and distorted scenes in the film highlight the theme of the film and imply the historical background of the society at that time (the pain caused by the First World War to the German people). Expressionist films are similar to Surrealist films, both influenced by Impressionism and distinct from Abstractionism.

What I see in this first horror film in history is more of a narrative technique and spiritual connotation.



Recently I have been reading books on film theory, but the deeper I study, the more I find that film as an art really includes too much knowledge, which requires a more thorough understanding of art, especially art.

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