Patrick Whittaker

Psychic Automatism in the Works of Luis

Bunuel and Maya Deren

In 1924, the French writer Andre Breton drafted the first

Surrealist manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surréalism) which
was published in 1925. In the manifesto, he defines
Surrealism ('once and for all', as he puts it) as: 'Psychic
automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to
express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in
any other manner - the actual functioning of thought.
Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control
exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral
concern.'i

Much of the document concerns itself with the nature of

dreams and dreaming. It is heavily influenced by Freud
whose Interpretation of Dreams (first published in
1911) was still causing shockwaves:

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear

upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this
considerable portion of psychic activity [...] has still
today been so grossly neglected.

Freud begins The Interpretation of Dreams by saying,

'[...] there is a psychological technique which makes it
possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application
of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a
psychological structure, full of significance, and one which
may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic
activities of the waking state. 'ii

In common with Freud, the Surrealists placed the

subconscious on a pedestal and examined it from a
scientific perspective. They believed the apparent
irrationality of our inner minds could tell us much about
the human psyche and unveil a reality which our
conscious minds filter out.

Like Dada, its immediate predecessor, Surrealism was not

to be confined to the art gallery. In fact it had started out
as a literary movement before being siezed upon by such
artists as Max Ernst and Man Ray.

Of all the media available to be used in exploring the

subconscious, the relatively new medium of the cinema
offered most potential, untarnished as it was by centuries
of tradition. Even before the Surrealists began to
experiment with film, film-makers were using it to create
representations of the fantastic. Obvious examples are
any number of films by George Melies (most famously A
Trip To the Moon (France, 1902)), Cecil Hepworth's
Alice in Wonderland (UK, 1903) and Larry Semon's
Wizard of Oz (USA,1925).

The interaction between Surrealism and the cinema has

been rich and varied. It involved, initially, a small group of
films produced within the framework of the French
Surrealist movement of the 1920s, among which Un
Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) stands as
the brief, comic, terrifying landmark.iii

What makes film uniquely suited to representing the work

of the dreams and the unconscious is its editability. Time
and space can be manipulated in the edit suite through
any number of techniques. By splicing two unrelated shots
together, the film-maker is able to create an association,
a dream-like implication of cause and effect that could not
exist in the real world. Time can be reversed, slowed
down, manipulated. Two or more incarnations of one
person can be in the same room at the same time; they
can even converse. The impossible becomes possible and
the Laws of Physics need not apply.

Even if there had been no Surrealist manifesto, such is the

nature of film that Surrealist – or at least surrealistic –
films were bound to arise. Hollywood comedians such as
Harold Lloyd and Buster Keatn, for instance, were apt to
exploit the malleability of reality on celluloid for comic
effect. In fact, it can be argued that Surrealism brought
little if anything new to the world of cinema, at least in
terms of technique.

The debt owed by Surrealism to earlier cinema was

acknowledged in the 1950s when scholars began looking
seriously at the history of film. According to Rudolf
Kuenzli, these historians 'also began to formulate a canon
of the Surrealist and the surrealistic film at the centre of
which were Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. These
two films were viewed as the crowning achievement of a
pure Surrealism that could now be seen to stretch back
through the more grotesque moments of Von Stroheim,
the more dreamlike passages of Keaton, Chaplin and
Feuillade, and finally, back to the original Surrealist
essence of cinema in Melies. At the periphery of this
canon were the many films with occassional moments of
accidental or involuntary Surrealism.'iv

Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or are both the work of

Luis Bunuel and his fellow Spaniard Salvador Dali. At that
time they decided to collaborate, Bunuel was a minor (and
self-published) poet, an Assistant Director to Jean Epstein
and a recent recruit to the Paris Surrealist Group. Dali had
yet to make any impact on the world of art.

Their first film, Un Chien Andalou is a 16 minute

smorgasbord of bizarre scenarios that collectively tell a
story that – on the surface at least – makes no sense. It is
a negation of rationality. The title, for instance, has little if
anything to do with the film. It is in fact the title of a
collection of Bunuel's poetry.

Although both Bunuel and Dali have over the years been
less-than-consistent in their accounts of how the film
came about, they both agreed that while staying with Dali
at his house, Bunuel told him about a dream he had in
which a cloud sliced the moon in half 'like a razor blade
slicing through an eye'. Dali then recounted a disturbing
dream of his own (there appears to be no record of its
exact nature) and the pair then agreed to create a low-
budget film constructed from irrational images dredged
from their subconscious minds.

How much each of the collaborators contributed to the

film will remain a matter of debate for years to come.
According to the notes that accompany the BFI's box set
edition of Un Chien Andalou: 'Dali's claim that he
presented Bunuel with a complete alternative scenario,
scribbled in a quarter of an hour on a shoe-box, does not
match Bunuel's memory of the scenario's construction
morning-by-morning at Figueras from shared memories of
dream-residues and spontaneously invoked gags and
objects, a concoction resolutely shorn of 'conscious'
meanings and associations.v'

The film opens with a sequence based on Bunuel's dream

snippet. A man – played by Bunuel himself – is seen
sharpening a cut-throat razor. He walks onto a balcony
and observes a sliver of cloud racing across the sky
towards the moon. We immediately cut to a close-up of a
woman's face. The woman is passive as a hand holds one
of her eyes open and the razor is brought towards it. The
cloud slices the moon; the razor slices the eye. (Closer
examination shows that the eye being sliced is that of an
animal, presumably one of the dead donkeys seen later in
the film.) Straightaway, an intertitle comes up. It reads,
'Huit ans apres' ('Eight years later'). There follows a scene
of a man dressed as a nun on a bicycle. This dissolves to a
shot of a woman in an apartment reading a book. It is the
woman we saw being mutilated. As if by some miracle,
her eye is intact. The events of the opening scene are
never referred to, never explained.

According to Bunuel: 'The plot is the result of a

CONSCIOUS psychic aoutomatism, and, to that extent, it
does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits
by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams.' He goes on
to say that he and Dali 'both took their point of view from
a dream image, which, in its turn, probed others by the
same process until the whole took form as a continuity.vi'

Although the influence of Un Chien Andalou on Maya

Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (USA, 1943) is
undeniable, the two films are far apart in tone.

The difference between the films is instructive. Un Chien

Andalou is filled with metaphors – the eye and the moon,
a drink shaker as a door-bell, the sea urchin and unerarm
hair – but Meshes has none. Objects in the earlier film
recur, especially the box of the clown figure, but without
the symbolic dimensions of the knife, key, and flower in
Meshes, which accumulate their deadly charge through
repeated use in slightly different circumstances.vii

Unlike Un Chien Andalou, the plot of Meshes is fairly

straightforward and comprehensible. Ken Dancyger sums
it up in one paragraph. He says it 'explores the story of a
young woman. She is being followed to an apartment
where she is to meet a man. The key to the apartment, a
knife inside the apartment, and the bed are the important
artefacts. The woman, the woman who is following her,
and the man are the only characters. The woman who
follows her is hooded and has a mirror over her face.
Whether she is a reflection or the woman's conscience, is
subject to interpretation. By the end of the story the
woman is dead in the apartment. Was it a crime of
passion, a suicide, or the emotional, inevitable
consequence of her own passion?'viii

The main factor that distinguishes the two films is the

intent of the makers. Un Chien Andalou strives to be
shocking and provocative – 'a call to murder' as Bunuel
famously put it. Dali and Bunuel do their best to obscure
its meaning. In fact they go out of their way to eradicate
any meaning it might have. Meshes, on the other hand,
is a search for meaning, a psycho-quest wherein its
protagonist reaches some kind of self-understanding.
Which is not to say that Meshes is not disturbing; its just
that its madness is that of the paranoid introvert rather
than the raving lunatic tormented by sexual guilt and
visions of corporeal corruptio

It has been hailed in retrospect as the first 'trance' film, a

sub-genre first identified by the American film historian P.
Adams Sitney and defined as a type of expressionistic film
in which a character, frequently the filmmaker,
experiences a personal revelation by playing out a
psychological drama in dream-like surroundings.

According to James Peterson: 'The trance film was

concerned with the psyche of its protagonist, but its first-
person aspects – shots from the protagonist's point of
view – were qualified and mediated by the entrance of the
protagonist as a character in the film.'ix

Deren uses a number of camera tricks to illustrate the

state of mind of her protagonist (played by Deren and no
doubt meant to represent Deren):

Meshes in the Afternoon is rife with images that

suggest identity diffusion around issues of sexuality and
gender. Her inability to accept herself, her womanhood,
her sexuality, leads to her destruction at her own hand or
through projection, his hand.

In order to suggest the degree of diffusion, Maya Deren

uses unsettling camera angles and motion. The camera
turns not horizontally but on a U-axis in order to simulate
the woman's feelings of diffusion. The extreme close-ups
of the woman removing the key from her mouth suggest
the clandestine implications of the key, as well as the
key's sexual subtext. Daren also highlights the violent and
sexual character of the knife in the same visually powerful
manner. Her use of jump cuts convey the heightened
emotional state of the woman. Although the images of
flowers and the seashore imply a romantic dimension of
the tryst, the overwhelming number of close-ups of the
woman [...] heighten the sexual-violent atmosphere in the
apartment and the man-woman interface. The tragic
ending confirms the primacy of identity diffusion.x
Most of the above effects can be achieved in other media
but only as discreet entities. It is possible, for instance, to
reconstruct Meshes as a series of still photographs but
that would lack the fluidity of the moving image. Dreams
are not made up of frozen instances. They are profoundly
cinematic. If we could capture dreams and play them
back, they would resemble Un Chien Andalou or Meshes
of the Afternoon rather more than any number of Man Ray
photographs or Salvador Dali painted dreamscapes.

Meshes is designed to be analysed and penetrated. It

offers us an insight into the mind of Maya Deren as she
acts out her inner concerns and anxieties

Un Chien Andalou, by contrast, is out to shock and

unsettle. It is an assemblage of vaguely related scenes
with which we are invited to construct a meaningful
narrative. Bunuel and Dali's next film L'Age D'Or is closer
to Meshes – and mainstream cinema - in that it sets out
to tell a story, albeit one that plays fast and loose with
reality.

But regardless of the question of influence, it is true that

the mechanics of Un Chien Andalou and of Meshes
result from a theoretical application of the principles of
cinema to the experience of the dream.xi

Bunuel's straightforward style serves to heighten haunting

images that disturb received notions of religion and
sexuality.xii

Bunuel's modernism emerges as well in his experiments

with narrative construction. The films are full of
repetitions, digressions, and movements between reality
and fantasy. (Don't worry if the movie's too short,” he
once told a producer. “I'll just put in a dream.”xiii

Most modernists attack narrative in order to turn the

viewer's attention to other matters, but Bunuel treats
narrative frustration as itself the basis of pleasure.xiv
... Bunuel contextualizes Un Chien Andalou by means of
concepts such as 'automaticity', 'the unconscious', 'the
poetic', 'the spectator', and the 'avant-garde'.xv

The 'automaticity' of the film's creation, for Bunuel,

cancels 'rational', 'aesthetic' and 'ethical' considerations,
together with those of 'customary morality', and points to
the fact that Un Chien Andalou does not recount a
dream but itself 'profits by a mechanism analogous to
dreams'. The nature of this mechanism is unclear, but the
aesthetic consequence is that the film is able to draw
upon putatively 'liberated' psychic impulses, formally
deployed as 'poetic' constructs, rather than as 'intended'
symbols.xvi

In spite of its commitment to the work of the unconscious,

the film in fact has quite deliberate intentions. With
familiar Surrealist idealism, Bunuel confers upon the film a
strongly conscious sense of purpose when he argues that
it makes 'systematic use of the poetic image as an arm to
overthrow accepted notions'. And although its makers
reject 'intended' symbols, the scenario itself explicitly
demands the clear and symbolic placement of objects on
the school-desk in the scene with the male protagonist's
double (a demand which the film itself does not fulfil with
any clarity). We need a more measured commentary than
the maker of the film was able to provide, and a less
allusive final flourish in the direction of psychoanalysis, to
account for the poetics of Un Chien Andalou.xvii

What Dali and Bunuel achieved through this method of

compiling a scenario was the liberation of their material
from the demands of narrative continuity. Far from being
puzzling, the film achieves the clarity of a dream. The
extremity of the violence and the calculated abruptness of
changes of time, place, and mood intensify the viewing
experience without satisfying the conventional narrative
demands of cause and effect.xviii

The strength of the identification in the context of the

abrupt dislocations and discontinuities provides us with a
vivid metaphor for the dream experience. Had Dali and
Bunuel set about to study their own dreams and clinically
re-create a dream on film, they could not have surpassed
Un Chien Andalou.

“This film is concerned,” Maya Deren wrote,

with the interior experiences of an individual. It does

not record an event which could be witnessed by
other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which
the sub-conscious of an individual will develop,
interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and
causal incident into a critical emotional experience.xix

In Meshes of the Afternoon, the heroine undertakes an

interior quest. She encounters objects and sights as if
they were capable of revealing the erotic mystery of the
self. The surrealistic cinema, on the other hand, depends
upon the power of film to evoke a mad voyeurism and to
imitate the very discontinuity, the horror, and the
irrationality of the unconscious.xx

Meshes explicitly simulates the dream experience, first in

the transition from waking to sleeping (the shadow covers
the eye and the window at the end of the first cycle) and
later in an ambiguous scene of waking. The film-makers
have observed with accuracy the way in which the events
and objects of the day become potent, then transfigured,
in dream as well as the way in which a dreamer may
realise that he dreams and may dream that he wakes.
They have telescoped the experience of an obsessive,
recurrent series of dreams into a single one by
substituting variations on the original dream for what
would conventionally be complete transitions of subject
within a single dream.xxi

Bunuel and Dali did not set out to create a film dream; the
dreamlike quality of their work derives from the strength
of their sources, from the ferocity with which they
dispelled the rational while keeping the structural
components of narrative. They show us neither sleep nor
waking, but simply a disjunctive, athematic chain of
situations with the same characters. The startling changes
of place, the violence, the eroticism, the tactility, and
above all the consistent use of surrealistic imagery,
suggest the dream experience.xxii

Many film-makers seem to have been unable to project

the highly personal psychological drama that these films
reveal into their characters' minds. They were realising
the themses of their films through making and acting
them. These were true psycho-dramas.

As psycho-drama, Meshes of the Afternoon is the

inward exploration of both Deren and Hammid.xxiii

Maya Deren's beliefs about the proper relations between

the photographic and film media oppose those of the
advocates of phenomological cinema. Like most of those
who flourished in the period of early American modernism,
Deren believed that each medium has its own unique
properties which artists must exploit. Deren claimed that
the properties of film derived from the camera and that
the impartiality and clarity of the lense – its precise
fidelity to the aspect and texture of physical matter – is
the first contribution of the camera.xxiv

Despite his general reference to dream “symbols,” Bunuel

does not seem to limit the potential range of dream
“mechanisms” to the one Freud calls “the symbolic”. In
fact, he and Dali surely used several different mechanisms
as models. It seems certain in any case that the two
Spaniards were fascinated by the mechanism Freud
himself called “the most psychologically interesting
achievement of the dream-work,” namely the translation
of a latent verbal thought into manifest visual images.
According to Freud, the dream work must reformulate
scandalous or morally-repugnant thoughts in order to
allow them to be represented in the dream. This
reformulation can proceed in several ways. For example,
words can be found whose concreteness or, alternatively,
ambiguit, enable them to slip past the censorship and
serve as the basis for both the odd and innocuous dream
images. This is the primary mechanism used by “verbal
disguise” dreams. The important point to note here is that
the form of (if not the motive for) this kind of operation
on langauge readily lends itself for conscious use in the
making of a film. If Dali and Bunuel -

were intrigued by the possibilities opened up by such

an adaptation – and that is my claim – then one might
expect to find instances in Un Chien Andalou in which
gestures, images, or indeed entire sequences were
created by finding visual forms for verbal
expressions.xxv

Footnotes:

ihttp://www.seaboarcreations.com/sindex/manifestbreton.
htm

iiFreud, Sigmund The Interpretation of Dreams. Whitefish,

Montana.. Kessinger Publishing. 2004. p.4

iiiDrummond, Phillip. Un Chien Andalou Box Set,

Connoisseur Films/BFI p.v

ivKuenzli, Rudolf E. Dada and Surrealist Film. p. 200

vDrummond. p.ix

viSitney, P. Adams. VISIONARY FILM. The American

Avant-Garde 1943-1978. p4

viiSitney. p.15

viiiDancyger, Ken. The Technique of Film and Video

Editing: History, Theory and Practice. p.220

ixDreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the

American Avant-garde Cinema By James Peterson p.74
xDancyger. p.74

xiSitney. p.15

xiiBordwell & Thompson. p.2

xiiiBordwell & Thompson. p.3

xivBordwell & Thompson. p.4

xvDrummond. p.ix

xviDrummond. p.x

xviiDrummond. p.xi

xviiiSitney. p.4

xixSitney. p.6

xxSitney. p.11

xxiSitney. p.13

xxiiSitney. pp.13-14

xxiiiSitney. p.18

xxivElder, R. Bruce. Reflections on Canadian Film and

Culture. pp.341-342

xxvKuenzli, Rudolf E. Dada and Surrealist Film. pp.144-

145

© Patrick Whittaker
www.coldfusion.freewebtools.com
trashman97@hotmail.com