The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928) by Colin Marshall When the subject of early surrealist film arises, most of us think of Salvador Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and not without good cause: even 86 years after its release, its nightmare images of piano-dragging and eyeball-slicing still lurk in our collective cinematic consciousness. But we can’t call it the very first surrealist film since, 87 years ago, French critic and filmmaker Germaine Dulac, in collaboration with no less an avant-garde luminary than Antonin Artaud, put out La Coquille et le clergyman, better known internationally as The Seashell and the Clergyman, which you can watch free above. Un Chien Andalou met with a pleased reception, to Buñuel’s delight and Dalí’s disappointment. Dulac and Artaud’s project provoked a different reaction. “Advertised as ‘a dream on the screen,'” writes Senses of Cinema’s Maryann de Julio, “The Seashell and Clergyman’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on February 9, 1928 incited a small riot, and critical response to the film has ranged from the misinformed – some American prints spliced the reels in the wrong order – to the rapturous – acclaimed as the first example of a Surrealist film.” The film takes place in the consciousness of the titular clergyman, a lusty priest who thinks all manner of impure thoughts about a general’s wife. In another Senses of Cinema article on Artaud’s film theory, Lee Jamieson writes that, in putting this troubled consciousness on film, it “penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted,” resulting in “a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically,’ truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.” It capitalizes, in other words, upon the now well-known principle that what is seen cannot be unseen. But it also pushed cinema ahead in a way that Buñuel and Dali could run with the following year. De Julio’s article quotes Artaud’s own description of the challenge he saw the form as facing, and the one which The Seashell and the Clergyman attempts, in its way, to address: it could either become “pure or absolute cinema” or “this sort of hybrid visual art that persists in translating into images, more or less apt, psychological situations that would be perfectly at home on stage or in the pages of a book, but not on the screen.” He saw neither of these as “likely the true one,” and many filmmakers even today (David Lynch stands as a guiding light among those now living) continue the search for how best to tell stories on film in a manner suited to the advantages of film. Even overshadowed by Un Chien Andalou, The Seashell and the Clergyman remains a popular silent film to re-score today, and you can watch the movie with a few different soundtracks online: from dark ambient artist Roto Visage, from musique concrète composer Delia Derbyshire, from large-scale experimental band Sons of Noel and Adrian, and many more besides. Copied from http://www.openculture.com/2015/11/witness-the-first-surrealist-film-the-seashell-and-the-clergyman.html

Luis Buñuel: A Statement

Film Culture, No. 21, 1960, pp. 41-42.


RESOURCES:
Luis Buñuel in UbuWeb Film
Presented in partnership with Anthology Film Archives


1. In none of the traditional arts is there such a wide gap between possibilities and facts as in the cinema. Motion pictures act directly upon the spectator; they offer him concrete persons and things; they isolate him, through silence and darkness, from the usual psychological atmosphere. Because of all this, the cinema is capable of stirring the spectator as perhaps no other art. But as no other art, it is also capable of stupefying him. Unfortunately, the great majority of today's films seem to have exactly that purpose; they glory in an intellectual and moral vacuum. In this vacuum, movies seem to prosper.

2. Mystery is a basic element of all works of art. It is generally lacking on the screen. Writers, directors and producers take good care in avoiding anything that may upset us. They keep the marvelous window on the liberating world of poetry shut. They prefer stories which seem to continue our ordinary lives, which repeat for the umpteenth time the same drama, which help us forget the hard hours of our daily work. And all this, of course, carefully watched over by traditional morals, government and international censorship, religion, good taste, white humour and other flat dicteria of reality.

3. The screen is a dangerous and wonderful instrument, if a free spirit uses it. It is the superior way of expressing the world of dreams, emotions and instinct. The cinema seems to have been invented for the expression of the subconscious, so profoundly is it rooted in poetry. Nevertheless, it almost never pursues these ends.

4. We rarely see good cinema in the mammoth productions, or in the works that have received the praise of critics and audience. The particular story, the private drama of an individual, cannot interest - I believe - anyone worthy of living in our time. If a man in the audience shares the joys and sorrows of a character on the screen, it should be because that character reflects the joys and sorrows of all society and so the personal feelings of that man in the audience. Unemployment, insecurity, the fear of war, social injustice, etc., affect all men of our time, and thus, they also affect the individual spectator. But when the screen tells me that Mr. X is not happy at home and finds amusement with a girl-friend whom he finally abandons to reunite himself with his faithful wife, I find it all very moral and edifying, but it leaves me completely indifferent.

5. Octavio Paz has said: "But that a man in chains should shut his eyes, the world would explode." And I could say: But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames. But for the moment we can sleep in peace: the light of the cinema is conveniently dosified and shackled.

The above copied from:
http://www.ubu.com/papers/bunuel_luis-statement.html