Between Real Objets and Moving Images: The Imaginary and Projection from André Breton's

Abstract

As secular visionnaires, Surrealists conceived a way of projecting the imagination on real objects that substituted (idealist) representation with “marvelous” encounters. These took place at the threshold between real space and dream images, the image being born at the meeting point between what is rêvée and what is rêveillée, in a sort of modern, psychoanalysis-mediated animism. But the modern city as a reservoir of dream-objects has been substituted by the post-war audiovisual archive and the floating image-reality which Louis Aragon had already feared in Le Paysan de Paris, thus highlighting the importance of the practice of real space for surrealist images. The films of Luis Buñuel can be seen as dealing with these two worlds. Buñuel had always declared himself to belong to Surrealism, and Viridiana (1960) is a clear example of that. If its division in two parts relates to a play of continuation and difference between two eras in Spanish history, it also points to a similar play between the world of experimental avant-gardism and the post-war world of the audiovisual archive. The quotes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) emphasize both a link between avant-garde experimentalism and Hollywood film productions, as well as between Franco’s Spain and the outside modern world through the audiovisual archive. The present paper focuses on the scene of Viridiana’s somnambulism as a rite de passage between these two worlds (in its double sense). Beginning with Don Jaime playing with a woman’s shoe (and other bridal items of his beloved dead wife, the aunt of Viridiana), the scene continues with him voyeuristically following a sleepwalking Viridiana. In her automaton-like walk, she goes to burn her wool and knitting needles in the fireplace, in order to collect its ashes and put them in Don Jaime’s bed, beside the bunch of white bridal flowers with which he had been playing. The absent body of the dead wife that he had substituted with the eroticized fetishes of the bridal things (that is, with signs) becomes through Viridiana the presence of a real female body that nevertheless not only acts as an automaton, but has lost all the fetishistic eroticism (the naked feet are now those of a Nazarene). The rest of the story —the rape of Viridiana, dressed as the dead bride, and Don Jaime’s suicide— is already prefigured in this scene, as it clearly appears if we link it to a paradigmatic Surrealist object from the thirties. Our contention is that what was encrypted in Breton’s Le Cendrier Cendrillon (The Cinderella ashtray, 1934), an object that Breton himself described in L’amour fou as that which resolved a wordplay related to the symbol of the lost object that is Cinderella’s shoe, is narratively deployed in this scene. The shoe-spoon (a degraded form of the female genitalia) which is also an ashtray (where what is burnt — dead — is disposed of), and whose heel in mise en abyme potentially repeats itself ad infinitum (in the same way as signs produce meaning by repetition), shows meaning as relying on the structure of desire, which itself can only end in death (the ashes in the ashtray). Breton himself called this object, with its potential infinite repetition, “le ressort même de la stéréotypie”. And as such it appears as deployed in film narration in Viridiana. The psychic projection on objects would have reached film through Epstein’s notion of photogénie, which Buñuel quotes directly, assuming Epstein’s defense of animism. The key point of this transfer, and that which distinguishes the cinematic photogénie from photography itself, is what movement adds to the object. But if this filmic moving specificity seems to retain something of the “minimum de fonctionnement méchanique” (Dalí) of proper Surrealist objects, at the same time this specificity includes it in the immanence of filmic discourse, which is what gives a sense to the individualized objects that appear on the screen. As Epstein says, a film is “animistic” and gives “a semblance of life to the objects it defines” as far as it is a language. Objects, then, don’t appear in it where language fails, where the practice of real space, in which Breton and Aragon located the traffic of surrealist images, distorts its conventional assemblage.