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Programmer's Welcome by Melody Jacobson

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.*

Welcome to the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers’ inaugural Surrealism Film Festival, a celebration  of the depth of the imaginative realms.  The festival was inspired by the 80th anniversary of the seminal film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and includes a screening of that film as well as contemporary media art works, a spoken word performance and a special radio program devoted to Surrealism sound art. 

Un Chien Andalou, the last film in our program, was a divine collaboration between two great minds that, in keeping with a basic tenet of the Surrealists, set out to make a film that didn’t make rational sense. Buñuel and Dalí deliberately wrote the film to avoid narrative structure or meaning in any way, and yet countless analyses have tried to impose a storyline in the symbolism.  Indeed it is difficult to watch the film and stop our minds from trying to connect the dots rather than see it for what it is, a magnificent dive into the fantastic, the mystical, the world of dreams.  This is the core of surrealism, and as the Surrealists maintained it is important to gather truth—both universal and personal—from the images and symbols is that the bedrock from which our collective unconscious draws meaning.

I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.*

The Surrealist movement caught fire with artists from every medium, inspiring the visual, literary, musical and performing arts to plumb the depths of consciousness and push boundaries to create new works that resonated and inspired countless generations and regenerations of theme and content.  The contemporary media art works in the program are perfect examples of how Surrealism has evolved throughout the years, with themes ranging from the intensely personal (Tell Us The Truth Josephine, perhaps / We, Melty Kitty, My Life in Dreams, Foodie, Hallucination de la mort de Guy de Maupassant) to the existential (Copy Shop, Wor, Alone, Citadel, Grotesque, Machine Guts, La Invención (The Invention), Yesterday’s Wine, At the Heart of It All, The Cat’s Pajamas, The Fever of the Western Nile,).  Love and personal identity are explored in excruciating and touching ways (Red Like Meat, Falling, Love Songs, The Traveling Eye of the Blue Cat, Morning Will Come) and experimental examinations of the unconscious abound throughout the program (Memory Lapse, Skull & Blackberries, Professor Delusia, the Nocturnalist, On Phenomena & Existences No. 3, Three Minute Miracle, Dali Ants, Seahorses and Flying Fish, Citadel). One film that stands as a direct reference to Un Chien Andalou is the squirm-inducing Botched Eyeball Operation, a one-minute tribute to the infamous sliced eyeball scene in the film. 

In keeping with other art forms that were inspired by Surrealism, we also have a special radio program that is part of the Festival.  Hosted by the amazing Paula Fayerman, Programming Coordinators Melody Jacobson and Melanie Wilmink will be joining Paula on her CJSW program Noise beginning at 9 pm until 10:30 pm on Thursday, Nov. 27 to explore Surrealism’s influence on music and sound art.  We have also programmed a spoken word performance by Christian Bök to take place at the Plaza Theatre to begin Saturday night’s program.  Calgary-based Christian Bök is an experimental poet and critic, who is internationally recognized for his work.

The CSIF is immensely proud to present this program in Calgary, an experience that will certainly inspire, exhilarate and possibly terrify all who attend.  It is our hope that by taking part in the festival as audience members, you will all leave the theatre changed by your experience and be inspired to celebrate the surreal in this world of ours. 

It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.*
*André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism  (1924)

New Surrealist Cinema by Melanie Wilmink

Short films as visual poems is an appropriate metaphor, particularly for this screening.  In poetry, you tell a story or share a moment in the same way you would in a longer text.  However you have some constraints, including the traditions of writing, and creating rhythm, beauty and narrative quickly.  We think of poems as short pieces of text that show us a moment and demonstrate its beauty and importance all at the same time.  A poem does not explain itself.  It just is what it is. 

These films were selected for the same criteria.  We looked at how the films fulfilled the Surrealist mandate… were they surreal?  Then we looked at quality, which included their artistic values… how striking were the images, how beautiful and memorable, how concise were they, how well did it flow and finally did it use the medium… celluloid – in their process.   In many of these films celluloid is as important as the story.  Un Chien Andalou used film because there was no other option.  These days film is a choice, and has many benefits, including the quality and depth of the image, but it also takes more time and expense to use.  There is a discipline to using film that we wanted to explore in this program.  In many of the films, celluloid is used to create an atmosphere where nostalgia and memory figure prominently.  The artists deal with dreamworlds, and the visceral quality of film helps to set their film in a different time and place.  Film affects what the final product looks like; dirt, scratches and grain all set a certain tone.  In Skulls and Blackberries, the story IS the process.  Eric Ostrowski uses sunlight and the acidity of fresh blackberries to expose and develop his film (similar to automatic writing).  He left the film, covered in blackberries, out in the sun for several days and the final film is a result of chance reactions with those elements.

Other films like Memory Lapse (Scott Amos) and Yesterday’s Wine (Roberto Ariganello), used found footage (another Surrealist process) to create surreal scenarios.  Amos uses contradictory text and found footage to defy our expectations and Ariganello uses found footage from old film archives and found language tapes, which he remixes to create a fragmentary and surreal narrative where speech and images combine in surprising and delightful ways.    

This act of combining images in surprising ways is key to the Surrealist act.  Disjointed images and timelines work to upset the normal expectations that viewers have for films. Surrealism is designed to disturb, and because it pushes the boundaries of normal understanding, it is inevitable that people will sometimes find it uncomfortable.  This is used for effect in narratives. Films like Melty Kitty, Memory Lapse and At the Heart of It All, use images out of context to make a point.  They are simple collage-like films, but the narrative that they imply is disturbing and does not seem to mesh with the images.  Yet, at the same time, as much as the images do not seem to fit with one another, they still make sense in a strange and intriguing way.

Surrealism can be used to create meaning/ story or it can simply emphasize the story that is already there.  One could argue that any meaning you derive from a surrealist work, whether it is found footage or created, is inherent in the work.  Because of the tenet that surrealism taps into the unconscious world, any story attached to it is valid, whether the story is applied to the story by the author/ filmmaker or the viewer. 

Many of the contemporary works here seem  to discard the original idea that the surrealist method HAS to be completely unconscious, and use images created Surrealist ways to make works that have overlying threads of narrative.  They take fragments of surrealism and cut away the boring parts to make a whole work using only the best surreal fragments.  I think that this program is a strong example of all of the different ways of using Surrealism in a modern context and you may agree, disagree or have something to add to the points made in this program.  Join us for the discussions after the screenings, write or illustrate something for us (and enter it in to the draw for a $100 Film Festival 3-day pass), or join us on the website and blog.  And above all...  enjoy the films!