| Popis: |
Among Antonin Artaud's film scenarios, only The Seashell and the Clergyman reached the screen. Its reception within the surrealist canon came only after his expulsion from the surrealist movement, and followed his own repudiation of the cinema as a viable art form. The complexity of his relation to each must thus be seen as double. Such reassessment or late acknowledgment of a work's canonicity is not in itself extraordinary, but The Seashell and the Clergyman was plagued by a series of misappraisals and reappraisals such that its interpretation appears actually to require, first off, defiance of the possibility of its interpretation. Germaine Dulac, the film's director, resisted suggestions offered by Artaud himself in several letters during the film's production; the surrealists consequently refused to consider her final product in support of their lapsed confrere, thus, we infer, denying the film's surrealist character. And then, years later, firm knowledge of the actions and motivations of those present at the film's first screening on the night of the now-infamous Ursulines scandal is itself questioned; the film is rediscovered and found to be canonically surrealist, confounding all earlier judgments. To be sure, the concomitance of refusal (of authorship) and disavowal (of said refusal) is well within the capacity of textual interpretation and not unique to this film, but it will ground this speculation on Artaud's interest in the cinema and in surrealism. In a late text written during his stay at Rodez, "Surrealism and the End of the Christian Era," Artaud explains his rejection of surrealism, and expresses its failure, as follows: "To create surrealism is not to bring the surreal into the real, where it will spoil and sleep, settle and encrust, the panes embedded in books, but rather to enhance the real until its soul must exit into the body, to persistently stir the body. This the world has not yet known, and this surrealism could not do."' In effect, the surrealists failed to understand the |
