#my theme is surrealism as a mechanism to turn the mundane/familiar into the bizarre and beautiful | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

audreygallegoba2a · 5 years

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Surrealism and Animation

The surrealism movement was founded in Paris by some writers and artist who wanted to use people’s subconscious minds to unlock their imagination. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud.

The surrealists themselves thought that the unconscious mind blocked people’s imaginations. By the surrealists basing their ideas on the power of the imagination, this indicated that they were influenced by the traditional Romanticism movement, whose key ideas were based on emotions and intuitions. However, the surrealists were radically different from the romantics because they had the theory that the revelations may be found to be on the streets and in everyday life.

One of the main founders of the Surrealist movement was Andre Breton, when he wrote “Le Manifeste du Surrealism”, where he famously wrote the definition of surrealism, which is “physic 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”.

The Paris surrealists, 1933: Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel and Man Ray.

Fida Kahlo

Her paintings tried to show the attributes of a bad situation.

Mexican culture and Amerindian culture tradition are important in her work, which has been sometimes characterized as naïve art or folk art.

She frequently included the symbolic monkey. In Mexican mythology, monkeys are symbols of lust but Kahlo portrayed them as tender and protective symbols.

In 1938 Andre Breton, principal initiator of the surrealist movement, described Kahlo’s art as a ‘ribbon around a comb’.

When painting Christinci, Frida’s health improved and darkness and gloomy feelings improved. Around this time, Frida called her husband down from the scaffolding to come and see her work. He told her to go home and paint and that he would tell her later what he really thought of it. The following Sunday, he told her that she had talent. She appeared in one of her murals which paid testimony to her developing political awareness. Her mother disapproved of her husband because he was an atheist. Her parents thought it was a marriage between an elephant and a dove.

My dress hangs there, 1933

To Frida the US was ‘ugly, dull and drab’. She once said to Detroit automobiles – anything mechanical meant bad luck and pain. Another comment she made about life in the USA was in the painting ‘My dress hangs there’; Frida’s costume hangs amidst the chaos of the USA and its technology.

Henry Ford Hospital, 1932

Her most dramatic miscarriage was in 1932. During 13 days in hospital, she said she wanted to die. The monkeys and parrots often seen in her paintings are substitutes for her children.

Salvador Dalí

Dalí is one of the most famous & prolific artist of the twentieth century he is mostly remembered for his paintings, however, during his lengthy career, he also turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and most famously his work in film-making with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock.

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Dalí tried to convey the themes of sexual desire, death and decay; this is clear throughout his work. He also illustrated his knowledge and understanding of Freud’s psychoanalytical theories of his time. His work reflected his learning experiences and childhood memories. Dali’s work often included already accepted symbolism such as fetishes, animal imagery and religious symbols.

Sueño causado por el vuelo de una abeja alrededor de una granada un segundo antes del despertar, 1944

He also accepted the surrealist André Breton’s theory of automatism, which is the theory of tapping the unconscious mind. Dalí referred to this as ‘critical paranoia which is where ‘one could be delusional while maintaining one’s sanity’. This was also defined by Dalí as a form of irrational knowledge. This method is apparent throughout most of his fellow surrealist work and his own surrealist work as well.

During his mature period, he began experimenting with a Cubist style due to his influence from Pablo Picasso, who he met in Paris in 1929. This exhibition explored symbolism and his passion for the sub-conscious.

For the next several years Dali’s paintings illustrated his theories about the psychological state of paranoia and its importance as subject matter. He painted symbolic objects that reflected his sexualised fears of father figures, as well as symbols that referred to his fear over the passing of life. He also claimed that he didn’t know the meanings behind the symbols in his paintings. Instead, he claimed that his childhood was his inspiration.

El gran masturbador, 1929

As the politics of war was at the forefront of the Surrealist debate, Breton expelled Dalí from the surrealist movement in 1934 because of differing views on General Franco and fascism - fun times.

Jan Svankmajer

Many of those familiar with his work regard him as either the most significant movie maker active today or a source of nonsense – an attitudinal contradiction that has greeted and continues to be associated with, all the great artist of surrealism. His work typically uses clay and other types of stop-motion animation, puppetry and live action to create a surreal feel throughout his work, which is extremely entertaining. He takes the unwritten rule of pushing movie making to almost breaking point. He is a cult movie maker whose worldwide “cult” is larger than the following of many mainstream directors. When Jan Svankmajer creates a new movie it causes great excitement within many different countries. He has won many movie awards, even though it does not follow the commercial Hollywood ideology.

Due to the fall of the Soviet Union, Jan Svankmajer was able to study the surrealists in more detail, especially in the surrealist Luis Bunuel. His first piece of work was as a director and designer in Liberec with the Czech State Puppet Theatre. His first movie experience was as a puppeteer when he was employed by Emil Radok. This work was a major inspiration for Svankmajer version of the Faust legend.

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He married a surrealist painter called Eva Svankmajerova and she has been an inspiration on his work to this day. He left the Magic Lantern Theatre to make his first short film called ‘The Last Trick’. His second short film used mundane objects in a strange juxtaposition style which is strongly associated with the surrealists. This movie started in a very down to earth way where a man unlocks a room, and sits down at an organ and takes a bite on an apple and begins to play. Even here the apparent naturalism is overthrown. Why the organ should be locked away in a seemingly deserted house and why should the organist be initially wearing street clothes over his performance costume.

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In the same year he went to Austria to create a short film called a ‘Game with Stones’. This film consists of an old musical toy that provided the sound accompaniment to a set of animated sequences, where stones drop from a bizarre gadget arranging and rearranging themselves. Even though the pattern does not make sense on its own if you put all the patterns and sequences together it could represent the evolution of human life and the destruction of human life.

Walt Disney Studios

One of the most surreal scenes from Walt Disney was in the film Dumbo with the Pink Elephants, when Dumbo hallucinates when he blows a giant bubble into the air that turns into pink elephants.

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The elephants then duplicate into other elephants by blowing bubbles through their trunks. The trunks transform into snakes attached to the elephants, and then two elephants mirror each other and then explode apart.

The elephants’ heads are made into a body which starts to walk. The elephants’ eyes turn into pyramids and an elephant-like camel creature walks through them, and then the camel turns into a cobra and then into a lady. Then the blue and pink elephants go ice skating. Finally, it starts to rain elephants that turn into clouds.

Studio Ghibli

Studio Ghibli uses many common themes and motifs throughout their works, for example, they include female leads which are usually young girls or sweet old ladies. Sometimes these two themes are combined because in ‘Howls moving castle’ a young female lead is put under a spell by a witch that makes her turn into a sweet old woman. Some of the other themes that Studio Ghibli uses in its works are aviation, trains and characters that take on multiple forms and bird-like creatures.

Throughout their films, the male characters are misunderstood which is unusual because, in the American film industry, it is usually the other way round. One of the things that make Studio Ghibli’s themes are quite exciting is that in almost all of their films the enemy is not clearly defined.

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