PART III—
BEYOND NARRATIVE:
AVANT-GARDE CINEMA
Chapter Four—
Cinematic Language as Quotation:
Cendrars and Léger
For several reasons, avant-garde cinema is of special interest in a study of intertextuality. First of all, the avant-garde film, when perceived against the background of classical narrative cinema (and that is precisely how it is usually perceived), presents itself as an openly acknowledged "anomaly" that needs to acquire normative status. In this sense the avant-garde film seems to lend itself readily to an intertextual interpretation. Seeking to crack the code in which a difficult text is written, the reader or viewer as a rule may turn willy-nilly to other texts that might be able to throw some light on the enigma at hand.
Second, the avant-garde text presents itself as something "new," unprecedented, a complete negation of the preceding tradition—a move vital to its operative situation. The discourse of the author is equated with the utterances of a new Adam who speaks as if he had no predecessors. In this way the avant-garde text, which by its very nature orients the reader toward an intertextual reading, at the same time appears consciously to bracket any intertext that would make this reading possible. This bracketing of intertextuality was a programmatic part of the early avant-garde. A vast array of manifestos of every kind, generated to defend the avant-garde's premises, constantly sought to subvert the received tradition; while in the visual arts and the cinema similar manifestos would insist systematically on their independence from language, which they perceived as the principal bearer of tradition and chief guardian of the "warehouse of quotes."
Avant-garde cinema typically rejects such characteristics as traditional plot interest, suspense, and identifiable human characters—everything normally associated with literature. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that a rejection of suspenseful plots and character interest implies a total break
with literature. There are cases of avant-garde films compensating for the absence of plot through a large-scale recuperation of literary language. This can happen in a cryptic way, with language encoded in a chain, as in the montage-rebus we find in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera[1] or, more programmatically, in the form of artistic manifestos and theoretical declarations that verbally explicate the meaning of an otherwise plastic visual experiment and justify its existence.
It is true that this appeal to manifestos, while permitting the decoding of plastic signs, could create bizarre difficulties of its own. In 1915, Kasimir Malevich made the following "clarificatory statement": "The curtain, in depicting the black square, the seed of all possibilities, acquires a terrible force as it keeps growing."[2] Here the viewer is compelled to take the artist's words on faith: after all, there is nothing in the form of the black square that points us to a "seed" or a "terrible force." The manifesto-as-explication creates a coercive intertext for the plastic image, an intertext overtly generated by the artist himself that cannot be reconstructed by the reader. We are dealing with a forced concordance established between a specific plastic sign and a certain verbal concept. Jean-François Lyotard has designated this trait of avant-garde poetics as an appeal to the "sublime," that is, the undefined. The sublime "occurs when . . . the imagination fails to represent an object that is, even if only in principle, matched with a concept. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we lack the capacity to show an example of it. . . . I would call modern the art that devotes its 'modest techniques,' as Diderot used to say, to representing the unrepresentable."[3] In this representation of the unrepresentable, the intertext of commentary plays a vital role. Forcibly linking a plastic sign to an abstract concept, a word, it creates a kind of intertextual shock that allows for the realization of this epistemological Utopia.
The artist's declaration of independence from language can thus scarcely be applied with any consistency. The avant-garde depends programmatically on the shock of intertextuality, on the interpretation of a plastic sign through the verbal fabric of another text.
This applies equally to avant-garde cinema as well. Literary intertexts are a fixed, if hidden, presence in avant-garde films, so much so that an avowedly "antiliterary" film-text can become paradoxically saturated with literary references. Moreover, the originality of any avant-garde film is largely defined by its specific way of linking visual representation to a more fundamental literary program, that is, the intertexts that its visual references imply.
The task of this chapter is to provide, however partially, an account of the literary intertext connected to one of the most well-known avant-garde films in cinema history—Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique (1924)—and an analysis of what is intertextually specific to the film's essential form.
Ballet mécanique is of special interest in the context of this chapter. It traditionally has been viewed as one of the most suggestive and consistent examples of nonverbal cinematic art. Devoid of any semblance of plot intrigue, being no more than a montage of short fragments depicting various forms of rhythmic movement performed by all manner of things, all equally and almost entirely desemanticized—objects, body parts, written signs, and so forth—Ballet mécanique has never been examined in its relationship to literature. The generally held opinion of the film's poetics is summarized in the title to an article by the French scholar Andrei Nakov: "De la peinture sans référant verbal." Léger's ambition, Nakov suggests, was the creation of a text in which the object would be totally stripped of its "cultural" significance and reduced to a purely thingly, "objective" presence. "All verbal signification is eliminated; only the image remains," says Nakov. "A man who thought through images and pictures and aspired toward a pure manipulation of the image as a visual object without a literary referent, Léger found it somewhat difficult to theorize verbally."[4] Léger's psychological and theoretical assumptions, for Nakov, led him to "create image-objects, as against the (theosophical or simply philosophical) image-myths of someone like Piet Mondrian."[5]
Nakov thus absolves the film of its need to "represent the unrepresentable." In his explanatory notes to the film (June 1924), Léger himself indicates: "This film is objective, realist and in no way abstract." But in the same note he clarifies: "From beginning to end the film has been subjected to mathematical constraints that are quite exact, as exact as possible (number, speed, time)."[6] Abstraction must of necessity enter into the construction of the avant-garde text, even if only in the form of rhythmic laws and "mathematical constraints."
In the pages to come, I shall attempt to prove that a "theosophical or simply philosophical myth" also lies within the intertextual field of Ballet mécanique. This myth is obscured by the absence of narration, by Léger's own avowed rejection of "cinema based on screenplays." In 1924, while making Ballet mécanique, Léger wrote: "The idea of putting a novel on the screen is a fundamental mistake, connected to the fact that the majority of directors have had a literary background and education. . . . They sacrifice that wonderful thing, the 'moving image,' in order to inflict on us a story that would be better suited to a book. We end up with yet another nefarious 'adaptation'—convenient enough, but which impedes the creation of anything new."[7] Yet Léger's invective against screenplays is never generalized into an attack on literature as a whole, or into a call to eliminate entirely the verbal meaning of representation. The negation of screenplays here often coexists alongside some rather nebulous thoughts concerning the possible narration of "stories" without a "novelistic," "sentimental or literary intrigue." Léger adds: "Enough of literature: the public couldn't care
less. We don't need perspective; and why have all these clarificatory texts? Are you really incapable of making a story without a text, with just images? But the modest cartoonist does it, on the last page of the newspaper. If we can reach this point, as well as many other things that will become clearer later, then the cinema will be on the right track."[8] Clearly what emerges here is a Utopia based on an entirely specific form of narrative. We have no reason to believe that Léger aspired to strip the cinema of language entirely, as is clear from this letter written much later to Sergei Eisenstein: "It's annoying. But writers, men of letters and others feel 'negative' about the screen."[9] Nonetheless, by no means all writers in Léger's milieu shared a negative attitude toward the cinema, as is clear from the following extract taken from one of Léger's main texts devoted to Ballet mécanique:
The history of the avant-garde film is very simple. It is a direct reaction to films that rely on screenplays and movie stars.
It is a fantasy, a sense of play, in opposition to the commercial order established by others.
That's not all. It is the revenge of the painters and poets. In an art form such as this, in which the image should be everything but gets sacrificed to a novelistic anecdote, it was necessary to defend one's ground and prove that the imaginative arts, which had been relegated to the status of accessories, could, on their own, by relying on their own means, construct films without screen-plays by viewing the moving image as the chief protagonist.[10]
Léger then goes on to call Ballet mécanique "a little theoretical."
Clearly, what is at stake is the elimination of the anecdotal element and its probable replacement by certain purely plastic elements. The equation of the moving image with the characters in the film says a great deal here, as does Léger's inclusion of poets in his pantheon of avant-garde filmmakers.
Which poets did Léger have in mind? We can answer this question with some certainty. It is most likely that Leger had in mind the writers he knew personally. There were four such poets: Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Ivan Goll. Léger had particularly close relations with Cendrars and Goll, whose books he illustrated more than once. Both poets were passionately interested in the cinema, another reason Léger was probably thinking of them.
Goll's influence is most evident in Leger's elaboration of a cubist representation of Charlie Chaplin. The cubist Chaplin first appears in Léger's illustrations to Goll's "cinepoem" Die Chapliniade (1920), to then become part of Léger's own cinematic work as the main hero of the never completed animated film Cubist Charlie.[11] A small part of this incomplete film, the animated figure of Charlie himself, appears at the beginning and end of Ballet mécanique. Nevertheless, we have no reason to believe that Goll's work had any formative impact on the making of Léger's film. His influence was most likely limited to specific thematic elements.
Blaise Cendrars is an entirely different matter. His influence on Léger's cinematic production is beyond question and has indeed been noted by most scholars in the field. Standish Lawder, in a book devoted entirely to Ballet mécanique, has dwelled specifically on the issue of Cendrars's influence in a chapter entitled "La Roue, Cendrars and Gance."[12] Yet Lawder effectively limits the range of Cendrars's impact (and that of other writers) to his participation in Gance's La Roue (1921–1923), a film that did exert a major influence on Leger, who wrote an article specifically on the subject. Léger's involvement as illustrator in Cendrars's screenplay-novel La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange N.D. is also now routinely acknowledged. Yet neither encounter can be said to exhaust the breadth of the relations that developed between the two artists.
Léger became close to Cendrars in 1912. Their friendship was then renewed in 1916, when both artists returned from the front. Cendrars, as one of the first protagonists of the French avant-garde to become a serious film enthusiast, apparently was instrumental in infecting Léger with the same passion.
Whereas the cinema seems to figure prominently in Cendrars's artistic trajectory, in fact few visible traces remain of his much-trumpeted filmmaking activities. In an interview, Cendrars's own account of his work reads as follows: "I wanted to make movies, and had the chance to work in England. I shot several films for an English company which then sent me to Italy because of the favorable exchange rate. I stayed for nearly a year in Rome making movies, at the time of Mussolini's March on Rome and triumphant entry into the city. Before that I had worked with Abel Gance. Even before that I had filmed some documentaries with Pathé, some shorts, and a series called La Nature chez elle. I wrote screenplays, synopses (as they call them), dialogues, did some editing, and so on."[13]
Of this considerable list of achievements only the collaboration with Gance and a few unproduced screenplays can be verified without a trace of doubt. The films made in England and the shorts connected with Pathé have never been unearthed. It seems reasonable to suppose that the "documentaries with Pathé" are none other than Cendrars's own texts, known under the titles "Kodak" or "Documentary Footage" (1924). These, we now know, were a complete hoax, consisting of phrases cut out with a pair of scissors from Gustave Le Rouge's Le Mysterieux Doctor Cornélius. Among these fragments is a text called "Chasse à léléphant," which is the likely literary analogue to the film Cendrars purportedly made about elephants. In any case, the evident link between this typical literary hoax and the cinema points to a broader pattern in Cendrars's biography. Apparently, the widely announced project of a Brazilian film was also not destined to be realized. Cendrars had gone to Rome at the suggestion of Jean Cocteau, who told him that the Italian film studio Rinascimento was looking for a French
director. Cendrars set about filming La Vénus Noire but was never able to complete the shooting because the studio was abruptly closed and the film destroyed.[14] The only thing to survive from this Italian period is the screenplay to the film La Perle fiévreuse. Franéois Vanoye has tried to shed some light on Cendrars's enigmatic and somewhat patchy film career, only to admit his failure.[15] Perhaps the poet himself intended this aspect of his life to remain obscure.
It is important to dwell further on the question of Cendrars's role in the films directed by Gance. As Léger tells it, it was these films that drew him to the cinema: "The cinema turned my head around. In 1923 I had some friends who were in film and I was so captivated by the movies that I had to give up painting. That began when I saw the closeups in La Roue of Abel Gance. Then I wanted to make a film at any cost and I made Ballet mécanique. "[16] Standish Lawder interprets Léger's statement in the following way: "Undoubtedly the 'copains qui étaient dans le cinema' of whom Léger speaks here were Blaise Cendrars and the film director Marcel L'Herbier. Cendrars created those parts of La Roue that turned Léger's head. He worked as film editor on this production, and, in this capacity, brought forth, in the beginning of the film in particular, a splendid montage that must have impressed and influenced Léger."[17] We know that Cendrars worked as an assistant on La Roue (as well as on another of Gance's films, J'accuse ), but we have no evidence that he worked on the film's montage. Why does Lawder insist on attributing the montage of the best sections of La Roue to Cendrars himself? Lawder refers to the testimony of Louis Parrot, who in fact speaks somewhat more cautiously: "In 1921 he collaborates with Abel Gance in the making of La Roue: Cendrars' part in the film can be seen in the montage, particularly in the scenes depicting the moving train."[18] Parrot does not clarify what exactly he means by "Cendrars' part"; on the whole, however, he overestimates Cendrars's cinematic skills, calling him a real "specialist in cinema technique."[19] In fact Cendrars himself tried to create this impression by overloading some of his own texts (Le Plan de l'aiguille, La Perle fiéureuse ) with technical film terminology. However, this hypertechnicalvocabulary reads as a stylization.
The legend of Cendrars's formative role in the making of La Roue seems to have emerged just after the film's release, and it is highly probable that Cendrars had a considerable hand in its diffusion. As early as March 1923, in a "Letter from Paris" published in the journal The Dial, Ezra Pound was to give Cendrars credit for the film's primary achievements: "Thanks, we presume, to Blaise Cendrars, there are interesting moments, and effects which belong, perhaps, only to the cinema. At least for the sake of argument we can admit that they are essentially cinematographic. . . . The bits of machinery, the varying speeds, the tricks of the reproducing machine
are admirably exploited, according to pictorial concepts derived from contemporary abstract painters."[20] Elsewhere Pound simply calls La Roue one of "Cendrars' films." Astonishingly, Abel Gance, the film's actual maker, is not mentioned even once in Pound's article.[21] No less curious is Pound's derivation of the film's aesthetic from contemporary painting. Pound, moreover, was no outsider to the culture at stake: enjoying close relations with the artistic bohemia of Paris, he also specifically knew the American cameraman Dudley Murphy, who collaborated with Léger on Ballet mécanique. Léger himself was to acknowledge Pound's indirect impact on his film. The very stylistic eclecticism of La Roue served to give the legend of Cendrars's role further credibility. George Charansol, certainly an informed witness, had this to say about La Roue in 1935: "This is now Fernand Léger, now Debat-Ponsan, sometimes Blaise Cendrars, sometimes François Coppée, and sometimes all of them at once."[22] Once again, the only person left out here is Gance himself. It seems extraordinary that Léger also figures among the film's "authors," even though he did little more than design the film's poster (probably at Cendrars's request), and certainly did not participate directly in its making. Charansol's appraisal here is a purely retroactive one, with several features made famous by Léger's Ballet mécanique attributed to the earlier La Roue.
Jacques-Henry Lévesque is even more unequivocal: "After seeing this reel, full of merits and flaws, it is easy to recognize the part that should be attributed to Cendrars in making this film, which created a sensation above all for its scenes of a speeding train, made in what is called simultaneous montage." While Levesque generally takes Cendrars's statements at face value, even more curious here is the invention of something called "simultaneous montage," pointing directly to simultaneism, a movement in which Cendrars did indeed take an active part. Lévesque's invented term here eloquently betrays the "etymology" of the myth concerning Cendrars's contribution to La Roue.
Is there some way of verifying the nature and extent of Cendrars's role in La Roue? We surely must not neglect the testimony of Gance, who had this to say about Cendrars: "Working on the set in the proper sense of the term put him out of sorts, and I could see, on looking at his eyes which were always a little surprised and fixed on us, that he understood nothing."[23] Elsewhere Gance repeats this claim and further clarifies the nature of Cendrars's role as assistant: "To tell the truth, I cannot claim to have been the one to have initiated him into the cinema: he always remained external to our work which put him out of sorts, and which he was barely able to follow; he mainly functioned as assistant director, organizing mountain-climbing parties, or gathering wagons and locomotives. He liked this work which was more concrete."[24]
One could certainly dismiss these subsequent recollections as coming out of Gance's irritation at seeing his own efforts constantly attributed to his assistant. Yet even if we discount the categorical nature of Gance's assertion, it does seem to ring a little true. Georges Sadoul accepts Gance's version entirely: "The writer nonetheless remained simply an assistant, and was not involved actively either in the screenplay or the shooting."[25] Cendrars himself was to confirm Gance's assertions indirectly, when he described his work with Gance during the shooting of J'accuse in the autumn of 1918: "For J'accuse I did everything: I did the heavy work, took charge of the props, I was the electrician, the pyrotechnist, the wardrobe keeper, the extras man, the assistant cameraman, the assistant director, the boss's driver, the accountant, the cashier."[26] This situation could hardly have been radically different during the filming of La Roue; in any case, we have the confirmation of at least one authoritative document, Jean Epstein's unfinished memoir, which coincides pretty much with Gance's account. Epstein was present during the shooting of La Roue, as a guest of Cendrars. It turned out, however, that when Epstein got there Gance and most of the film crew had already left; remaining were a few people to whom Gance had assigned the task of shooting the connecting shots. Among them was Cendrars, although the group was in fact supervised by another assistant, Robert Boudrioz. Epstein recalls: "During the day I saw very little of Cendrars, who was everywhere, in places where one would never think of looking—on the engine of a train by the boiler, at the post office busy sending his own telegrams in Morse code, at the Bossons ice-cream shop with a group of guides, in search of a box of make-up and some props or other which had fallen into a crevice."[27] Both Epstein and Gance concur on two facts: that all the seriously professional work had been assigned to Boudrioz, and that Cendrars was effectively the odd-jobs man (the list of his activities is the same in both). Epstein also confirms that when montage work was being done for La Roue, Cendrars was actually in Italy, and that Gance's sole assistant during this time was Albert Dieudonné.[28] A definitive understanding of Cendrars's role in the making of La Roue has been provided by Roger Icart, whose textological research has established that there were two versions of the film's montage. Furthermore, the major innovations and changes to the montage were made by Gance after his conversations with D. W. Griffith in 1921 at the Mamaroneck studios. It took the entire year of 1922 to put together this montage, which was completed that December. Icart makes several technical points concerning variations in the montage that allow us to dismiss with some certainty the possibility that a relative dilettante like Cendrars might have had a part in shaping the final outcome.
Yet does this mean that we can reduce Cendrars's role in the making of La Roue to the work of a second assistant? Of course not. At stake, it seems, is something else—the highly intriguing phenomenon of a film getting intertextualized through the involvement of a well-known writer. Even if we were to ignore the intellectual influence that he undoubtedly exerted on Gance, the very presence of Cendrars was enough to connect the film to a specific set of ideas that the poet embodied. Cendrars may have been of use to Gance on the film set as someone able to elaborate "myths" and insert their concrete manifestations into an extraordinarily powerful intertextual context. Cendrars, then, may well have served to create a myth, one that served La Roue very well. Gance took advantage of the poet's tendency to "read" his own "cinematic practice" into films that had actually been made without any real input from him.
Cendrars's myths could often be highly whimsical. For example, he would assert that Charlie Chaplin was in part inspired to make his film Shoulder Arms (made in America while Cendrars was serving on the war front in France) by some of Cendrars's own ideas.[29] He also accused Francis Picabia of having stolen the idea of Entr'acte from him.[30] These accusations of plagiarism, however, did not constitute a claim of authorship; rather, they reflected a characteristic ability on Cendrars's part to see other people's work as the embodiment of his own ideas. This tendency was in fact a consequence of Cendrars's own constant desire to project his artistic aspirations outward, subjectively appropriating a vast range of works as examples of his own poetics.
From the very first moment he began working on La Roue, Gance was confronted with the dilemma of finding some mythic means of overcoming the awkwardly melodramatic material at the film's core. It fell to Cendrars, with his incomparable mythmaking powers, to fulfill this task. The very tendency that elsewhere led Cendrars to the brink of conflict and misunderstanding was here used by Gance to make the material at hand sound more respectable. Cendrars thus "imposed," as he was wont to do, his "own" film aesthetic on Gance's film, leading to subsequent divergences of opinions concerning the extent of his involvement in the making of La Roue.
This legitimation of material principally took the form of giving the symbol of the wheel a far greater prominence. The film had been based on the book Le Rail (1912) by Pierre Hamp. The film's working title long remained La Rose du rail —a somewhat crude allegory quite in the spirit of Gance's bombastic style. The pithy and symbolically resonant tide "The Wheel" was probably an invention of Cendrars, although one that fits all too readily into the context of his past work. What occurred, essentially, was a linking of Gance's film to the existing corpus of Cendrars's writings, allowing it to
resonate intertextually at the expense of Gance's own work, in order to unite the concrete details of the film with an abstract concept and thereby "represent the unrepresentable." Here is how Gance defined the film:
"The Wheel involves a movement of four forms, each of which revolves one inside the other," said Jacob Boehme. The Circle, the Wheel, do not just sustain life, but endlessly begin it again and again. The ride is symbolic and positive. In my mind it is positive because the leitmotif of the film is the wheel of a locomotive, which is one of the film's main heroes, reminding us of fate as something that can never come off the grid of the railway track. In more precisely symbolic terms, it is the wheel of Fortune which is directed against Oedipus.[31]
Hamp's novel, which recounts the strike of a railway workers' union, could hardly have provided the basis for such an allegorical interpretation. It lacks any real elaboration of the wheel as a symbol. Something like Gance's "wheel of fortune" does, however, make an appearance. Thus one Delecambre, who works for the main railway inspection board, makes the following observation about railway accidents: "The railway, even if it is subject to a billion improvements, will always have some flaws: either in the tracks or in the people. The Company is the baker in a roulette game in which Death plays a game of probabilities. It is necessary for Death to win from time to time; otherwise it would get bored."[32] But even here there is no direct connection made between fate and the wheel. Cendrars may well have played a prominent role in linking Hamp's game of roulette to the symbolism of the wheel. Gance traced the latter to Boehme and then admitted that he owed his acquaintance with Boehme and mysticism as a whole to Cendrars. Mystical doctrines were, of course, a fundamental intertext for many avant-garde artists, providing a store of abstract conceptual equivalents for concrete plastic images.
Before we examine the actual process by which the wheel, the circle, and the disk gained symbolic currency in Cendrars's work (a currency that would then circulate in Léger—particularly in Ballet mécanique—as well as among other artists), let us complete our examination of the myth of the wheel in Gance's work. This myth, which originates in Cendrars (this will become even clearer as we continue), was taken up by Gance in several grandiloquent declarations and then circulated by converts to his faith, who created something of a cult around his figure. One apostle of the Gance cult was his close friend Jean (Juan) Arroy, who dedicated a book to him that has all the trappings of a new gospel. Gance is called a saint and is placed among such exalted figures as Plato, Moses, Mohammed, Christ, Nietzsche, Swedenborg, Byron, and Whitman.[33] Arroy repeats Gance's symbolic interpretation of La Roue: the film, a paroxysm of fate, is the
meeting point of Aeschylean tragedy, the Roman doctrine of fatum, and Nietzsche's Eternal Return:
La Roue is truly the first cinematic symbol, and up until today, the only one. Once set in motion, it revolves eternally, and every evening, when the shadows fall and silence sets in, Sisyphus [the film's hero, with an emphatically symbolic name] once more takes up his cross, climbs onto his Golgotha, endures the passion, experiences his suffering and dies. He is condemned to die in this way a thousand billion times. The wheel revolves in its daily crucifixion. . . .The cinema hinders him from dying. O cruel fate. O infernal torture not to be able to flee oneself. O the pain of immortality.[34]
Clearly Arroy turns the wheel into a symbol of cinema itself, with its capacity to reproduce endlessly one and the same "reality." The same myth also circulates in the writings of Epstein, another of Gance's "apostles":
This film saw the birth of the first cinematic symbol. The Wheel. The martyrs who denounce our dogmas as cruel lies, wear it on their brows, a crown of steel. . . . The Wheel. It rolls along, as long as a heart still beats, along tracks predestined by chance, luck that can be good but is generally bad. The cycle of life and death has become so jagged that it has had to be retempered lest it break. Hope glows in its center, a prisoner. The Wheel. . . . The rapidly revolving cross takes on the form of a rose. That is why, at the summit of your Calvary, Gance, there is La Roue?[ 35]
Cendrars, of course, did not take any part in the creation of this new cult. It seems he was quite far from any desire to Christianize symbols. The transformation of the wheel into a cross, and of the film's hero Sisyphus into an alter ego of Gance who assumes the martyr's crown, is entirely a creation of the director and his entourage. Cendrars in fact did pay some homage to this mythologization of Gance and his film, but in an entirely different way. His first novel, from the cycle about Dan Yack, Le Plan de l'aiguille, is dedicated to Gance. This dedication, moreover, is dated December 1919, that is, the very moment Gance was completing the massive (seven-hundred-page) screenplay to La Roue.[36] I would suggest that the novel, which Cendrars worked on from 1917 until 1928, contains several veiled hints concerning the making of La Roue. The novel's heroine, Dan Yack's beloved, is called Mireille. This was also the title of Gance's first screenplay written for Léonce Perret in 1907–1908, precisely the time he first met Cendrars.[37] Nor does it appear fortuitous that the story of Mireille largely coincides with the life of Ida Danis, Gance's lover, who fell ill during the film's shooting and died on the day the film's initial montage had been completed.[38] Even the shooting schedule of the film had to be adapted to the dictates of Danis's doctors, with scenes on Mont Blanc being worked into the film so that Ida could benefit from the mountain air.
Something quite similar happens in Cendrars's novel. A film is shot especially for the benefit of Mireille, who dies at the end of the film.[39] If we can assume that Le Plan de l'aiguille reflects certain events that occurred during the shooting of La Roue, it is possible that the relationship between Dan Yack and Mr. Lefauché, the film director in the novel, to some degree reproduces Cendrars's understanding of his relations with Gance. Dan Yack (who is undoubtedly an alter ego of Cendrars himself) does not take any direct part in shooting the film, but he is a true connoisseur of the art and has a thorough knowledge of its technical aspects. He makes paradoxical aesthetic judgments. Marginal to the film's making, he nonetheless remains its central figure. Lefauché, by contrast, is a master of the old school of melodrama, a professional with a limited artistic vision. Of course, there is no reason to project the relations between the novel's heroes onto their prototypes in real life in any literal sense. Yet even considering the specificity of a work of art and the fictional compensation it might provide for the artist's psychological complexes (Dan Yack's role as the film's financier in the novel versus Cendrars's technical incompetence and subordinate position in real life), it seems reasonable to assume that the cinematic sections of Le Plan de l'aiguille constitute Cendrars's response to the emergent cult of Gance. The dedication of the novel to Gance might then be read ironically, especially the "modest" warning it contains to the director not to seek any new ideas in the novel.[40]
Cendrars's Le Plan de l'aiguille thus offers a specular reversal of the situation that Gance created in La Roue. If Gance made use of Cendrars, inviting him onto the film set to serve as a live "marker" of intertextuality, then Cendrars inserted Gance into his novel as a prototype, thereby also recreating the entire context of La Roue, albeit in reverse. This reversal, as well as Cendrars's nonacceptance of the Gance cult, may have yet another motivation. The fetishization of the wheel in Gance's milieu contradicted Cendrars's own desire to create a new and unprecedented symbol, while the religious transcendental reading to which Gance's adepts subjected the wheel stripped it of its novelty and turned it into an allegory. In one of his earliest texts, Moganni Nameh (1911), Cendrars had criticized the symbol as a "formalized axiom": "In effect few and unique are those who have shaped art, and . . . elaborated a symbol,. . . a symbol such that a new metaphysical heaven is cast on its shoulders."[41]
Cendrars's strategy was thus diametrically opposed to Gance's. At stake was not a given plastic element, to be taken and immersed in a field of symbolic intertextual interpretations (the wheel = the wheel of fortune, etc.). Rather, Cendrars strove to elaborate a new and powerful cultural myth out of the very "plasma of art," weaving a contradictory thread of intertextual links, frustrating any reduction of the symbol to a "formalized axiom," as had been attempted by Gance and his adepts. (Cendrars's "collaboration"
with Léger—and with Delaunay—was in this sense far more productive.) Let us now attempt a more painstaking examination of the genesis of the symbol in Cendrars, one all the more necessary since, in pointing to its role in the elevation of the wheel as primary symbol in Gance, we have yet to find any textual evidence for this (beyond Gance's own references to Jakob Boehme). It is time to verify the hypothesis.
In 1906, Cendrars read Camille Flammarion's Popular Astronomy (1880), which touched him profoundly and led him to take up astronomy and then astrology. Subjecting Flammarion's work to a highly poetic reading, Cendrars transformed the poetic topos of the sky into a series of heavenly spheres that resemble a complex mechanism, in which wheel-like planets decided people's fate. Yvette Bozon-Scalzitti has observed that the novel Moganni Nameh, yet to overcome the influence of symbolism, already betrays the influence of Cendrars's passion for astrology, as in the following passage: "As far away as the most distant centers, circles slowly began to move. His brain was now nothing more than a harmonious wave, a mathematical sky in which comets circulated among the planets in a complex play regulated by preordained movements."[42] Cendrars's capacity for a complex and reciprocally charged metaphorization of reality allowed him to discover new elements in the symbol of the celestial wheels each time he returned to it. For example, in a text on Marc Chagall from 1912 he wrote: "The wheels of folly whirl in the furrowed sky and besplatter the face of God!"[43] Gradually the idea of a celestial mechanism begins to be linked to the image of a perpetuum mobile, in which the wheel gains pride of place. In 1976, a text by Cendrars on the perpetuum mobile, conceived of as an appendix to his description of the cosmic voyage L'Eubage (1917), was published for the first time. In this text, written in 1917 and hence predating by several years Gance's first efforts at making La Roue, we find a complete elaboration of the myth that was later to be used by Gance. I quote a lengthy passage here, which is all the more necessary since it also bears directly on Ballet mécanique:
Without doubt religious motivations and mythological monuments must have played a large role in the question of the perpetuum mobile. One need only think of the enormous importance that the symbolism of the ancient religions attached to the wheel, a symbol that incorporates the idea of movement and the idea of eternal return. In the religion of the Vedas, the wheel is the symbol of divinity. The same goes for the ancient Germans and the Celts. Many customs and myths bear witness to the religious origin of the wheel as a symbol, which is compared mostly to the sun, both in its form and its movement. It is as a form of wheel symbolism that Oldenberg explains the presence of a crown nailed to the top of the stake to which sacrificial animals were tied in many ancient religions. . . . One can ascribe religious motives to the theologians of the Middle Ages who attacked with such ferocity the idea
of perpetual movement, claiming movement to be finite and declaring the perpetuum mobile to be incompatible with the Science of God. . . .
The human desire for an artificial machine that might work forever goes back to the most ancient times; this desire is perhaps as old as the desire for immortality itself. Outside any technology, the idea of perpetual movement is one of the oldest questions posed by human civilization.[44]
Cendrars here pauses briefly on the question of religious symbolism, in order to discover concealed behind it the primary idea of movement. This idea, which traditionally has been associated with life as such, here acquires some rather unusual features, in that Cendrars connects it with the evolution of a new language. Many movements in early twentieth-century art—most demonstratively futurism—transformed movement into the sign of a new civilization and a new artistic language. Cendrars's approach was nonetheless somewhat unique. His lecture entitled "Poets," presented in Brazil in 1924 and devoted essentially to the problem of language, has survived. The poet departs from the assumption that language has evolved from the "concrete to the abstract, from the mystical to the rational."[45] In the spirit of numerous modern writers, Cendrars appeals for a return to a primordial language that is at once concrete and mystical. In this appeal, however, he goes far beyond the accustomed rhetorical norm. Not only does Cendrars note the parallelism between the development of language and that of industrial technology; he even "instrumentalizes" language in the most literal way, treating it as a physical act, a mechanical movement. Cendrars generously quotes the linguist Joseph Vendryes, especially from his descriptions of speech mechanisms. "'There are thus accelerations, jolts, reductions in speed, moments of rest. In other words, language contains within itself a rhythmic principle with stronger and weaker tempos.'"[46] And again: "'In this play of complex movements that constitutes the phonic system, it can happen that one of the organs exaggerates or reduces its action to an even minimal degree, or that a muscle executes a movement somewhat gently or slowly, or, on the contrary, with greater vigor and rapidity."'[47]
Speech here acquires all the traits of a mechanical activity and at the same time loses its capacity for semantic transparency. It becomes something physically visible, tangible (Cendrars even speaks of the possibility of a language based on the sensations of taste, touch, or sight),[48] and acquires the hieroglyphic quality that results from the intertextual layering of quotations. For Cendrars, poetic discourse is a physical mechanism, powerfully intertextual, a vertiginous layering of fragments, quotes, borrowings, heterogeneous blocks. Intertextuality thus becomes part of the sheer physicality of the muscular movement involved in speaking.
The wheel emerges here as an essential metaphor for imagining a new language. Reproducing in its very movement the rhythmic and mechanical
aspects of the articulatory apparatus, it becomes a metaphor for the speech organs and turns the kaleidoscope of image quotations. Gradually the circle, the wheel, and the disk grow into fetishes for Cendrars, becoming more than just wheels of fortune, wheels bearing the chariot of being, or the cogwheels in a cosmic mechanism. They become the mechanical elements of a new "metalanguage" of the universe and are integrated as such into Cendrars's texts. This is what the wheel signifies in one of Cendrars's main works, Moravagine (1926), which Gance in fact read in manuscript form while working on La Roue .[49] These may well be the origins of the metadescriptive symbolism that was projected onto the wheel in the film. In one moment in Moravagine, wheels serve to introduce a dream sequence:
The wheels of the train [cf. La Roue ] turned in my head, with each turn mincing my brain into tiny pieces. Vast expanses of blue sky entered my eyes, but then the wheels would also madly rush in, wreaking complete havoc. They revolved in the depths of the sky, staining it with long, oily marks. . . . The sky was hardening, bursting like a mirror, and the wheels, taking up their charge for the last time, were smashing it to pieces. Thousands of pieces of debris crackled as they revolved, and tons of noise, cries and voices rolled down like avalanches, going off and reverberating in my eardrums. . . . Above and below, images of the city hung in the air, then spun around, right side up, then upside down, up-down, before collapsing into dust.[50]
This pulverization of the world's images into details and fragments—a kind of cubist transformation of the world that we shall soon rediscover in Ballet mécanique —is in fact an effect of the wheel itself, which for Cendrars serves as a mechanism for generating a new vision of the world, a new language. Later on in Moravagine Cendrars explains:
A circle is no longer something round but a wheel.
And this wheel turns. . . .
It generates a new language . . . of words and things, disks and runes, Portuguese and Chinese, numerals and factory labels, industrial patents, postage stamps, tickets, records of shipping and handling, signal codes, the radio—language is remade and becomes flesh, language that is the reflection of human consciousness, the poetry that grants access to the image of the mind that conceived it, a lyricism that is a way of being and feeling, the animated and demotic language of the cinema[51] that speaks to the restless crowds of the illiterate, the newspapers that know nothing of grammar and syntax, in order to bedazzle our eyes all the more with typographic displays of advertisements. . . .
Everything is artificial and real. The eyes. The hand. The vast fur of numbers on which the bank lies sprawling. The sexual fury of the factories. The wheel that turns. The wing that soars. . . . Rhythm. Life.[52]
"Language is remade and becomes flesh," says Cendrars, and its body is composed of quotes.
The wheel thus acquires a far wider significance in Cendrars's mythology than it had in Gance's film, becoming strongly associated with the idea of a new language, which is also the language of cinema.
Cendrars was always on the lookout for people who would listen to him; he would deafen those around him with a torrent of unusual ideas, images, and fantastic recollections, creating a certain aura around his own persona. The relations established between him and those who were drawn to his aura were seldom less than complex, but few were able to escape the powerful influence of his ideas. He sought constantly to gauge the efficacy of his ideas in other art forms, involving for this purpose other artists who were already in his sphere of influence. Particularly important and fruitful was the encounter between Cendrars and Robert Delaunay, which even had an impact on the work of Léger.
Cendrars met Delaunay in 1912 and settled in his house in the autumn of the same year. It was the year Delaunay elaborated his theory of "simultaneism" in painting. Cendrars took an active part in this epic quest, whose most celebrated outcome was the first "simultaneist" book coauthored by Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay (the painter's wife), entitled La Prose du Transsibérien (1913). John Golding explains the basis of simultaneist theory:
Delaunay conceived of a type of painting in which the colors used to produce a sensation of light would not blend but would retain their separate identities; by their interaction these colors could furthermore be made to produce a sensation of depth and movement. Since movement implies duration, time was also an element of this new art. Using the terminology of Chevreul [Michel-Eugène Chevreul (1786–1889), a chemist who studied the problem of color and published On the Law of the Simultaneous Contrast of Colours (1839), a book that influenced Delacroix, Seurat, and Signac], Delaunay called these color contrasts "simultaneous," to distinguish them from those used by the Impressionists and their successors which were "binary" and tended to fuse together when seen at a distance.[53]
Delaunay's celebrations of color was to have a powerful influence on Cendrars, particularly evident in his Nineteen Elastic Poems. Delaunay drew Cendrars into a shrill exchange between himself and Henri Barzun, who also claimed to have invented simultaneism.[54] Getting involved in the struggle between rival movements in painting allowed Cendrars to present himself as a credible theoretician. In fact, a great deal of what he would say was taken from Delaunay. One clear example of Delaunay's influence can be seen in the condemnation, unexpected in Cendrars's texts, of geometry as a personification of death: "Death is the consciousness that humanity has gained of itself (geometry)."[55] This can be compared with Delaunay's statement: "They [the futurists] today arrive at their point of death: geometry, the machine, geometrical dance etc."[56]
Cendrars, we know, would later become one of the great enthusiasts of geometry and the machine.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Delaunay's influence on Cendrars was only one-way. Cendrars was also to influence the painter, as can be seen in Delaunay's clear abandonment of rectilinear forms in favor of circular and disklike shapes that coincided with his first meetings with Cendrars.[57] If the series Les Fenêtres, begun in 1912 and marking the beginning of simultaneism, was by and large expressed in rectilinear forms, then on the cusp of 1912—1913 Delaunay turned to circular forms to create a series of paintings with his typical astronomical symbolism, Soleil, lune, simultané 2 (19 12–1913), Formes circulaires, (1912–1913), Disque, première peinture inobjective (1913), and so forth. The disk, as we know, would soon become one of the primary base elements of Delaunay's art. The "simultaneous disk" was to acquire clearly symbolic traits in Delaunay's worldview.[58] It allowed the artist to overcome the static quality of his early compositions in color and achieve the sensation of movement. Sonia Delaunay was to have an analogous evolution. From 1914–1915 on, the disk was to dominate her painting as well (Marché au Minho [1915], Danseuse [19 23], etc.). Here is what Sonia Delaunay herself had to say about the origin of the circular form in her painting Prismes électriques (1914): "It comes out of observing the halo of moving colors that were produced around the electric lightbulbs celebrated by Blaise Cendrars in his 'Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques.'"[59]
Proceeding from simultaneist premises, Cendrars developed certain elements of Delaunay's doctrine in a way that was all his own. For example, he would radically rethink the notion of contrast, which Delaunay had construed in a somewhat technological fashion.[60] For Cendrars, contrast would become the basis for vitality, something like Bergson's élan vital. The poem "Contrast" is filled with motifs derived from the programmatic declarations of the simultaneists (the poem would then inspire Sonia Delaunay to paint her "halos of moving color"). Cendrars rendered Delaunay's painterly principles in powerfully mythic terms: The movement is in depth [mouvement en profondeur ]. Life is the most immediate expression of this movement and of this depth. Life is the form of this depth (sensuality), the formula of this movement (abstraction). Animism. Nothing is stable. Everything is movement in depth."[61] Clearly, Delaunay's artistic movement became in Cendrars's eyes the embodiment of life itself, while at the same time being closely linked to the idea of an innovation in language. Contrast serves to introduce the apparatus of vocal articulation into the canvas itself. The painting begins to speak. At the same time, the rhythmic nature of movement in depth is associated with eroticism.[62] Cendrars rewrites Delaunay's artistic declarations as if they were mythological, erotic, or esoteric texts.
In close touch with both Delaunay and Cendrars, Léger did in fact adopt some ideas of the former. Delaunay's influence can be seen, for example, in Paris par la Fenêtre (1912), which is probably a response to Delaunay's Les Fenêtres. Soon, however, a conflict was to drive a wedge between the two artists. The dispute concerned the use of color. In 1933, Delaunay, who still considered Léger's choices to have been mistaken, wrote that "Léger did not understand that color is the only drawing possible. We cannot do what Léger did—a drawing and then put color on top."[63] In a conversation with Cendrars recorded on October 27, 1954, Léger reminisced with Cendrars—himself an active participant in these controversies—about his disagreements with Delaunay, all of which assumed the proportions of a veritable war: "It was the time of the great battle with Delaunay; he wanted to continue doing impressionistic relations, and I wanted to arrive at a sense of local color. So I'd tell him, 'Old chap, if you go on like that, you are going to start doing Signac to scale.' And he'd say, 'You are going to take us back to museum colors.' And then we'd get into a slinging match. What took place between Delaunay and me was the battle of colors."[64]
The circle was to play a decisive role in this battle between Delaunay and Léger. Léger swiftly assimilated the circular form, derived from Delaunay and Cendrars, into his own artwork. Werner Schmalenbach has described the significance of Léger's debt to Delaunay and Cendrars as follows: "Before the war, Delaunay had made a start on his formes circulaires. In his eyes the circle was the absolute form, the colored circle the symbol of light. Léger, though undoubtedly influenced by Delaunay's suns and moons, was quite free of his sort of light symbolism. . . . Not Delaunay's cosmic, 'Orphic' suns but colored machine wheels that revolve around their axes."[65]
The dispute between Delaunay and Leger, emblematically rendered in the opposition of the cosmic star and the mechanical wheel, became the object of a characteristically laconic and witty parody by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 presented his first controversial "ready-made object"—the Bicycle Wheel. The very absurdity of Duchamp's creation—the front wheel of a bicycle attached to a stool—served as his ironic contribution to the dispute.[66] When Duchamp's wheel began turning, it produced the same effect as that created by Newton's disks; these had fascinated Delaunay, who sketched them during his research into circular rhythms. Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel was thus a rendering of Delaunay's experiments with color executed in Léger's style, with "mechanical" imagery: it thus parodically "resolved" the contradictions between the two artists.
Cendrars—who lent the circle its mythic dimension—also found himself at the center of the debate. The understanding of the circle both as a cosmic symbol and as a mechanical wheel belong to him. The myth Cendrars propagated thus split into two forms readily identified with Léger
and Delaunay. Later Cendrars would recall that "every writer had his painter. Me, I had Delaunay and Léger."[67] Slowly, however, Léger was to displace Delaunay and grow in importance for Cendrars. To some extent this process is reflected in "Twelve Elastic Poems." The first poems in the cycle by and large "feed off" Delaunay's painting. The second poem ("The Tower") and the third ("Contrasts"), both written in 1913, are directly related to simultaneist aesthetics and its creator. Léger, by contrast, was the inspiration for the final poem in the cycle, "Construction" (February 1919). This work, dedicated to Léger, can be seen as Cendrars's move away from the poetics of simultaneism to a posidon that can be described more as constructivist. Here is the poem in full:
De la couleur, de la couleur et des couleurs.
Voici Léger qui grandit comme le soleil de 1'époque tertiaire
Et qui durcit
Et qui fixe
La nature morte
La croûte terrestre
Le liquide
Le brumeux
Tout ce qui se ternit
La géométrie nuageuse
Le fil à plomb qui se résorbe
Ossification.
Locomotion.
Tout grouille
L'esprit s'anime soudain et s'habille à son tour comme
les animaux et les plantes
Prodigeusement
Et voici
La peinture devient cette chose énorme qui bouge
La roue
La vie
La machine
L'áme humaine
Une culasse de 75
Mon portrait
(Color, color, and colors
Here's Léger who grows like the sun in the tertiary age
And who hardens
and fixes
the still life [or dead nature]
The earth's crust
The liquid
The foggy
Everything that darkens
The cloudy geometry
The plumb line that is reabsorbed
Ossification.
Locomotion.
Everything swarms
And the mind suddenly comes to life and in its turn
dresses like animals and plants
Prodigiously
And now
Painting becomes this huge moving thing
The wheel
Life
The machine
The human soul
A 75-mm breech
My portrait)[68]
Léger's painting is here described as a crystallization, the mechanization of something amorphous, born of color and sky—in other words, the primary elements, to an extent, of Delaunay's canvas.
Evidence of Cendrars's growing friendship with Léger can be found in many places. In 1913–1914, Léger painted a series of works called Contrastes des formes, a title that highlights a theme close to Cendrars. In 1918, Léger began the "disk series": Les Disques (1918), Deux disques dans la ville (1919), Les Disques dans la ville (1924), and so forth. The poster that Léger made for Gance's La Roue is in fact a variation on the theme of this series, which marks the beginning of a period of intense collaboration between writer and painter. In 1917, Léger illustrated La Fin du monde; in 1918, he illustrated J'ai tué; and in 1923, both artists collaborated on the ballet La Création du monde.
For Léger, Delaunay's work, as well as the polemical relations that existed between them, receded into the past. He succeeded in overcoming Delaunay's poetics by dissociating object, form, and color. The contrasting placement of objects (and indeed any fragments taken from the world or from texts) can, for Léger, generate the sensation of movement in art. Delaunay found this unacceptable. Pierre Francastel summarizes Delaunay's view of the nature of movement: "There is only one way to apprehend movement, which is a fundamental quality of the nature of the universe, and that is color."[69] In the posthumously published fragment "L'Art du mouvement" (1924?), Delaunay touches on the cinema, whose mechanical movement strikes him as "dead" in comparison with the sensation of movement created by the contrast of colors on a canvas: "Until now the art of cinema has involved a play of photos arranged successively and provid-
ing the illusion of real life—very sad as subject matter. The photo, even the ideal color photo by Kodak, can never be worth as much as a bath taken at a pleasant impressionist temperature."[70]
Léger's Ballet mécanique partly makes use of Delaunay's idea of contrasts, but in a modified form. In his rapid and rhythmic montages, Léger juxtaposes immobile objects, generating a sense of movement at the expense of contrast, and in a way that dispenses with the need for color. Léger's film in black and white acts to confirm Delaunay's intuitions but at the same time broadens their range and finally debunks them.
It is no coincidence, then, that—this despite Delaunay's own hostility toward the cinema—numerous contemporaries of Léger christened the montage based on the juxtaposition of immobile objects "simultaneous" (e.g., George Levesque cited the scenes of the speeding train in La Roue as examples of "simultaneous montage"), thus making Delaunay its immediate progenitor. In his 1920 article "Das Kinodram," Ivan Goll mentions simultaneism as one of the precursors of the cinema. The style of Goll's declaration (which Léger probably knew) is derived entirely from the simultaneist manifestos: "The image is freed from the space of the frame and breathes in time [atmet zeitlich ]: through the rapid succession of various ascending and descending contrasts, the film is created."[71]
From 1916 on, Cendrars would return again and again to the idea of making a film. We know already that the film he dreamed of creating was never made. As was his habit, Cendrars preferred to "impose" his cinematic vision on others. He took great pleasure in describing to his friends an imaginary film that he would make if he had the chance. Philippe Soupault recalls: "I still remember his enthusiasm for the cinema. Charlie Chaplin, of course! (It was in his company that I saw the film Shoulder Arms, which he rightly thought was outstanding.) But his vision of the cinema was completely different. Before writing it, he told me about the extraordinary screenplay that he was to publish several years later."[72] The screenplay mentioned here is without a doubt La Fin du monde. Epstein recalls Cendrars's dream of making a Rabelaisian film with "astonishing close-ups of people gorging on food."[73] Among those that Cendrars tried to hypnotize with a verbal portrait of his extraordinary film was the prominent French actor and theater director Louis Jouvet. Cendrars apparendy thought Jouvet capable of making his imaginary film. We have Jouvet's account of the vision Cendrars shared with him:
What a funny film we could make, a stream of gags, endless and absurd. . . with a set located in some industrial area, a graveyard of motor cars, broken gasometers, shattered tar barrels piled up in teetering pyramids, floodgates from sluices floating about, trails of ash, a stretch of broken glass from bottles, mounds of buckets ripped to pieces, embankments riddled with mattress springs and other débris that passes by the name of civilization.[74]
For Cendrars the cinema was connected to the idea of a new language, to be born through the destruction of traditional ways of relating objects and the shattering of the world into fragments. These fragments were not intended to enter the linear flow of the narrative: they preserved their character as distinct corpuscles, unintegrated, "anomalous." The cinematic text was to come together out of a vast, unlimited selection of quotes, all of which could openly display their quotational character. The text essentially had to mobilize the limitless field of intertextuality that was the basis of Cendrars's understanding of cinematic language.
Slowly forming in Cendrars's mind was the still amorphous image of a film resembling a chaotic picture made up of the distinct elements that constitute civilization, forming a kind of human trace. The rubbish heap and the graveyard are images betokening this "catastrophic consciousness," which transforms the final cataclysm into the starting point for creating a new language. For Cendrars the destruction of the world was in principle equivalent to the creation of a new world. An organized disintegration is in its own way identical to creation. Cendrars, moreover, was to project this artistic agenda not only onto the cinema but also onto all the artistic genres, above all painting. It is no coincidence that Cendrars's attention was to focus on Léger's painting, which he interpreted consistently according to his notion of the catastrophic genesis of a new language.
Interestingly, Cendrars's article "Fernand Léger" (1919) describes Léger's painting in terms that resemble the language Cendrars had used to describe his own film project to Jouvet: "Lots filled with machines, instruments and implements. The painter's mind grasps all this. Around him new forms arise every day. Huge volumes move with ease, thanks to a series of movements broken down into short tempos. His gaze moves from the bucket to the zeppelin, from the caterpillar to the tiny spring taken from a cigarette lighter. An optical signal. A bulletin board. A poster. . . . Everything is contrast. . . . Now here's the topic: the creation of human activity."[75] Curiously, the association of Léger's painting with a cinema of chaos remained Cendrars's idée fixe for many years. For example, in a much later conversation with Léger, recalling a trip abroad, Cendrars says: "I thought about you a lot when I saw this extraordinary film, whose tide I unfortunately don't remember. The film was set entirely in a graveyard for motor cars; there was a kind of mechanical bird in it, sort of like an American crow, that ate motor cars, gorging on tons and tons of steel, thousands of tyres."[76]
Typical of Cendrars, then, is a constant desire to elevate his own poetics into a myth, which circulated in his work in the form of certain plot scenarios. Thus his program for the creation of a new language, dating back roughly to 1917, is mythologized into two plot sequences that are finally fused into one: La Fin du monde and La Création du monde. From this mo-
ment on, the poet's linguistic agenda is described with extraordinary persistence as the destruction and re-creation of the world. Significantly, the cinema is itself inserted into this eschatological myth. This is easily explained: the cinema symbolized a new language born of the shattered material world, and thus was the ideal vehicle for describing the universal cataclysm. This myth is most dramatically expressed in La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange N.D. (1917), with illustrations by Léger.[77] The novel's plot deals with a journey made by God to the planet Mars, where he decides to fulfill certain ancient prophecies. He sends a telegram to Earth to the angel of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, who carries out the divine command to film the Earth's destruction. This film is then shown on Mars. But the camera projecting the film breaks down, and the entire film, which has just been spooled into place, begins to unwind in the opposite direction. The script primarily deals with describing this film, which documents the world's end.
Several crucial details should be noted here. By speeding up and slowing down the projection, millennial cataclysms are compressed into a few pages. The world's end is rendered as the precipitous decline of civilization and its return to a prehistoric stage, that of the world's creation. Just as the film is shown in reverse at the end of the book, so the history of the world's end becomes the history of its creation. A technical motivation (the camera breakdown) allows for the beginning and end of the world to become one, made identical by the technology of film.
A careful reading of the novel brings out a further detail that until now has escaped the attention of critics. The poem "Construction," quoted earlier and dedicated to Léger, is in fact nothing less than a summary of La Fin du monde. This is how the book describes the extinguishing of the sun: "At the trumpet's first sound, the sun's disk grows sharply in size, while its light grows duller."[78] And the poem: "Here's Leger who grows like the sun in the tertiary age," that is, in precisely the era described in the novel. The sun then grows to improbable proportions and then "dissolves. A kind of granular, phosphorescent mist [hangs] over a decomposed sea in which some obscene, gigantic, swollen larvae move ponderously."[79] Then the world begins to harden: "The joints petrify. . . . The movement, becoming more rarefied, gets fixed in a hinge. . . . We begin to see the formation of crystals."[80] (Cf. in the poem: "And who hardens / and fixes / the still life [or dead nature] / The earth's crust / The liquid / The foggy / Everything that darkens.") The script then introduces the motif of darkness—"All is black"—before describing the geometric division of the world: "Segments of shadow become detached. Tapering flames are isolated. Cones, cylinders, pyramids."[81] (Cf. in the poem: "Painting becomes this huge moving thing / The wheel / Life / The machine.") The two texts, then, are clearly parallel,
showing the extent to which Cendrars interpreted Léger's painting as his own film on the apocalypse: it is no wonder that at the end of the poem Cendrars is able to call Léger's canvas "my portrait."
Cendrars's capacity to appropriate any given text that treats the problem of genesis is also based on his consistent desire to articulate his own birth within the myth of universal creation. In his poem "La Ventre de ma mére," for example, Cendrars attempts to describe his condition before birth. Later he was to declare with pride that "this poem is the sole testimony known to this day of the activity of consciousness in a fetus; it is, at the very least, an outline of what prenatal consciousness might be."[82] Cendrars sought in his own prehistory to uncover the prehistory of the world, the night out of which all intelligible forms took shape. This is why the phrase "all is black" precedes the geometric segmentation of the world. This is a classical metaphor of birth, translated into cinematic terms as a beam of light in the darkness.
Roughly at this time, Cendrars wrote and published a striking text called "De la partition des couleurs" (June 17, 1919). It is dedicated to a film by the artist Léopold Survage that was destined never to be made. In 1914, Survage conceived of making a film based on the rhythmic transformations through time of color taken individually or grouped in clusters. An enormous number of outline sketches were made in preparation for the film, but the outbreak of World War I effectively prevented Survage from completing the project. Apollinaire organized an exhibition of Survage's sketches and published Survage's explanatory manifesto in his journal Soirée de Paris( 1914).[83] Cendrars did not respond immediately to these events; in fact, his article on Survage appeared three years later! It is clear, moreover, that the project as Survage had conceived it was of little interest to Cendrars; the film was only the latest pretext for yet another of Cendrars's cinematic fantasies. After a brief preface in which Survage is taken to task for failing to complete his film, the article seizes the bull, as it were, by the horns:
Alas, it is still impossible to film directly in color. I shall attempt to render, in words as photogenic as possible, the bold manner by which Mr. Léopold Survage has succeeded in re-creating and decomposing the circular movement of color. He has more than two hundred drawings. You would think you were present at the actual creation of the world.
Little by little a red invades the black screen and soon fills the entire visual disk. . . . It [the red] is composed of a multitude of small plates placed one alongside the other. Each of these plates is crowned by a pimple that trembles gently and ends up bursting like cooling lava.
Later some blue appears, "spreading its branches in all directions." The red rotates along with the blue.
Nothing remains on the screen save two huge marks in the shape of beans, one red and the other blue, facing each other. They look like embryos, masculine and feminine. They meet, copulate, separate, and multiply by splitting one or more of their cells.
Later vegetation appears out of these cells:
Boughs, branches, trunks, everything shakes, falls to the ground and rises. . . . Everything turns dizzyingly from center to periphery. A sphere forms, a dazzling sphere, in a gorgeous yellow color. Like a fruit. The yellow explodes.
And finally,
The white stabilizes and hardens. It turns to ice. And all around the void deepens. The disk, the black disk, reappears and obstructs the field of vision.[84]
It is no longer that easy to establish definitive links between Cendrars's essay and Survage's original ideas. Survage's sketches have not survived in full. They lie scattered in different collections, and to this day have never been reproduced in a size or quantity that would permit us to evaluate the original intent behind Rythmes colorés. Nonetheless, even the few surviving sketches suffice to establish Cendrars's commentary as yet another myth-making exercise: once more, Cendrars imposes his own cinematic ideas on another artist. The notion of movement as generated by contrasts in color, harking back to Delaunay, is here interpreted unambiguously in the context of the myth of genesis, while the embryo episode eroticizes the cosmogonic myth in a way that is quite typical of Cendrars. The commentary is filled with quotes from La Fin du monde: the description of the growth of vegetation, the motif of the revolving and exploding sphere, and the very Cendrarsian identification of the disk with the faculty of sight.
In any case, Cendrars's analysis of Survage's Rythmes colorés shows how far he was prepared to go to appropriate, in the ideal Platonic sense, the film, which he saw as embodying the most fundamental principles of creativity. Cendrars's strategy readily conforms to other attempts on his part, which we have already seen, to give a semblance of reality to his own cinematic fantasies. He would take up a concept, long abandoned and clearly destined never to be realized, and intertextualize it retrospectively, immersing it in a sea of quotes from his own work. In this way a text by "someone else" became one vast quote from his own texts that had somehow been "plagiarized" from him by the film itself. Cendrars persistently nursed his own cinematic utopia, while maintaining it suspended in a condition of "virtual reality." His cinematic model in fact served as a mechanism internal to literature: a metamodel of his own literary work that Cendrars projected fictitiously onto the cinema.
Of particular significance in this metamodel of creativity was the destructive moment, the tabula rasa. Moreover, the repeated use of the same
themes in different semiotic contexts (a repetition motivated by the autobiographical nature of almost all his works) led Cendrars to rewrite endlessly the texts he had already "destroyed." The film being shown in reverse in La Fin du monde is thus a perfect metaphor for Cendrars's poetics. Noting the persistence of autobiographical elements in Cendrars's intertext, Claude Leroy makes the convincing argument that by fictitiously reducing this intertext to a state of chaos and nonbeing, Cendrars was able to generate new texts.[85]
Cendrars's projection of his own literary model onto the cinema was in fact an ambiguous gesture. On the one hand, Cendrars was truly fascinated by the cinema as the source of a new language; on the other, he was clearly seeking to disguise his own literary methods by giving them a cinematic form. The director Gance, who was deeply influenced by Cendrars, formulated this problem as follows in his "major" theoretical text: "The process of constructing a film script is the reverse of what is involved in a novel or play. Here everything comes from outside. First everything is misty, then a scenery gets delineated . . . the earth has already formed, but there are not yet any creatures. Kaleidoscopes appear."[86] Gance then goes on to describe the making of "creatures," "human machines," and how they are prepared for work. The entire process of filmmaking is here equated with the creation of the universe (Gance's demiurgic complex is certainly playing its part here), in sharp contrast to literature. Gance's idea seems to have been dictated to him by Cendrars: while always insisting that cinema and literature were diametrically opposed, Cendrars himself always created his literary texts according to a cinematic model.
Quick to forgive artists and film directors for borrowing his ideas, indeed always ready to propagate his thoughts among them, Cendrars was nonetheless extremely critical of fellow writers for attempting the same. Any case of writer influencing writer was, for Cendrars, an infringement on his priorities. Jean Epstein recalls a prolonged and bitter quarrel that took place between him and Cendrars, who accused him of plagiarism (Epstein was not at that point working in the cinema) and demanded that he halt the publication of his book Bonjour cinéma( 1921). Epstein was at a loss to understand the reason for his former benefactor's wrath. Cendrars saw Epstein's book as duplicating his own A B C du cinéma: both were conceived as providing a literary model for the cinema.[87]
Yet perhaps the most rarefied system of relations between the poetics of different art forms was achieved by Cendrars in his ballet La Création du monde (1923). This piece is also essential for the light it sheds on Ballet mécanique: it was devised just before the making of the film, and was the product of the most intense collaboration between Cendrars and Léger to date. Based on a libretto written by Cendrars himself and music by Darius Milhand, the ballet was choreographed by Jean Börlin for the Ballets suédois
led by Rolf de Maré. Cendrars's libretto was based on an African creation myth that had appeared in his own Negro Anthology. The ballet's theme resonated deeply for him, touching on the genesis of the world and of the text.
The show was presented as a spectacle arising out of chaos. "The circle opens," wrote Cendrars in the libretto, "three divinities cast a new spell, and we see the formless mass seethe. Everything is in motion, a monstrous leg appears." From this chaos a couple then emerges, and "while the couple performs the dance of desire and then of mating, the formless beings remaining on the ground slyly emerge and drift into the circle, accelerating its pace frenetically to the point of vertigo."[88] This description largely coincides with related texts by Cendrars, including his commentary on Survage's film, where embryos copulate to create the universe. Léger succeeded in creating a vivid plastic analogue to Cendrars's literary agenda. His contribution to the ballet has been described by Pierre Descargues:
For La Création du monde x188; at first he created a sense of chaos, in order then to generate progressively in the minds of the spectators the notion of order, organization and the creation of an ordered life. When the curtain went up, one's gaze fell upon an extremely cluttered scene in total disarray, where one was unable to distinguish the set from the actors. Then slowly certain decorative elements began to move, pieces of the set started to move apart, clouds rose toward the sky; one could make out the stirring of strange animal-like masses; the rhythm began to accelerate.[89]
Léger's plastic rendering of Cendrars's text was realized on the very borderline of cinema. I have already noted the strongly cinematic overt-ones of the cosmogonic theme in Cendrars. The ballet allowed for the introduction of a third semiotic system, dance, into the already complex relationship between literature and cinema. Cendrars's "cinematic" texts had already involved ritual dances (and the ballet by Milhaud had been based on the poetics of African ritual dance). In La Création du monde the motif of ritual dance appears twice in the second chapter, "Le Barnurn des Religions": "Negro, oceanic, Mexican fetishes. Grimacing masks. Ritual dances and songs." And a little later: "the frozen horror of negro masks, the cruelty of the dances."[90]
The connection between the African fetish and the cinema is most clearly visible in the novel Moravagine. Within a description of a psychiatric clinic in which the narrator, Raymond la Science, is incarcerated, there is a particularly eloquent moment: "On the white tiled floor of the various rooms, bathtubs, ergometers, pergolators appear as if on a screen, all of the same savage and terrible largeness which objects possess in films, a largeness of intensity, which is of the same scale as negro art, Indian masks and primitive fetishes, and which express the latent activity, the egg, the
formidable sum of permanent energy which each inanimate object contains."[91]
The African fetish becomes a symbolic equivalent of the close-up shot. The close-up is also linked to the animistic energy of things and to the symbol of the egg as the primordial element from which everything is created. It is the genetic corpuscle from which the universe is born. The close-up shot in cinema and the African fetish on a mythic level are interchangeable. This analogy is introduced by Cendrars into his ballet, in which circular forms are made to move (the mythic-erotic equivalent of copulation), and where fetishes and masks generate the energy underlying creation.
In another cinematic text, the screenplay La Perle fiéveuse (also a symbol of creation), the theme of dance has already been assimilated into the textures of cinematic language and is further linked to the fragmentation of the body through close-up shots (fetishes), and to erotic myths. Here the dancer Rougha performs an Indian dance that has a specific ritual meaning:
507. Close-up. Rougha becomes still, as if inspired.
508. A rush into the dizzying midst of the dance. Rapid swirls (attempt some upside-down perspectives) by reversing the camera angle.
509. Flashes and various close-ups of the details of the dance: a finger, a shoulder-plate, the toes spread apart, the stomach taut with effort, the hips heaving, etc.[92]
In becoming an erotic symbol, dance is now also inserted into Cendrars's myth of creation as yet another artistic "sublanguage." If the cinema can be understood as a mechanism for destroying and creating the universe, then dance is a mechanism of reproduction. For this reason various forms of movement, especially the circular and the ovoid, are linked, subtextually, to the fructification of the world and are described in mythic terms as dance.
This entire cluster of ideas is equally present in Léger's Ballet mécanique, whose title doubtless reflects both Léger's experience in the Ballets suédois and Cendrars's legacy of influence. The predominance of circular forms in the film, in all their variations, is certainly linked (as was said earlier) to Léger's prolonged discussions with Delaunay. But these forms are also an erotic symbol of birth, as Léger explained in 1924, praising the circle for its "primordial nature": "Any object that has the circle as its initial form is always sought out as an attractive value."[93] A later text by Léger, "Le Cirque" (1950), is a veritable apology for the circle, whose attractiveness is ascribed to its "sensuous" features: "There is a visual and tactile satisfaction in a round form. It is really evident that the circle is nicer. . . . Water, the mobility of the human body in water, the play of sensuous enveloping curves—a round pebble on the beach, you pick it up, you touch it."[94] The
eroticization of the circular form of course does not have any crudely sexual connotations here: it is linked rather to Cendrars's mytheme of the "creative impulse."
Another artist who eroticized the circle at much the same time as Léger and Cendrars was Marcel Duchamp. In 1926, Duchamp made the film Anemic Cinema (apunning title in which both words are anagrams of each other). For the film Duchamp shot a series of revolving disks containing texts with spirals inscribed into them. As they revolved, these "rotodisks" would create the feeling of volume (a "rotorelief") that Duchamp interpreted ironically as a female breast. The texts written on the disks were puns with obscene meanings as their subtext.[95] By uniting a completely sterile, indeed castrated, form with crude obscenities buried in anagrammatic puns, Duchamp was able to make fun of the "anemic" geometric eros of the moving disk. Duchamp's linguistic program, however, was quite different. Annette Michelson has shown that Duchamp's artistic impulse, unlike the extroverted creativity of Léger, was oriented toward a kind of autistic consciousness,[96] a language that is directed, as it were, within the subject. This displacement of language onto a centripetal spiral of complex anagrams makes Duchamp's film the exact opposite of Léger's Ballet mécanique.
It is important to note some other equally unexpected transformations of the cosmogonic myth that function as intertextual echoes in Léger's film. Cendrars had introduced into the myth two interconnected elements: representing the space of creation as a gigantic kitchen and eroticizing the everyday world of objects. The image of the kitchen, certainly somewhat unexpected here, was motivated above all by the mytheme of the egg, from which the plot of universal creation originated as a kind of culinary experiment. In Moravagine this metaphor surfaces explicitly: "The cradle of today's humanity is to be found in Central America. The stores of kitchenware, the shellmounds of the Gulf of California, the shellheaps that follow the entire Atlantic coastline. . . . These enormous accumulations of debris, piles of shells, the remains offish, the bones of birds and mammals, as high as mountains, prove that significantly large groups of people lived there a long time ago."[97] The link between birth and cooking implements makes Cendrars evolve an oddly erotic relationship to the domestic object, a relationship that becomes more interpretable through one more intertext. I have in mind the work of Remy de Gourmont, for which Cendrars had a passionate admiration. In 1948, Cendrars wrote: "During the past forty years I think I have not published a single book or text which hasn't mentioned his name, where I haven't quoted him in one way or another. This testifies to the extent to which I have been influenced by the master chosen by me at the age of twenty."[98]
In 1900, Gourmont published a collection of essays entitled La Culture des idées, which featured an essay called "The Dissociation of Ideas," a text
essential to his aesthetics. Ideas, Gourmont believed, do not circulate in a pure form within culture: they are compacted into what might be called associative aggregates. These aggregates need to be shattered and critiqued in order to rediscover the "pure idea," although the latter in turn will almost instantly link itself to yet another associative pair. In Gourmont's own words: "Just like the atoms of Epicurus, ideas cling to each other however they can, by chance encounters, collisions, and accidents."[99] Among the aggregates of ideas that need to be dissociated, Gourmont identified the notions of art and female beauty. Gourmont argued passionately that woman as a physical object is devoid of harmony: "The idea of beauty is not a pure idea; it is intimately connected with the idea of carnal pleasure."[100] Woman has come to be seen as an embodiment of harmony and beauty only because she is associated with sexual fulfillment. Therefore, in order to arrive at a pure idea of art, we have to dissociate the idea of art from sexuality.
Gourmont was to write an entire book devoted precisely to this question. Physique de l'amour (1903) attempts to dissociate art from sexuality by adopting two parallel strategies. On the one hand, Gourmont places human beings among fauna and is thus able to treat their sexual functions alongside analogous ones found in any number of other animals. The "paltriness" of human sexuality becomes evident when seen against the boundless array of sexual unions possible in the animal world. On the other hand, Gourmont studies love as a function of a mechanism that is located in instinct. Here he returns once more to the problem of female beauty, interpreting it exclusively in geometric and physically concrete terms:
The superiority of female beauty is real; and it has only one cause—the unity of line. What makes a woman more beautiful is the fact that her genital organs are invisible. . . . The harmony of the female body is thus geometrically speaking still more perfect [than a man's], especially if one considers the male and the female at the very moment of desire, at the moment they display the most intense and natural expression of life. At that point the woman, by interiorizing her movements, or making them visible only through the undulation of her curves, retains her full aesthetic value.[101]
Cendrars knew Gourmont's Physique de l'amour very well, reading it aloud to his lover, whom he took to the zoo for practical demonstrations of his mentor's anatomic insights.[102] Gourmont's insistence on dissociating ideas harmonized well with Cendrars's general orientation toward fragmentation, the breaking down and recombining of the world's elements in order to make a new language. Gourmont's ideology proved valuable in this regard by providing a refined metaphorics of eros that dissociated love from female beauty: erotic attention could thus be deflected onto objects
that were "geometrically more perfect"—metallic disks, drums, frying pans, and saucepans.
The novel Moravagine, the summa of Cendrars's mythology, performs this dissociation programmatically as part of the author's linguistic agenda:
It was then that I became seized by a violent passion for objects, inanimate things. . . .
Soon an egg, a stovepipe began to excite me sexually. . . . The sewing machine was like the plane, the cross section of a courtesan, a mechanical demonstration of the power of a dancer in a music hall. I would have liked to split, like a pair of lips, the perfumed quartz and drink the last drop of primordial honey that the life of origins has deposited in these glassy molecules, this drop that comes and goes like an eye. . . . The tin can was an annotated synopsis of woman.
The simplest figures—the circle, the square, and their projections in space, the cube and the sphere—moved me, spoke to my senses like crude symbols, red and blue lingams [a phallic symbol and attribute of the Hindu deity Shiva], obscure, barbarous ritual orgies.
Everything became rhythm to me, an unexplored life. . . . I performed Zulu dances.[103]
The hero finally addresses his lover in the following way: "You are as beautiful as a stovepipe, smooth, wound round, cranked up. Your body is like an egg lying on the seashore."[104] This rather extravagant moment in Moravagine is also relevant for its broader exposition of practically the entire paradigm of Cendrars's metamyth. Here a vast array of metaphorical substitutes are deployed to establish one and the same plot: how the creative force grows to generate the world. In the episode just quoted, which is motivated by the hero's mental illness, the motifs chosen are diverse but (as I showed earlier) interconnected: the egg, the kitchen implements, the dancer and the mechanical dance, the African dance, the ritual orgy, the eroticized geometric figures, the organic life of an amorphous primordial matter, and sexual desire. This selection of "primary elements" is also an almost complete inventory of the motifs to be found in the febrile movement of Léger's Ballet mécanique.
Léger's painting in the early twenties is typified by a conflation of human and object, their interchangeability. Characteristic of Léger, too, is an escalation of motifs from everyday life, particularly kitchen accessories, in such paintings as Le Petit déjeuner (1921), Le Grand déjeuner (1921), La Mére et l'enfant (1922), and Le Siphon (1924). These motifs, equated in plastic terms with human beings, are not presented, it is true, as mythological equivalents. For Cendrars only the cinema, as a world of primal creative chaos, can generate an endless series of transformations
and substitutions. A film is a universe of general semantic equivalence; it presents the cosmos as pure seriality, infinite and existing prior to language. In A B C du cinéma (1921), Cendrars writes: "Animals, plants, minerals are ideas, feelings, numerals" (cf. the moving numerals in Ballet mécanique ).[105]
Everything is a signifier of everything else. All static linguistic structures are shattered in a film. In "Pompon" (1957), a late text devoted to the cinema, Cendrars answers the question "What is cinema?" as follows: "You, yourself, you, anonymous as you are to yourself, alive, dead, dead-alive, wild-rose, angelic, hermaphroditic, human, too human, animal, mineral, vegetable, chemistry, rare butterfly, a residue in a crucible, the root of a voltaic arc, a second in the depths of an abyss, two swimming costumes, a spout-hole, mechanical and spiritual, full of gear and prayers, aerobe, thermogenous, famous foot, lion, god, automaton, embryo."[106] This list mixes adjectives and nouns, as well as the most diverse phenomena. Such a definition of the cinema seems more like a random choice of words, arranged like a lexicon and completely without syntax. The cinema becomes a dictionary, a paradigm free to embrace the entire world, a supreme intertext (we might recall the traditional comparison of the universe with a dictionary or encyclopedia).
The paradigm presented in "Pompon" is the logical limit to which the equation of the cinema with the universe as "hypertext" can lead. In fact, neither Cendrars nor Léger expands the lexical range of cinematic language to such an extent: they operate largely within the confines of the list of "interchangeable" mythemes enumerated earlier and limit their description of the world to the theme of its genesis (and that of language) and to the motif of space travel, deployed as a metonymic approximation of cosmic expanse.
Closely linked to this plot is the topos of the end of the world. In the screenplay La Fin du monde, it appears as the voyage to Mars. It also appears in the novel Moravagine, whose hero writes a vast work also called La Fin du monde, which he may have put together "based on a cinema program, during his mysterious sojourn on the planet Mars."[107] In order to translate the screenplay from the Martian language, Moravagine compiles a lexicon of the two hundred thousand basic meanings of the only word that exists in Martian. The screenplay is finally written in a language that expresses the infinite diversity of the same. Here we have returned to the same lexical phenomenon of universal semantic equivalence discussed earlier. Further on, the novel's hero, Raymond la Science, who translates the screenplay, notes: "It was this dictionary that allowed me to translate, or better still adapt, the Martian screenplay. I have entrusted its publication and possibly its film adaptation to Blaise Cendrars."[108] As we know, Cendrars was in fact to fulfill a part of his own hero's charge.
The theme of space travel is in fact most elaborately treated in another of Cendrars's works, L'Eubage (1917). Cendrars wrote L'Eubage in response to a request of the well-known art patron Jacques Doucet. The work is dedicated to Doucet and to Conrad Moricand, a friend of Cendrars and an astrologer-mystic who gained some renown between the 1920s and the 1930s. There is some reason to believe that it was Moricand who introduced Cendrars to astral mysticism. His influence is also evident in other works by Cendrars, as well as by many other writers of the time, such as Henry Miller.[109]
The word eubage refers to a Gallic priest who practices fortune-telling and astrology. L'Eubage recounts a voyage through space that penetrates the constellations described in the horoscope, proceeds through the Milky Way, and so on. This text, saturated with astrological symbolism, is perhaps the intertext closest to Léger's Ballet mécanique. Here the metaphoric equation of cosmic creation with the creation of a new language is expressed graphically, and through images that are very close to those deployed by the film. The book's third chapter, "Des instruments de musique" (the reference here is to the music of the cosmic spheres), presents a vision of a primordial chaos before passing on to the "birth of language":
Some elementary forms become clearer: a square, an oval, a circle. These rise to the surface and burst like bubbles. Now everything wiggles like flippers: the square becomes longer, the oval becomes hollow, the circle becomes a star; mouth, lips, throat; everything hurls itself into the void with a huge cry; everything rushes together from all sides, regroups, forms a mass, stretches out in the form of the senseless tongue of a mastodon. This tongue gives a jump, begins to work, makes an unprecedented effort, stammers, speaks. It is talking.[110]
The sixth chapter of L'Eubage is dedicated to a journey into the eye, according to a metaphoric chain linking planet-eye-object-lens. The seventh chapter contains cinematic associations encoded in the chapter's very title, "De la parturition des couleurs," where the French parturition ("birthing") recalls the title of Cendrars's article on Survage, "De la partition des couleurs." This chapter often coincides word for word with the article: "My field of vision is submerged by a whirlwind. A brownish red slowly invades my screen and fills it. A dark-red . . ., composed of small plates placed one alongside the other. Each of these plates is crowned by a pimple that trembles gently and ends up bursting like cooling lava."[111] Everything is repeated here: the copulation of the embryos and the growth of branches. Here too the yolk bursts and the disk grows. Nonetheless, the cosmogonic epic ends differently in L'Eubage: "All around me, everything becomes solid. Domestic forms develop one out of another, familiar and useful."[112]
Yet the strangest part of the book is chapter 8, "De l'Hétéroclite." This is perhaps the text that most directly anticipates the imagery of Ballet mécanique in its account of a journey through space:
Everything flutters, opens and closes like gills. Minuscule mouths. Round bulbous things disappear, come and go, show themselves, then melt into a gleam. Golden balls rise, descend, trace the outlines of figures. A meditation? A game? One can discern arabesques or drawings. . . .
Everything breaks. Transparent craters open up and reveal a dazzling array of cooking implements, all made of the best copper. An Indian and a blue Negro dance around the hearth and juggle large Spanish onions. An ostrich egg rolls down a slope. . . .
Icy plates fly in all directions like tiles. A woman shakes her skin. The spokes of a windmill turn.
Then everything becomes like glass, murky, without depth, like a photograph that hasn't been toned.[113]
Cendrars had intended for the book to be illustrated with photographs, treating subjects ranging from astronomy to industrial accessories from everyday life. The aim was to create a working tension between the quotidian and the deliberately esoteric nature of the book. Regrettably, Cendrars's intent was never realized. Yet even Léger's film does involve a certain amount of playing on the opposition between the cosmic and the everyday. Léger himself recalled: "I photographed the painted nail of a woman and magnified it a hundredfold. Then I showed it on a screen. The astonished pubic thought it was looking at a photo taken of outer space."[114] The sense that a blown-up photo of a fingernail was a kind of miracle is something common to Léger's painting as well: from 1924 (with the painting Reading ), Léger started to include nails on the hands of his human figures. W. Schmalenbach attributes this detail, conspicuous enough yet generally ignored, to the influence of cinema.[115] This chain of associations, linking the blowup of the nail to astrology and the cinema, is also typical of Cendrars himself: "That's cinema! . . . your hands, cracked like lunar craters, with an enormous tube under the nail."[116] The poet observes that the cinema has the capacity to uncover the essence hidden under appearances just as astrology reveals one's fate through the movement of stars, or palmistry predestination in the "shape of the fingers."[117] From this chain of logic it suffices to remove the middle to get the odd equation, cinema = astrology = nails.
These somewhat whimsical chains of association are typical of both Léger and Cendrars. Both artists shared a tendency to see the world in mythic terms; both sought to establish a semantic equivalence between different elements in the objective world. The similarities that obtain between these chains of association clearly suggest a level of intertextual interference between the works of the two artists: the chains seem to shift
freely from one text to another, creating a kind of mixed or hybrid authorship. The quote about nails was in fact borrowed by Cendrars from Léger, since Léger's text precedes his by several years. Cendrars's whimsical astrology resonates as part of Léger's work, from which it is borrowed as a quoted motif. We are dealing with a complex system of quotations that intersect so readily as to almost lose their original authorship.
To return now to Léger, his Ballet mécanique, we can summarize, is largely made up of small fragments—various geometric figures (circles and triangles), everyday objects (boaters, slippers, tongs, balls), cooking utensils (saucepans, bottles, molds for baking pies), body parts (lips, eyes, legs from display mannequins), and so forth. Each of these objects is a piece of the world, a quote from some general lexicon that constitutes a specific paradigm. Each object can be understood as a quote and linked thereby to its related text by Cendrars; for example, the legs echo the leg in La Création du monde.
Yet this kind of fragmentary reading tells us little about the film as a whole. Ballet mécanique is in fact a single and unitary hyperquotation, referring to a closed corpus of texts outside it, all of which belong to Cendrars. Each smaller composite quote fragment can be seen as an index, a "hypoquotation" that is functional only within its own paradigm. In order to compute the Cendrars intertext, a viewer must be able compile the film's full lexicon. The entire vocabulary of Ballet mécanique, that is, the film's language, is a quote.
For this to be so, language must first of all appear as a text. This is indeed the case in Ballet mécanique, which is in effect a syntagmatic elaboration of a linguistic paradigm. Second, the film's language derives its rationale and normative status from an external literary program, which appears in the selection of fragments from various texts by Cendrars. This allows the film to bring together a range of utterances by the poet and give them a unified and programmatic weight. Ballet mécanique thus takes on the task of "reconstructing" Cendrars's mythology. Myth and language emerge as intertextually supplementary.
The presence of this literary myth in Léger's film is not palpable through any direct echoes; nor is it the result of any desire on Léger's part to illustrate Cendrars's ideas. The process involved can be better described in the following way: first Cendrars declares the cinema to be the model for generating a new language, thus locating the matrix of his new poetics outside literature (whose renewal is seen as yet another task for the cinema). Cendrars himself will strive to foster this matrix in other art forms, particularly film. These efforts, always ambivalent in character, are in themselves unsuccessful; however, they do result in several literary works containing descriptions of Cendrars's cinematic vision. A myth is thus elaborated, a ramified interpretive apparatus for appraising a nonexisting film.
This apparatus is thus activated within literature itself, for which, in the final analysis, it had always been intended.
Cendrars had always followed Léger's painting closely: his texts described Léger on their own terms, projecting Cendrars's myth onto his work. Well before Ballet mécanique, then, Léger's painting was part of Cendrars's imertext, with all its cinematic overtones. The film, when made, thus readily entered the specific intertext of Cendrars's myth about the destruction and creation of the world and the related creation of a new language.
The question then emerges: To what extent does the film logically continue the work of Léger's painting and reproduce its motifs, and to what extent does it rather move beyond the painterly realm and find its intertext in Cendrars? In other words, is an immanent reading of Ballet mécanique possible? There can be no simple answer to this question, since even Léger's older paintings had been subjected by Cendrars to a kind of "forced" interpretation: they were already an effective part of his intertext. Not only did Cendrars invest Léger's paintings with new meaning; he in fact stripped Léger of their authorship by drawing them into a context he himself had constructed. The scenario is further complicated by the fact that, even after Ballet mécanique, Léger was to make several paintings that reproduce motifs from the film. One example is Hommage à la danse (1925), where against a background of concentric circles we see two mechanical legs that clearly recall the mannequin's legs in the film. Another is Composition aux quatre chapeaux (1927), where in the center we see a face with a birthmark on one cheek, while the edges of the canvas reveal a boater, spoons, and bottles. The lower edge shows a hand holding a gray bowler hat. Christophe Derouet has called this painting a "carefully made rebus." In the large face he sees Kiki, a model in Léger's film, and identifies the hat as Charlie Chaplin's (or perhaps Léonce Rosenberg's, he adds cautiously).[118] At this point, Léger's film has clearly begun to dictate the terms by which his painting can be interpreted. Cinema thus becomes a "strong" intertext for painting. This is because the cinema possesses a greater number of the features that we associate with texts: it breaks down readily into fragments, it develops in time, it has a finite beginning and end. Only by invoking a film intertext is Derouet able to make his rather arbitrary interpretive claims, as if the bowler hat in his painting could actually be traced to a concrete owner, be it Chaplin or Rosenberg, with whom Léger traveled to Ravenna in 1924.
If Ballet mécanique emerges as quite a powerful intertext for some of Léger's own paintings, we have also seen that Cendrars's imaginary cinema was no less powerful in this regard: more than any single text by Léger himself, it engenders the program according to which Ballet mécanique was made. It is this breadth that allowed Cendrars as intertext to function within the film (perhaps even while the film was being made). Whatever
the case, the Cendrars intertext also freed the film from the imperative of narrative, allowing it to limit itself to the primary elements of language, which could then refer to a wider system and acquire meaning through literary sources outside the film proper.
Put simply, Cendrars invented films in order for them to be parasitized by his literary works, which they provided with a new language. Léger, by contrast, made films that could parasitize Cendrars's literary works. His films embodied a speech whose apparently senseless stammer conveyed the dramatic myth he had found in the books his friend Cendrars had written.
Chapter Five—
Intertext against Intertext:
Buñuel and Dali's Un Chien andalou
Cendrars was not the only writer of the avant-garde to adopt the cinema as his literary model. The cinema provided a fictitious escape from literature, while also holding out the possibility of its radical renewal. The films imagined by the writers of the avant-garde were all too frequently never intended for production, retaining their significance precisely as facts of literature. This seems to me the real reason for the clear discrepancy between the number of films the surrealists conceived and those actually produced. A great number of surrealist screenplays have survived. Among the most important are Philippe Soupault's Poèmes cinématographiques and Le Coeur volé; La Coquille et le Clergyman, Les Dix-huit secondes, La Révolte du boucher, and others by Antonin Artaud; Minuit à quatorze heures, Les Mystères du métropolitan, Y a des punaises dans le rôti de porc, and many others by Robert Desnos; Paupières mûres, barre fixe, and mtasipoj by Benjamin Fondane; Benjamin Péret's Pulchérie veut un auto; Georges RibemontDessaignes's Le Huitième jour de la semaine; Georges Hugnet's La Loi d'accomodation chez les borgnes; and Francis Picabia's Sursum Corda and others. Only two of these films were actually produced: La Coquille et le Clergyman (directed by Germaine Dulac and repudiated by Artaud himself) and George Hugnet's La Perle (1928–1929, directed by H. d'Ursel). The pantheon of surrealist cinema is an extraordinarily limited one. To the preceding list we could also add two films by Luís Buñuel and Salvador Dali, Un Chien andalou (1928) and L'Age d'or (1930), and perhaps L'Étoile de mer (1928) by Man Ray and Robert Desnos as well.
The desire to create a cinema not destined for the screen was expressed with remarkable candor by Benjamin Fondane in 1928: "SO LET US BEGIN THE ERA OF UNFILMABLE SCRIPTS. Something of the astonishing beauty of the fetus will be found there. Let us say right away that these screenplays
written to be read will be shortly drowned in 'literature'. . . the real screenplay being by nature very awkward to read and impossible to write. So why should I deliberately get attached to this nothing? To what purpose? The fact is that a part of myself, that poetry had repressed, has found in the cinema a general loudspeaker through which to pose the questions that torment it.[1]
The screenplay, a genre considered "awkward to read and impossible to write," was placed in opposition to literature as poetry. The literature poetry dichotomy was a general feature of surrealist writing. To literature were attributed all the stereotypic features of writing, which poetry was called upon to overcome. Robert Desnos, for one, believed that the cinema was on the front line of "the great struggle which everywhere pits. . . poetry against literature, life against art, love and hate against skepticism, revolution against counterrevolution.[2] Desnos also saw the cinema as a remarkable and purely mechanical weapon in his war on reading, since the darkness of the movie theater "impedes. . . the illusory reading of textbooks and edifying books of all kinds."[3] The surrealists saw the cinema as standing in opposition to high-bourgeois culture, as its violent negation. In his first Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924, André Breton wrote: "Hence-forth I am strongly inclined to view the reveries of science with indulgence, as unseemly as it finally is in all respects. The wireless? Fine. Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don't have any objections. The cinema? Hurrah for darkened theaters!"[4]
Cinema, then, was perceived as a means of attacking high culture, one that by no means necessitated a renunciation of language (the output of surrealist screenplays is ample evidence of this). The cinema promised the overcoming, within language, of the literary tradition. A literary text oriented toward the poetics of film was thus obliged to enter into a negative relation with the intertext of the broader literary arena. The cinema drew such a text into a kind of negative intertextuality, one that denied the wider context of culture.
Un Chien andalou, a Buñuel-Dali collaboration and the first film to have been unconditionally hailed by the surrealists, might be reexamined in this light. The film was consciously conceived as a model of surrealist poetry in film. Buñuel himself declared that Un Chien andalou would not have been possible without the surrealist movement: "Un Chien andalou would not have existed if the movement called surrealist had not existed. For its 'ideology,' its psychic motivation and the systematic use of the poetic image as an arm to overthrow accepted notions correspond to the characteristics of all authentically surrealist work."[5] To some degree, Buñuel's stated goals also could have encouraged the attempt to transfer the structure of the surrealist trope directly from literature to film. The film's celebrated prologue is interesting in this regard, establishing as it does a parallel between an eye severed by a razor blade and a cloud that intersects the
disk of the moon. The prologue has mostly given rise to psychoanalytic readings.[6] More recently, however, scholars have also begun to pay more attention to the quasi-literary structure of this parallel. Linda Williams, for example, has examined the moon/eye metaphor as a rare example of a "metaphor within a syntagm" that inverts the relationship between the elements it juxtaposes. Williams rightly notes that traditional metaphors usually bring together some human action within diegesis and an extradiegeric element taken from nature. In the Buñuel film, by contrast, the moon and the cloud correspond to the diegetic level, a fact that is further emphasized by the direction in which the hero of the prologue (Buñuel himself) directs his gaze as he steps out onto the balcony. The human action thus becomes the second element of the comparison. Thus it is not the eye that is compared to an extradiegetic moon, but a moon situated within diegesis that is compared to the eye of a woman who is herself "poorly" integrated within diegesis.[7] Naturally this reversal of the relations between the constitutive elements of this metaphor can be interpreted as purely surrealist, a reading that, in turn, can lead to far-reaching conclusions about the nature of inversion in the film. In fact the matter appears to be somewhat more complex. One's relationship to culture is not so simply overturned by metaphor.
Buñuel himself maintained that the image of the eye being cut by a razor blade had come to him in a dream: "When I arrived to spend a few days at Dali's house in Figueras, I told him about a dream I'd had in which a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor blade slicing through an eye."[8] Georges Bataille gives a different version of the event: "Buñuel himself told me that it was Dali who had thought up the episode, suggested directly by the fact that he actually did see a long, narrow cloud cutting the disk of the moon into two."[9]
This recourse to dreams, highly characteristic of the surrealists, often serves to repress a source, camouflaging the real intertextual links that remain concealed behind tropes. The dream replaces the quoted source, removing it from the realm of culture and placing it within the domain of physiology, eroticism, and the subconscious. Nonetheless, we have every reason to believe that the slit eye as a motif has several sources. Dali made use of it as early as 1927 in "Mon ami et la plage": "My friend loves. . . the tenderness of gentle cuts of the scalpel on the curve of her pupils."[10] J. Francisco Aranda has traced this motif back to a 1919 poem by Juan Larrea.[11] It can also just as easily be interpreted within the broader context of the theme of blindness, quite prominent in the film: the gouged-out eyes of the donkeys, the blind men who are buried in the sand at the end of the film, and so forth.
It is worth pausing over yet another possible source for this motif—the novel Cinelandia (Movieland) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Buñuel held
Gómez in high esteem, clearly overestimating his role in the development of the cinema, and even hoping to involve him as a scriptwriter in the making of Un Chien andalou.[12] Even before this, Buñuel had plans to make a film based on a script by Gñmez entitled Caprichos, consisting of six novellas.[13]
There is no doubt that Buñuel was aware of Gómez's literary film utopia. In viewing the world through the prism of cinema, the novel Cinelandia has much in common with the surrealists. A chapter in the book, entitled "The Stolen Birthmark," recalls die prologue to Buñuel's film. Here a "tragic incident" is recounted: the film star Edna Blake's husband "had bound her and cut out with a bistoury the magnificent beauty spot that enhanced her back. Ernest Word had dug down so deep in tearing it out, that he had opened a blood vessel through which Edna nearly bled to death, as if the beauty spot had been the cork stopping all her blood."[14] Gómez here takes great pains to emphasize the chameleon-like reversibility of Edna Blake's birthmark. It is readily displaced, becoming an eye: "To tear out a palpitating beauty spot is like extricating an eye."[15] The birthmark can also become a diamond—"Not the biggest diamond set in platinum could repay for her beauty spot"—or a beacon: "She has turned her back on herself and thinks that her beauty spot shines more brilliantly than any beacon."[16] The birthmark suddenly finds itself on the moon: "Even the moon of that splendid night had a coquettish beauty spot punctuating the corners of its wide smile."[17] It can also acquire the trappings of an erotic symbol: "If a man were to do that to me, I'd bite off his nose."[18] Clearly, the nose here is a euphemism drawn from the tradition of erotic disguise. In emphasizing the versatility of the birthmark, Gómez generates a long chain of interchangeable motifs, a kind of extended many-tiered metaphor: birthmark/eye/beacon/moon, and later on, the jupiters and reflectors used in the film studio. The blinding light of the beacon/moon/ jupiters is linked by Gómez to the motif of blindness, which is crucial to the novel: "One of the most moving spectacles is when, in a holocaust to her public, the star burns her beautiful eyes in a blaze of light. . . . In the movies, modulation of voice, diapason, musical and elegant diction, are all to be found in a pair of eyes. One can say that blind people are 'cinematographically dumb.'"[19]
Such metaphors, extended and metadescriptive in nature, also are typical of the poetics of surrealism, although the interchangeability of motifs in Cinelandia still appears somewhat tentative; "To rip out a birthmark is almost the same as ripping out an eye." The substitution of eye for birthmark is here elaborated on the figurative level of discourse, and its impact on the diegetic and referential level of the text thus appears mediated. The equation of moon and eye within the diegetic plane of Un Chien andalou leads to a far more radical dislocation of the discursive and referential planes. This becomes clear in the main section of the film.
The metaphor of the prologue has one other important feature. The juxtaposed images here definitively merge, although essentially on the basis of a purely external and formal similarity. The circle of the moon and the eyeball are rendered interchangeable. This emphasis on external form serves to destroy conventional semantic links, which are replaced by alternative modes of interaction on the level of the signifier. The shift of emphasis away from semantics onto the external and formal properties of the images being compared was an essential part of the surrealists' strategy for renewing language. "The conjunctive, serving as a formal substitute for the synonym, metaphorically brings together words that strictly speaking have no semantic connection."[20] In Un Chien andalou the conjunctive function is fulfilled by montage effects or dissolves that unite the elements being compared within a fictive common space, and thus "oddly" unite two or more objects in a single and absurd image. Thanks to its "ungrammatical" nature, a film does not need to rely on a grammatical simulation of synonymy by way of conjunctive constructions.
The concatenation of logically incompatible elements, by way of either conjunctive constructions in a written text or montage in films, leads to a paradox. On the one hand, we have veritable clusters of ungrammatical constructs, anomalies that suggest the need for an intertextual reading. These strange associative chains seem literally to flaunt their quotational character. On the other hand, the abolition of semantic links shifts the emphasis onto the purely syntagmatic level. It is as if we were being asked to read a text whose meaning resides only in its immediate elaboration, a text located entirely in the syntagm, with all paradigmatic links refused. In this sense (and this is what remains to be proved), the surrealist text can be seen as the exact opposite of Ballet mécanique, with its repetitions and maniacal elaboration of the paradigmatic axis, to the complete exclusion of the syntagmatic.
The surrealists themselves, with their constant references to dreams, to the mediumistic possibilities of écriture automatique , and so forth, seemed to invite a psychologizing reading, such as Freud's. The obscurities of the text's code were thus found to be concealed in the depths of the subconscious. Riffaterre has shown how elements of surrealist writing read like hieroglyphs: "We do not understand them as language or even as isolated symbols. They rather represent a language the key to which has been hidden away somewhere."[21] I have already had occasion to discuss the quote as hieroglyph. In the present case, however, the hieroglyph refers not to an intertext but to the text of the subconscious. This, at any rate, was the surrealists' conscious strategy, which insisted on the "automatic" nature of writing and dreaming. The strategy was finally justified, insofar as a great number of surrealist texts have been usefully interpreted in a psychoanalytic vein.
Nonetheless, the evocation of the unconscious was only a palliative. The essential impulse of surrealist strategy lay elsewhere. Riffaterre has quite rightly observed that the semantic ungrammaticalities of surrealist texts are consistently compensated for by a grammaticalily on the level of structure. The absurd, the nonsensical, simply by impeding decoding, force us to read the structures directly."[22]
What I propose to investigate is precisely the extent to which structure and syntagm are capable of "normalizing" a text that cannot be rendered normative intertextually, via the traditional means of uncovering and interpreting quotations. In this sense the cinema is of course ideally positioned to lighten the semantic level, by distancing itself from the field of associations that might weigh heavily on the verbal elements. It is easier for cinema than for literature to accentuate the external, visual side of an object, stripping it of the semantic content that literature imposes. This is also why many surrealist texts appear to mimic the cinema.
The easiest way to bring two objects together syntagmatically without reference to their symbolism or other meaning is by relying on their external formal similarity. Such a comparison is easiest to establish if the two objects have a common shape. The most elementary form is the circle, and it is no accident that it became so important to surrealist poetry.
The passage of one circular object into another was elaborated with a striking consistency by Robert Desnos in his screenplay Minuit à quatorze heures (1925). Here are a few select images from the script:
23. Circles in water.
27. The setting sun, all round.
30. Nighttime. The lamp is shining. The round shape of the light on the ceiling. The round shape cast by the lampshade on the floor.
32. Nighttime. The round moon. . .
33. . . . Round plates. The round shape of the napkins.
36. The round handle of the door turns slowly. . .
37. . . . wheels
43. Fen-is wheel . . .
47. The wafer grows infinitely in the [priest's] hand.
48. A halo emerges behind the priest's head. . .
50. A beggar at the door of the church. [A woman] gives him a coin.
57. Nighttime outside. It is calm. The round moon.[23]
Frame 59 introduces us to the film's main "hero," a sphere, recalling a cricket ball in size. The sphere falls down a staircase and then rolls out the door. People are seated in the garden, while a round ball hovers over them in the sky. The ball then falls onto their table. Later a peasant digs up a cannonball from the ground (frame 74); a woman tries to stroke a cat, which turns into a ball (frames 76–77). Then we have a series of "adventures," each involving objects that are transformed into spheres that
balloon out, aggressively enveloping everything in their path. The screenplay ends as follows:
159. Something spherical in the sky.
160. Circles in the water.
161. Something spherical in the sky.[24]
Clearly there is a certain external similarity between Desnos's screenplay and Léger's film, both of which make extensive use of the circular form. Yet the texts are also very different. Léger's circle is a dynamic form and the embodiment of a vital erotic impulse. It is linked to a specific myth. It "shatters" the world into fragments. True, Léger also paid tribute to the idea of juxtaposing objects on the basis of their external form. He would recall, for example, the pains he took to get a parrot's round eye to look exactly like the outline of the lid of a saucepan that had appeared in the previous frame.[25] Taken in the context of the film as a whole, however, this episode seems more like a joke.
Minuit à quatorze heures presents an entirely different picture. There is no metaphysics here, no mythmaking, and no internal dynamism. The circle serves not to segment the world but to gather it into one syntagm. The very plot of Desnos's screenplay describes the development of surrealist poetics away from simple association based on formal attributes (such as a series of circular objects) toward a transformation of these objects, which are made to pass physically through one another. The initial cumulative serialization of objects acquires the dynamism of a plot. Similes begin to generate events. A nearly analogous device can be found in the script Les Pauïères mûres by B. Fondane, involving white billiard balls. People in a café are seen throwing balls at one another's heads. As in Desnos, the balls begin to move, rolling down the street, encountering corpses, and so forth.[26] Billiard balls also appear in Buñuel's Une girafe, where they are hidden inside the giraffe's "fifth spot" that is said to resemble the drawer of a writing desk.[27] These balls are essentially the physical embodiment of the circle as an abstract geometric universal. In Un Chien andalou the circle has a somewhat similar function. The serialization of circular forms in the prologue grows into a kind of reciprocal interaction that becomes part of the plot. The moon becomes an eye, a cloud becomes a razor.
The surrealist emphasis on concrete form, the unique importance accorded to circular objects, served to strengthen the denotative function of the signifier. The surrealists leveled out the semantic differences between objects that bore any formal resemblance to one another. This is most easily seen when the physical or concrete aspect of a traditional poetic image is emphasized. One such "concretized" image is the eye. On the one hand, the eye gains a highly poetic resonance (especially in the poetry of Paul Éluard or Breton, where the eyes are often compared to stars). On the
other hand, the surrealists were fond of "eye-play" as a kind of ball game: "Sur les murs pour les jours de fête on accroche / des yeux joujoux des pauvres." (On the walls during holidays they hang / eyes, toys for the poor.) And elsewhere: "The beaches are full of eyes without bodies; they can be found along the dunes and on the far-off meadows red from the blood of blooming herds."[28] And in Breton's Nadja: "I managed to notice the balls of her eyes gleam on the edge of my hat."[29] Traditional tropes, then, get desemanticized by the surrealists through a process of reification. Here is another curious example from Les Champs magnétiques: "Their good star is the eye of the women they robbed, upturned to such a height";[30] or from Jean Arp's "De 'Perroquet supérieur'": "De la bordure de la mort s'avançaient les yeux des jeunes étoiles. . . [From the verge of death the eyes of the young stars advanced. . .]."[31] In both cases the traditional metaphor of star-as-eye is externally preserved, only to be subject to a kind of blasphemous reification. The same ambivalence is also the basis of the prologue to Un Chien andalou.
The examples quoted here illustrate more than a persistent desemanticization and reification at work in surrealist texts. They also point to another factor that at least initially might seem less likely: the existence of a rich poetic intertext created precisely through such tropes. A poetry constituted within a broader negation of the intertextual quickly begins to generate a new field of intertextual relations that serve to enact the semantic strategy that had been selected. The surrealist intertext, however, does not just "play" with traditional motifs—it is deeply parodic. In each case, playing with an object involves distancing it from its traditional metaphoric associations in a kind of irreverent debunking. Motifs like "eyes" and "stars" clearly call upon an immense reservoir of traditional poetic associations. Buñuel, for example, might well have intended his comparison of a woman's eye with the moon in Un Chien andalou to be seen as a parody of his friend Federico García Lorca, whose poetic imagery provides the intertext for the beginning of the film. In 1924, Lorca dedicated to Buñuel the following verses, which he wrote on the back side of a photograph of the two of them: "The large moon glistens and rolls / in the calm clouds above." Significantly, the film provoked a quarrel between Buñuel and Lorca, who perceived it as an attack on him. "I'm the dog," he was reported to have said.[32]
The extreme form of this irreverent strategy of reification is the motif of the dismembered body. Intended to shock the reader, this motif was in fact revived rather than invented by the surrealists, being a topos that already enjoyed a wide literary currency. The specific motif of the gouged or slit eye is mythicized in an entire body of surrealist texts, specifically those of Georges Bataille, many of which were profoundly influenced by Un Chien andalou. Bataille would acknowledge the importance of Buñuel's
film for his treatment of this theme in L'Oeil (1929), a work written immediately after the film's first screening. The inaugural elements of the myth are already present here: Granville's nightmare involving visions of eyes that pursue him as they transform themselves into fish; the story of Crampon, who gives the priest his glass eye as a memento on the eve of his execution; and so on. Bataille would further elaborate this motif in his subsequent essay "La Mutilation sacrificielle et l'oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh" (1930). Here Bataille made use of M. Lortillois's book De l'automutilation: Mutilations et suicides insolites (1909), which cites eleven cases in which people voluntarily had their eyes cut or gouged out. Bataille frequently compared the eye to planetary objects, more often the sun than the moon, here acting very much in accordance with Christian tradition,[33] and also examined the Oedipus myth in the context of solar sacrifice. This same motif was then further elaborated in his Histoire de l'oeil. Typical of Bataille is a chain of mythic substitutions: eye/insect/some other bodily member/sun. The internal mechanisms of surrealist imagery are here preserved.
In Uccello, un poil, a text of 1926, Antonin Artaud produced another associative chain that was even closer to Buñuel: eye/egg/moon. The heads of hanged men are compared to eggs created by the "monstrous palm" of an artist, a palm "of the full moon." The egg becomes a moon: "So you can walk right around this egg that hangs among the stones and stars, and which alone possesses the double animation of eyes."[34] Artaud wrote a series of texts as records of physiological sensations felt by his own body. In these texts, body parts enter into complex metaphoric series, while the body as a whole appears fragmented. Artaud's "sensation" was then elevated into a constructive principle by Hans Bellmer, whose puppets' arms, legs, and heads appear dislocated as if by accident.
The head was another motif favored by the surrealists. Its circular shape seems "naturally" to provoke a comparison with the eye. "Ses yeux sont une tête coupée [Her eyes are a severed head]," writes Éluard.[35] No less typical is the metamorphosis of the head into a sea urchin: "My head is difficult to hold because of the quills."[36] The head often appears as an object such as a sphere. For instance, Tristan Tzara writes, "You hold in your hands as if to throw a ball, bright number, your head full of poetry"; Fondane's screenplay Paupières mûres has "55—he turns his head toward the mirror. 56—the woman's head is visible in it, although lying placed on the table."[37] Soupault has "The head which rolls without a leaf and the fruit of the day ripe and red."[38] And Breton wrote in "Allotropies":"My head rolls upside down."[39]
The motif of severed body parts, which goes back to magic shows and the films of Méliès, is not limited to the eye and head alone. In Un Chien andalou we find a severed hand, which also appears in the work of Desnos,
Soupault, and Breton.[40] Thanks to its external similarity to a starfish, the hand is also linked to the eye. This particular correlation became the basis of an entire mythology elaborated in Breton. As Jean Roudaut has it: "In its movement and its form, the hand is wing and leaf, seaweed, cockscomb, a root hugging the ground, mandragora. . . . It is the mediator between the domain of the living and the universe. . . . The eye is always attached to a person. The hand, on the contrary, particularly in Nadja, tends to be independent. . . . Through it, man's desire intervenes in the world's order."[41] We see, then, how the poetic intertext underlying Buñuel's film establishes a dialogue between the eye in the prologue and the severed hand that appears in the main section of the film. These chains are established through metaphoric links that were formulated in surrealist poetry. The intertext allows for the crystallization of established chains of equivalences and substitutions, creating syntagmatic links (chains) that are then rendered paradigmatic.
The surrealists created a system of external similitudes. These restored universal connections were then charged with a new symbolic weight. (The sphere or ball is only the most elementary nucleus of this metaphoric process.) It is hardly surprising to read Breton and Soupault declare: "A sphere destroys everything."[42] The destruction through metaphor of the established semantic order privileges the process of metamorphosis, in which the first object must be destroyed in order for it to become the second. Film is very effective in portraying this process, thanks to simple tricks such as the dissolve. René Clair's Entr'acte and Artaud and Dulac's La Coquille et le Clergyman, two works crucial to the genesis of surrealist cinema, both paid homage to the principle of metamorphosis, which is also the basis of one of the first presurrealist film scripts, Philippe Soupault's Indifférence.[43]
Among the surrealists' literary works, metamorphoses are vividly present in the writings of Benjamin Péret.[44] In his novel Il était une boulangère (1925), trees turn into snakes, a face turns into a siphon, and a woman turns into a bird. In Mort aux vaches et au champ d'honneur (1922), objects exist in a state just prior to mutation, soft or liquefied. Salade the heroine rides in a "soft bus," Monsieur Charbon "suddenly liquefies," the railway tracks are "completely liquefied."[45] The later novel Histoire naturelle (1945) is perhaps Péret's most consistent attempt to work out the principle of metamorphosis. Here we read that under the influence of the sun's warm rays oil made of snow turns into a chair, the chair into a poisonous lemur, which in turn becomes a kangaroo.[46]
These chains of absurd metamorphoses seem to parody Darwin's evolutionary theory, which in fact often served as a theoretical model for surrealist transformations, including Un Chien andalou. Writing about the film Dali said: "It is not by accident that I have taken some simple examples
from natural history, for, as Max Ernst has said, the history of dreams, miracles, surrealist history, is above all and in every sense a natural history."[47] The surrealists strove to replace literature, and culture as a whole, with nature as the intertextual source for their metaphoric eccentricities. Hence the importance, in surrealism, of animal imagery. The surrealists singled out the simplest forms of animal life, species that had no symbolic value for human society, such as insects and marine life. The connection between the sea (and water in general) and the theme of metamorphosis is extraordinarily persistent in surrealist writing. Moreover, all marine animals are essentially interchangeable and enjoy the same (essentially erotic) symbolic value.[48] François de la Breteque, a critic who has studied the surrealist bestiary, notes: "Here, then, is a highly marked mythology of woman: she is a crustacean, a mollusk, an echinoderm; a primitive, opaque, animal living out a visceral existence, yet also connected to the loveliest alchemical transformations of nature: the pearl, the mother-ofpearl, or the gleam of a star." [49] The pearl, singled out for its spherical form, was one of the primary symbols of the surrealist universe. Other motifs included the snail and the shell, with their obvious sexual symbolism. In Péret we even find a description of a film theater that gets inundated by the audience's tears, causing the sudden appearance of snails.[50] Sea imagery is also evident in Artaud's screenplay La Coquille et le Clergyman, George Hugnet's La Perle, Desnos and Man Ray's L'Etoile de mer, and Prévert's Baladart.
In Un Chien andalou, a wide range of fauna is involved in the theme of metamorphosis. Primarily it is the "death's-head" or atropos moth. Moths and butterflies (French doesn't make a distinction between them, using papillon in both cases) in general are an ancient symbol of transformation. They appear most often in Breton's works, where they are identified with the changeable nature of women. The butterfly transports pollen, thus prolonging life and serving as a medium of communication. The butterfly embodies death and rebirth. The atropos appears in Breton's Au lavoir noir (1936), as an image of a lady of the night who flies in from some hellish space speaking the language of death. Breton's Arcane 17 (1944), centered on alchemical transmutations, also features butterfly imagery. Here the butterfly emerges as an esoteric sign (or letter) taken from an alchemical code that guarantees "exchanges" and "dark metamorphoses."[51] The atropos moth also figures in the catalog that appears in the "eleventh spot" of Buñuel's Une girafe: "In place of the spot, one finds a large, dark night moth with a death's head between its wings."[52] Clearly, the atropos moth in Un Chien andalou has a vast surrealist intertext, one that connects it unambiguously to the theme of metamorphosis.
Other animals to figure in these cinematic metamorphoses are the ant and the sea urchin. In a celebrated passage, the use of dissolves creates a
series of linked images: we see ants crawl out of a hole in a human palm, hair in the armpits of a man lying on the beach, a sea urchin on the sand, and a severed hand being played with by an androgyne. Ants and hair play an important role in the film's metamorphoses. Elsewhere hair from the armpits of the heroine appear where the mouth of the hero had been before being erased.
The ant-hair correlation is parodically affirmed in Buñuel's essay "Variations sur le thème des moustaches de Menjou." Here Buñuel derides the Don Juanesque trappings of the actor Adolphe Menjou's mask:
His immense Menjouesque force irradiates from his moustache. . . . It is usual to assert that the eyes are the best way to arrive at the depths of a personality. . . . Under the dark magic of the moustache, the trivial gesture or the ghost of a smile acquires an extraordinary expressiveness; a page of Proust realized on the upper lip;. . . Menjou's moustaches, which so much incarnate the cinema and his era, will replace in the showcases of the future that horrible and inexpressive hat of Napoleon's. We have seen them, in a close-up of a kiss, alight like some rare summer insect on lips sensitive as mimosa, and devour them complete, coleopterus of love. We have seen his smile, ambushed in his moustache.[53]
The hair-insects on the face of Pierre Batcheff in Un Chien andalou introduce the Don Juan theme in a parodic vein; they are also linked to the presence of Proust, which is notable in this film. We know that it was Salvador Dali who suggested the ants to Buñuel.[54] Dali created an entire mythology around ants, which figure prominently in his painting. They appeared for the first time in Le Grand fourmilier, then in Le Grand masturbateur, where they replaced the missing mouth. Dali's ant mythology quickly became a prominent feature of his painting. They seem on the one hand to symbolize putrefaction. In Le Grand masturbateur, Dali replaced the mouth with a cricket whose rotting stomach is seething with ants. Ants also mark the putrefying body of a donkey in Guillaume Tell (1930). On the other hand, ants also function erotically, being associated persistently with pubic hair, as in Le Jeu lugubre (1929), in the watercolor study for Le Grand masturbateur (1929), and in Combinaisons (1931), where ants in the pubic region are linked to an obvious Freudian symbol such as the key. In Le Rêve (1931), ants once more occupy the place of the mouth and metaphorically signify erode fantasies. Their ambivalent status allows them to unify the themes of death and eros, a gesture important for Dali.
The connectedness of eros and death is also confirmed by the intertext of surrealist literary production. Many writers associated ants with blood. Breton writes: "This explorer in a struggle with the red ants of his own blood."[55] In Péret we find: "There are two ways to shorten the nose. The simplest method consists in grating it with a cheese grater, until several
dozen ants come out of it."[56] (The latter image has clearly erotic connotations.) The associations of ants with wounds and blood can often involve unexpected twists, as in Breton's "Poisson soluble" (1924): "In the shop window the hull of a superb white steamship, whose stem, gravely damaged, is being attacked by some unknown species of ants."[57] Not long before the making of Un Chien andalou, Artaud also made the association between ants and death: "A kind of night fills her teeth. Penetrates the caves of her skull with a roar. She lifts the cover of her grave with a hand whose knuckle-bones seem like ants."[58] The chain skull/death/ants is also found in a truncated form in Breton and Soupault's "Les Modes perpétuelles": "On découvre un cerveau il y a des fourmis rouges" (You discover a brain, there are red ants there),[59]
The external similarity that red ants bear to blood, and black ants to wavy hair, and the fact that ants eat carrion make them reversible signifiers, capable of referring to different signifieds and by that very fact connecting quite heterogeneous points of reference. In Buñuel, as in Breton and Soupault, the ant loses its traditional semantic baggage, becoming an empty signifier, open to different metaphoric meanings and substitutive relationships. We are dealing with a trope in the process of formation rather than in its crystallized and established form.
Throughout Un Chien andalou, Buñuel and Dali replace fixed meaning with chance meanings. This is most obvious when they are dealing with objects that have an evolved cultural symbolism, such as Vermeer's painting The Lacemaker or the pianos in the film on which dead donkeys are brought into a room. Both the painting and the piano are attributes of European high culture, and the viewer is inclined to view them in this light. In reality, the more obvious the cultural symbolism of an object, the more likely it is to be treated in a manner entirely divorced from the intertext into which it is normally inscribed.
The context of The Lacemaker' s appearance in the film is as follows. A cross-dressed cyclist is riding down the street. Then we see a girl who (I quote from the script) "is reading a book attentively. Suddenly she shudders, listens curiously, and throws her book on a nearby sofa. The book stays open. On one of the pages is seen a reproduction of Vermeer's Lacemaker. The young girl is convinced that something is going on: she gets up, turns halfway from the camera, and walks rapidly to the window."[60] Later on we see the cyclist crash alongside her house, dying in the collision.
In this scene—a typical case of an anomaly produced by montage—the relations of cause and effect seem to be inverted: the girl is startled and runs to the window; only then does the cyclist ride toward her house and fall, breaking his head against the edge of the pavement. Such a violation of causal relations is in fact not typical for Buñuel. What, then, might be
the significance of Vermeer's Lacemaker, whose presence was already foreseen in the script?
Contemporary French interest in Vermeer was aroused by an exhibition of Dutch art at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in May 1921. The exhibition created a huge sensation. Pierre Descargues speaks of "magazines . . . filled with articles on Vermeer. Schematic transfers from his works are being published, and the dazzling tile work of Dutch interiors is being compared to the Mondrians of the day."[61] The impact of Vermeer was vast and at times unexpected. It caused Léger to include everyday themes in his work. Vermeer's painting quickly became a myth, gaining a symbolic significance for Proust, who devoted quite a few pages to the Dutch painter in his Recherche. Proust went to the Vermeer show but on the way felt himself suddenly weaken, a fact he interpreted as a sign of his impending death: "On the staircase he [Proust] felt a terrible dizziness, he staggered and came to a halt, but was then able to continue walking. In the exhibition hall of the Jeu de Paume, Vaudoyer had to take him by the arm and lead him panting to the View of Delft."[62] On returning home, Proust worked his prophetic encounter with Vermeer into an episode of his book dealing with the death of Bergotte. Just before dying, Bergotte contemplates the View of Delft, concentrating on a yellow piece of the wall lit by the sun: "He fixed his gaze, like a child intent on a yellow butterfly he wishes to capture, on the precious piece of wall." This turns out to be Bergotte's last vision: "Then he fell onto a round sofa. . . . Another stroke seized him, he rolled off the sofa onto the floor, at which point all the visitors and attendants came running. He was dead."[63]
The Proustian intertext is in fact even richer, and more capricious. It contains in turn another writer, now mostly forgotten, Robert de Montesquiou, a celebrated Parisian dandy whom Proust admired and even imitated, and whom he depicted in his own cycle of novels under the name Charlus. In his Diptique de Flandre, Montesquiou also mentions the View of Delft, particularly noting its "yellowish pink color,"[64] to launch then into a sudden digression on Vermeer as the painter of death and pearls. "Waters that roll pearls, always. Only four of them become iridescent in the Vermeer of the Rijksmuseum; they weep longer on the necks of the heroines of the living Vermeer, they weep along with these young women, for they are sad, these Ophelias. . . . Yes, Ophelias who have known and tasted love, but who bathe it in their tears and their pearls."[65] It was this motif, as we shall shortly see, that was taken up and elaborated by the surrealists, and Dali in particular.
As Proust's parodic double, almost surrealist in spirit, Montesquiou might well have served as a subtext for Un Chien andalou, providing a grotesque prototype for the role played by Pierre Batcheff. The behavior
of this decadent fin de siècle eccentric anticipated much of what was to become the surrealist ethic. For example, he took great pride in his cruelty, as can be seen from the following aphorism: "The greatest and gravest of crimes is to cause only minor pain to those who love you."[66] Montesquiou gained some notoriety for having beaten a woman with a cane during a famous fire at Paris Fancy Fair in 1897 that he was trying to flee. Very much like the surrealists, he collected strange artwork, such as paintings representing body parts. He owned a drawing of the chin of Countess Greffulhe, another of the legs of his secretary Ituri by Boldini, and a plaster cast of the knee of the Countess de Castiglione.[67] The latter became the object of a veritable cult of Montesquiou's own making: both shared a peculiar passion for photography, the countess being particularly partial to having her legs photographed.[68] Their mutual passion for body parts represented out of any natural "context" clearly anticipated surrealist poetics. Moreover, Montesquiou was also known for his improbable mustache and a set of rotten black teeth that he constantly tried to conceal with his hand. Proust was to adopt the latter gesture, without having any reason to do so.[69] The eroticized cruelty of the hero played by Batcheff, as well as his odd gesture of "erasing" his mouth, could thus easily be a reference to Proust himself—a somewhat unexpected presence in the surrealist context, although mediated by his grotesquely parodic caricature Montesquiou.
Montesquiou's example incited the surrealists to a wholesale parody of the Proustian myth. Buñuel and Dali were equally involved in this game. It seems probable that the virulence of the surrealists' polemical rejection of Proust had something to do with their attitude to memory. The cultural symbolism they aimed to destroy had become lodged in cultural memory, which in turn became the logical object of their aesthetic violence. As Soupault proclaimed: "Memory [la mémoire ] should be replaced by recollections [des souvenirs ] of the present." Desnos even advocated the destruction of memory.[70] Éluard appealed for a boycott of reading and writing, since writing embodied the mechanism of memory: "Let us stop before we form letters. As far as possible, let us forget reading, writing, orthography."[71] In having equated memory with the universe, Proust became the logical target of the surrealist derision (hence the Menjou-Proust mustache), just as the skull, a mnemonic symbol embodying the maxim of memento mori, was constantly placed in a sacrilegious context.
The painter Vermeer was also interpreted by the surrealists, particularly Dali, as a Proustian symbol of death. Vermeer haunts a series of Dali's works of the early thirties like a phantom (such as Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape [1934], The Phantom of Vermeer of Delft [1934], and The Phantom of Vermeer of Delft That Can Be Used as a Table [1934]). But the clearest example of the Vermeer myth in Dali's work can be found in one of his man-
ifestos of "paranoia-critique," "Light-Ideas." Dali here elaborates a symbolism of the pearl that is in nearly complete unison with Montesquiou's fantasies: "For the pearl," writes Dali, "is none other than the very ghost of the skull, a skull which, at the end of its seething, aphrodisiacal decay, becomes round, clean and hairless, like the crystallized residue of this entire swampy, nourishing, magnificent, glutinous, obscure and greenish OYSTER OF DEATH." The oyster is then identified with the grave: "The pearl is elevated to the highest position in the loftiest hierarchy of objective myth by Vermeer of Delft. It is an obsessive motif in the indefatigably complex, highly lucid and immemorial thinking of this painter who possessed 'the luminous sense of death.'. . . Vermeer is the authentic painter of ghosts. The woman trying on her pearl necklace before the mirror is the most authentically ghostly canvas to have ever been painted."[72]
This "new myth" of Vermeer was destined to circulate in Dali's work for many years. In his reworking of Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter called The Image Disappears (1938), Dali depicted a woman's head that is at the same time the pupil of a man's eye and an oyster shell. Dali also called Vermeer a "weigher of pearls" (hinting at Vermeer's painting Woman Weighing Pearl). Later, Dali would return to the theme of the lacemaker. In 1954, he began working on a film in collaboration with Robert Descharnes entitled The Marvellous Adventures of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, which contains a scene of Dali himself at the Louvre copying Vermeer's Lacemaker. The film's primary theme is metamorphosis. Never shown in public and possibly never completed, the film is described by James Bigwood as being based on "Dali's theory of the spiraling and logarhythmic relation that exists between objects. . . illustrated by the scopic metamorphosis of a rhinoceros horn into Vermeer's Lacemaker, then into a sunflower, a cauliflower, a sea urchin, a drop of water, and the skin of a chicken. Two seeds on an ear of barley turn into buttocks, and a pastoral scene becomes the face of Hitler."[73]
The Lacemaker became the means to smuggle in the relatively obscure theme of the pearl and the connected theme of metamorphosis into Un Chien andalou. We are now in a better position to understand the logic behind the development of the beginning of the film's main section. The Vermeer painting figures here as a prophecy of death, which is immediately fulfilled by the cyclist's accident. The latter, in turn, parodies Proust's account of the death of Bergotte, who also falls dead immediately after seeing the Vermeer painting. This initial scene is related to an episode at the end to which it symmetrically corresponds. The film's hero dies twice, first by falling off his bicycle, then when he is shot by his double. The second time, he falls dead while gripping the body of a naked woman seated in the forest like a tableau vivant. This woman, we should note, is wearing a pearl necklace around her neck (the only overt reference to pearls in the film).
Immediately after the hero's death, the atropos moth appears on a wall (we remember the butterfly motif in Proust's account of Bergotte's death). It is also worth noting the connection, well established in surrealist poetry, between the pearl and the skull. One of the "phrases" (Number 7) of Rrose Sélavy (Robert Desnos, perceived as an oracle by many surrealists), reads: "Oh my skull fading star of pearl." Rosa Buchole has shown that this phrase is constructed as an anagrammatical and pseudomathematical equation, where the word skull (crâne ) is equated with mother-of-pearl (nacre).[74] Also typical is the motif of the star, one of the many persistent and ambivalent images the surrealists used to link heterogeneous phenomena.
The pearl motif also acts as a link between Vermeer's Lacemaker and the figure of the moon that appears in the film's prologue. As Mircea Eliade has shown, the link between the pearl, the moon, death, and eros is one of the constant themes of world mythology.[75]
A wider intertext equates the pearl with the eyes of a drowned man. T. S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922) frequently quotes from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest, "Those are Pearls that were his eyes."[76] Both in Eliot and in Shakespeare, this phrase refers to the transformation of a drowned man. A long and highly subtle chain of associations emerges here, much of which can be found in a condensed form in Robert Desnos's poem "A present," whose very title stands in a polemical relation to memory: "Each lamp I transfigured into a gouged-out eye, from which I poured wines more precious than mother-of-pearl and the sighs of murdered women."[77] Here the chain of metamorphoses is signaled by the verb "transfigure," repeating the motifs of Un Chien andalou almost to the letter: luminous object (lamp, moon) /slit eye/liquid/mother-of-pearl/death (murdered women). As is evident from this example, Buñuel and Dali often used semantic links that were already well established in poetry.
These chains, which become part of the general process of metaphoric transformation, nonetheless do not prevent the objects they include from acquiring a narrow occasional meaning, one that becomes evident only in appearing more than once within a specific body of work. Even here, the stability of cultural significance attaching to these objects (e.g., works of art) often prevents us as viewers from understanding their place in the text. Buñuel and Dali act as if this cultural significance were absent, allowing the Vermeer painting or the atropos butterfly to function as if they belonged to one and the same semantic field. The "normal" field of intertextuality, which contains objects with a heightened cultural symbolism, is here overcome by force. Yet the latter is found to be possible only at the price of actively cultivating a new intertext, which serves to counteract the normative intertext of traditional culture. The destruction of classical cultural associations is in the final analysis found to be the result of the rapid
and intense growth of a new intertext. A new culture emerges from the struggle against the old, parading as an anticulture, hiding behind the play of external forms. This struggle between two intertexts is not just a conscious strategy: it is in fact utilized to create a new type of text, a textual puzzle, which respects the laws of semantics even while appearing to dismiss them.
There are three references to classical painting in Un Chien andalou, and in each case the cultural symbolism of the work of art is viewed negatively. First there is The Lacemaker, then the nude with the pearl, and then the prologue, where the reference remains obscure. Here we see a cloud that intersects the disk of the moon. Buñuel, we know, was particularly fond of the narrow, dense, almost tangibly concrete clouds he had found in the works of Mantegna. In 1924, Buñuel specifically asked Dali to draw similar clouds in his portrait of him.[78] The materiality of Mantegna's clouds may well have given Buñuel the idea of transforming his own cloud into a razor. More important, it is in Mantegna's works that we find clouds that conceal hidden figures. His St. Sebastian has a rider on horseback concealed in the clouds; and an enormous face can be discerned in the clouds represented in The Triumph of Virtue. Mantegna's clouds, then, serve as the raw material for effecting visual metamorphoses.[79] As an intertext for Un Chien andalou, Mantegna makes no claim to a culturally symbolic space: he appeals, rather, to a private, subjective, and occasional meaning, the symbolism of metamorphosis.
The insistence with which Buñuel and Dali introduce cultural associations as a subtext suggests the tremendous importance the classical intertext held for them, an importance eloquently illustrated by the urgency of creating an alternative intertext to oppose it. A negative "hyperacculturation" of the text is typical of the film, as it is of the avant-garde as a whole. It is this that finally allowed the avant-garde to be readily absorbed by European culture as a system.
This ambivalent relation to cultural tradition is further illustrated by one of the film's most enigmatic episodes, involving the rotting corpses of donkeys lying on pianos. Most of the existing scholarly literature seeks to throw light on this episode by invoking all the possible nuances of cultural symbolism attached to donkeys and pianos.[80] Such an approach, however, has not really produced satisfactory results.
This scene, in which Pierre Batcheff, close to exhaustion, is seen dragging the two pianos with donkeys on them into the room, does acquire a marginally normative status thanks to a film intertext, specifically connected to Batcheff's mask. The critic Drummond has shown that this mask is connected both to French melodrama and to the figure of Buster Keaton, one of Buñuel's favorite actors: the Keaton film One Week (1920) contains a scene in which the hero tries to drag a piano into his house.[81]
Echoes of Charlie Chaplin are also possible here. This is how Louis Delluc describes Chaplin's 1915 film Work: "Is this really a film? No, it's a piano. Of course, it is pleasant to look at Charlie, fragile as a weak little donkey, dragging a cart up the slope of a hill." Delluc goes on to describe the "vertiginous episode" in which Chaplin "transports the piano and where the piano coolly transports Charlie."[82] None of these interpretations, however, provide us with a complete set of keys to this episode, with its complex agglomeration of motifs.
Buñuel and Dali themselves sought to mystify the origins of the motif of the putrefying donkey. In this case a mystical coincidence rather than a dream was said to be involved, as Dali noted in 1929:
In 1927, without there being any contact between them, three men at some distance from each other imagined a donkey putrefying: at Cadaquès, I was doing a series of paintings in which a kind of donkey, rotting and covered with flies, made an appearance. . . . Almost at the same time, I received two letters: one from Madrid, from Penin Bello, who spoke of a donkey in the process of decaying. . . . Several days later, Luis Buñuel wrote to me about a putrefying donkey in a letter from Paris.[83]
This version is confirmed, although in a slightly different redaction, by Georges Bataille: "The rotting corpses of the donkeys in Un chien andalou reproduce a hallucination that both Dali and Buñuel had during their childhood, when both of them, while in the countryside, saw the corpse of a donkey decomposing."[84] Bataille's version, with its insistence on two authors, might well explain the fact that the film involves two donkeys.
After 1927 the motif of the putrefying donkey becomes a constant feature of Dali's painting and written work. It appears in the 1927 text Mon ami et la plage;[ 85] it is depicted twice in the 1927 painting Le Miel est plus doux que le sang, and twice again in Senicitas (1927). In 1928, Dali paints Ane en putrefaction; more rotting donkeys appear in Vache spectrale (1928) and in Guillaume Tell (1930).
The motif of the rotting donkey in fact has a fairly wide intertext, as Buñuel and Dali themselves imply. In his memoirs of 1982, Mon dernier soupir, Buñuel recounts his student years in Madrid. His account is abruptly interrupted by a sentence that appears somewhat divorced from the narrative context: 'This was the time in which, thanks to L'Enchanteur pourrissant [The decaying magician], I discovered Apollinaire."[86] The discovery of Apollinaire appears to have been of fundamental importance to the director, since he mentions it more than sixty years after the fact.
L'Enchanteur pourrissant, a work of Apollinaire's youth, was written between 1898 and 1904 and definitively completed in 1909, when it was published in an edition of one hundred copies with prints by André Derain.
Republished but once in 1921, the book remained out of print until 1965. A text hailed by Breton as one of Apollinaire's most significant works, L'Enchanteur pourrissant remained unknown to the general public, even as it became an essential point of reference for Un Chien andalou, and for surrealism as a whole.
Formally speaking, L'Enchanteur pourrissant recalls the Walpurgisnacht episode from Goethe's Faust, as well as Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine . Thematically, it is a parodic interpretation of the medieval legend involving the magician Merlin, who falls victim to the perfidy of the Lady of the Lake and is buried alive in the forest. Apollinaire's short book in effect recounts the procession of a series of strange mythological beings over the grave of the deceased yet still living magician. The book's main themes are love and death. The plot itself centers on Merlin, doomed to immortality yet slowly decomposing in his grave, around whom various creatures gather and dedicate themselves to love. Among them we find hermaphrodites (an androgyne is also the hero of Un Chien andalou). The animals who dedicate themselves to love wait in vain to be transformed, an experience known only to Merlin, whose physical decay is discovered to be linked to an unexpected surge of life: "The magician understood that some enormous work was being accomplished in his corpse. All the latent parasitic beings, which languish in boredom during human life, now quickened, meeting and fecundating one another, for this was the moment of putrefaction. . . . He was even glad, thinking that his corpse would be full of life for a while longer."[87]
Putrefaction becomes, for Apollinaire, the central moment of animal eroticism. Flies and dragonflies perform voluptuous dances and then depart for a feast of decay. At the end of L'Enchanteur pourrissant, in a chapter called "Onirocritique" (cf. Dali's idea of "paranoia-critique"), masses of people fall into a kind of wine press where they are liquefied (the final stage of decomposition): "A whole mass of people, squeezed into a press, was singing as it bled. Human beings were born out of the liqueur which poured out of the press."[88] In being connected to eros, decay itself becomes the source of new forms of life.
L'Enchanteur pourrissant contains a number of typically surrealist motifs: a "weeping head made of a single pearl," a magician who dives for pearls, a dance of hands and leaves (a typically surrealist correlation based on shape), a "mollified animal," and so forth. In fact, these motifs are older than Apollinaire, who merely elaborated them further. In some of Victor Hugo's most apocalyptic verse we already find the theme of metamorphosis in decay. In the chapter "Montfaucon" from La Légende des siècles, Hugo writes "From cadaver to skeleton one can study / The progress which the dead make in rotting."[89] And in Les Chátiments we find a poem describing the slow disappearance of bodily shape in the process of decay, to the
point where it is no longer possible to establish whether we are seeing "dead dogs or rotten Caesars."[90]
But perhaps the most eloquent account of formal decomposition culminating in a metaphoric transformation is Charles Baudelaire's "Une Charogne:"
Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux.
Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
Comme afin de la cuire à point,
Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
Tout ce qu'ensemble elle avait joint;
Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
Comme une fleur s'épanouir.
La puanteur était si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crûtes vous évanouir.
. . .
Les formes s'effacaient et n'étaient plus qu'un rêve,
Une ébauche lente à venir,
Sur la toile oubliée, et que l'artiste achève
Seulement par le souvenir.
(Do you recall the object that we saw, my soul,
This so gentle summer morning:
At the detour of a path a vile piece of carrion
On a bed of scattered pebbles.
The sunshine poured over this corruption,
As if to cook it medium rare,
And to render back to Nature hundredfold
Everything that she had joined together;
And the sky saw the superb carcass
Bloom like a flower.
The stench was so strong, that you thought
You would faint on the grass.
. . .
The forms became effaced and were no more than a dream,
A sketch slow in coming,
Forgotten on the canvas, and which the artist completes
By memory alone.)[91]
The decomposition of a corpse here creates a formless chaos in which everything can be discerned—right up to a vision of divine beauty. Hugo's "rotten Caesars" and Baudelaire's "pieces of skeleton like large flowers" seem oddly to prefigure surrealist verse, above all the poetry of Benjamin Péret, who was particularly fond of the motif of decay.[92]
Péet's related poems were probably known to Buñuel and Dali even before they began work on Un Chien andalou. Buñuel recalls: "I started reading them [the surrealists], above all Benjamin Péret, whose poetic sense of humor excited me. Dali and I read him and cracked up laughing. There was something about him, a strange, perverse movement, a delicious sense of humor, of a corrosive kind."[93] Péret consistently connected decay to the figures of God, Christ, and various priests, something that appealed to the anticlerical sentiments of Buñuel and Dali. Péret shared their antipathy to the church. Soupault recalls: "He would get angry (to put it mildly) whenever he saw or met a priest. He became furious and would insult what he would call the 'ecclesiastics.'"[94] It is hardly a surprise to read the pope described by Péret as "a crab-louse among rotting Christs."[95] Joan of Arc, appearing before a "pile of cow dung crowned with flies near an old piece of rotten wood," realizes that she is standing "before the face of God."[96] Jesuits are said to fill their cups with "eucharistic rot."[97] Alongside Joan of Arc stand forty archbishops with "rotting glances"; another poem, "6 février," describes the "rotten yellow-green curates."[98] Péret composes a "prayer" on the death of Briand, where he writes, "Lord, bless us with a toilet brush / just as we have blessed with a rotten fish."[99] At times the motif of putrefaction is inserted into a lengthy series of metaphors. Hence in the poem "Louis XVI s'en va à la guillotine" we read:
II pleut du sang de la neige
et toutes sortes de saletés
qui jaillissent de sa vieille carcasse
de chien crevé au fond d'une lessiveuse
au milieu du linge sale
qui a eu le temps de pourrir
comme la fleur de lis des poubelles
que les vaches refusent de brouter
parce qu'elle répand une odeur de dieu
dieu le père des boues
(It rains a rain of bloody snow
and of all kinds of filth
which spring forth from his old carcass
a dead dog at the bottom of a washing trough
among some dirty linen
that has had time to rot
like the fleur-de-lis of the rubbish-bins
which the cows refuse to nibble a
since it exudes a smell of god
god the father of slime)[100]
There can be no doubt that the makers of Un Chien andalou made good use of these motifs of Péret. (The precedent of Péret may well explain the
inclusion of priests in the donkey episode, as well as the rotting bishops who appear in L'Age d'or. Let us also not forget the traditional link between the donkey and God in European culture.)[101] The presence of the Péret intertext is confirmed by one of Buñuel's own texts, in which we find motifs that are elaborated later in Un Chien andalou. In a fragment called "Le mot de passe commode de Saint Huesca," two curates decide to gamble their lives and crawl into a streetcar filled with beehives: "The bees made a fine racket and the Marists lay down in their coffins, ready to stake everything. One of them said in a low voice: 'Are you sure that the Bologna sausage is made for the blind men as Péret said?' The other replied: 'We are already at the bridge.' Below the bridge, in the middle of the water, half green, half putrid, they could see a tombstone."[102]
In Un Chien andalou the priests are kept but are displaced in their graves (the pianos) by donkeys. The donkeys assume the attributes of blindness and putrefaction. During the filming, Dali took care to have their eyes gouged out. Interestingly, the film's epilogue also contains a blind man and woman at a beach, buried in sand up to their chests. And Dali's text Mon amie et la plage also places the putrefied body of a donkey on a beach. At stake, then, is a complex contamination and echoing of motifs, with the poetry of Benjamin Péret at its center.
These motifs are brought together by yet another intertext, Georges Bataille's book L'Expérience intérieure, which was written after Un Chien andalou. In what appears to be a reference to the film's ending, Bataille metaphorically substitutes blind men for the donkeys. In Dali's "Mon amie et la plage" we read: "At that very moment, the printed letters of a newspaper devour a bloated and rotting donkey, clear as mica."[103] The letters here are insects, most likely ants. Bataille elaborates this motif and transforms it in the process: "This sand into which we sink in order not to see is composed of words, and the revolt implied in using them forces us to remember—if I can move from one image to another—the man caught in the sand who struggles but as a result only gets even more stuck." Bataille says later that words have "something of shifting sand" about them; the grains of words are then gathered together by ants.[104]
The donkey scene from Un Chien andalou interests us for yet another reason: the absolute lack of any motivation that might justify the linkage of the donkeys with a piano. Péret, in the passage quoted earlier, compares a dead dog to a fleur-de-lis. The simile, however extravagant, is still motivated (linen is white, the lily is a water-plant, and there is an analogy between linen and flower petals, and between the dog's body and a flower's pith), all the more so since the fleur-de-lis is the symbol of the French monarchy, whose importance is readily understood in a poem about the beheading of Louis XVI. In an article by Dali entitled "Les Nouvelles Fron-
tières de la peinture," we find a startlingly similar image, although this time entirely unmotivated: "Flowers are highly poetic, precisely because they resemble rotting donkeys."[105] If a decomposed dog can be compared to God, then the gamut of analogies becomes extremely wide, far beyond the limits set by established similes.
This widening of the range of possible comparisons is also realized through the destruction of cultural symbolism. The flower and the donkey emerge as purely formal analogies. For Buñuel, cinema was a splendid tool for ridding the world of the burden of older meanings:
The film, in the last analysis, is composed of segments, fragments, attitudes, which, taken thus, separate and arbitrarily, are archi-trivial, deprived of local meaning, of psychology, of literary transcendence. In literature, a lion or an eagle can represent many things, but on the screen they will be only two beasts, and that is all and no more, even though for Abel Gance, they can represent ferocity, valor, and imperialism.[106]
It is no coincidence that Buñuel chooses to instantiate his point with an image taken from the bestiary, one of the most symbolically charged codes. Yet the donkey, being both a "lowly" emblem and an embodiment of God, is even more significant here. The image of the donkey was advanced by Dali at a time when he was beginning to develop his theory of "paranoiacritique," according to which one and the same form could be "read" to be entirely different things, depending on the way it was viewed. Dali proposed the notion of "multiple representation," in which the image of the rotting donkey was to occupy a central place.
One of Dali's manifestos of paranoia-criticism, in fact entitled "L'Âne pourri" (The rotten donkey), declares:
No one can stop me from recognizing the multiple presence of simulacra in an image with multiple representations, even if one of its states took on the appearance of a rotten donkey, and even if that donkey were really in a state of horrible decomposition, covered with thousands of flies and ants. Yet insofar as it is impossible to presuppose the individual significance of different states of representation outside the notion of time, nothing can convince me that the donkey's furious putrefaction is something other than the hard and dazzling gleam of new precious stones.[107]
Dali here also speaks of three great simulacra—"shit, blood, and putrefaction." These great simulacra can assume any guise insofar as they are without fixed form. As metaphors they can be compared to any phenomenon or object. Rotting leads to the dilution of form; it is said to take us back to the "necrophilic source" that is the common denominator of all dissolving form. This "source" was to resurface in Dali's painting also: in Naissance de désirs liquides (1932), where water is seen flowing from a cypress tree (sym-
bol of death, the black candle), or in Source nécrophilique surgissant d'un piano à queue (1933), in which a stream is pouring out of a piano that has been pierced by the same cypress tree. So the piano (grave) as a symbol of death becomes the source of all forms and, effectively, the source of all texts in which these forms are embodied.
In a sense, Dali's transformation of death into a principle of textual generation is merely a simplified version of the literary mythology that Artaud had created before him. Artaud had described the sensation of his body liquefying and passing into nothingness and had then elevated this sensation into a kind of "artistic gnoseology." According to Artaud, there is an eternal and infinite reality, which gives itself to us as real. The real, being "one of the most transient and least discernible aspects of infinite reality," is "equal to matter and decays with it."[108] All perception that strays from structure and clarity is, for Artaud, linked to death. Hence the idea that any sign which violates the organized structure of a text is a sign of death. (The very production of a text is also, at its limit, equated with death.) Artaud introduced death into the sphere of textual production as a formal structuring principle. His collection L'Art et la mort contains the text "Héloïse et Abélard" (1925), which begins by saying of Abélard that "entire regions of his brain were rotting," after which Abélard's text, the outcome of this mortal decay, follows. The text ends with Abélard feeling "his life become liquid."[109]
Dali follows in Artaud's wake. His dead donkey, generator of metaphoric analogy, in part reworks Artaud's "necrophilic" generative principle. In Dali, however, the production of text from a putrefying source is far more mechanical, allowing him to continue elaborating a paradigm that in turn keeps escalating. Through metaphor the text strives to become a universe. So in the text "Le Grand masturbateur" (1930), which refers to a painting with the same title, Dali writes: "The short / alley with springs / recalled / the clear / decomposition / of rotting donkeys / rotting horses / rotting cats / rotting mouths / rotting chickens / horrible rotting roosters / rotting grasshoppers / rotting birds / rotting corpses of women / oppressively rotting grasshoppers / rotting horses / rotting donkeys / rotting sea urchins / rotting hermit crabs."[110]
The rotting donkey thus becomes a kind of "hypersign," a symbol of hyperconvertibility. Picasso once noted Dali's fondness for having one animal represent another: "These young artists are astonishing. They know everything. They even know that a horse should be represented through a fishbone."[111] In 1928, Éluard, who may have even influenced the formation of the "donkey myth," had written about the wandering skeletons of donkeys that can insinuate themselves into any form of knowledge: "The skeletons of knowledge the skeletons of donkeys, / Eternally wandering around the brains and the flesh."[112]
The unexpected juxtaposition of donkey and piano, then, was intended to reveal their "paranoia-critical" analogy. The episode was largely shot by Dali, who describes his work on the scene as follows:
The shooting of the scene of the rotten donkeys and the pianos was a rather fine sight . . . I furiously cut their mouths open to make the white rows of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth so that it would appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were still vomiting up a little more of their own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos. The whole effect was as lugubrious as fifty coffins piled into a single room.[113]
Let us note how Dali here equates the bared jaws of the donkey with the piano keys. Later on, he would often compare a piano to a skull, on the basis of their remotely similar shape, and of the analogy between bared teeth and a piano keyboard. One example is the painting Cráne atmosphérique sodomisant un piano à queue (1934). Dali's "skull-harp"—a skull used as a musical instrument—belongs to the same kind of comparative play, as in the gravure Crânes mous et harpe crânienne (1935), the gouache Jeune fille au crâne (1934), and the painting Bureaucrate atmosphérocéphale moyen en train de traire une harpe cránienne( 1933). This motif, moreover, was also anticipated by Apollinaire, whose L 'Enchanteur pourrissant describes sounds emerging from teeth as from a piano keyboard.[114] But the analogy between the piano and the donkey does not end here.
The piano is also seen as the donkey's coffin—hence its black color and its shape, which is hardly typical for a coffin. This motif is also not original. In a more muted way it is present in a screenplay, never produced, by Gómez de la Sern called Stradivarius's Burial, in which a violin is buried in its case: "The funeral director, with a mask of pain on his face, encloses the broken violin in its case which is then carried away."[115] Here, as always with Gómez de la Serna, the eccentric quality of the image is internally motivated.
In the preceding case we are dealing with a fairly traditional metaphoric scheme. If it is harder to successfully read the same metaphor in Un Chien andalou, this is so for several reasons. First, both elements of the metaphor are presented to the viewer as a physical conglomerate, almost too shockingly visible to be abstracted into metaphor. It is also extraordinarily difficult to see the piano as a coffin or a skull because of the irreducible cultural symbolism it carries, and without which it cannot enter the text. No viewer could normally "read" a piano as a purely external form, devoid of any previously given semantics. This is why the scene acquires such an enigmatic feel. The enigma is solved when we bracket the piano's traditional symbolism and accentuate its external nature, its structural role as an analogy or simulacrum. The problem of textual construction is here resolved by ignoring the object's traditional semantic weight, on the basis of
external formal traits. In order to read this scene, we have to forget our reading habits, renounce the experience of reading over many centuries, the entire intertext of culture. To learn to read, one has to lose the habit (or memory) of reading.
By privileging the category of the analogy or simulacrum, the surrealist text is confronted with the basic opposition of form and formlessness. We have already pointed to two models of juxtaposing objects based on external form in Un Chien andalou. On the one hand, we have the bringing together of realia that have a clear geometricized form (most often tending toward a circle). This formal clarity and precision are of fundamental importance from a geometric point of view. On the other, where objects are brought together that lack geometrically defined contours (such as the donkey), the possibility of formal destruction becomes vital, and a protean formlessness is emphasized. Metamorphosis is possible on the basis of both principles. While serving primarily as principles for constructing texts, both form and formlessness gain the status of a worldview in surrealist poetics (something quite typical for artistic systems that equate the text with the world). In December 1929, Georges Bataille published L'Informel, in which the formless is opposed to the artificial and rationalist givenness of form. Bataille's revolt against geometry was expressed in his declaration that the world as an embodiment of the formless is like "a spider or a spit."[116] A little later, in Rejet de la nature, he was to celebrate monsters that were "situated on a pole dialectically opposed to geometric regularity."[117]
Monsters, insects, and death: all these motifs function in Un Chien andalou as embodiments of the formless. The film's prologue, which still echoes the geometricism of Desnos's Minuit à quatorze heures, can in this sense also be read as an attempt to cross out the geometric principle in favor of analogies of formlessness.
The plot of Un Chien andalou in part reflects the evolution of surrealist metaphor from the pole of form to that of formlessness, an evolution that reflects characteristic changes in the outlook of the surrealists themselves. On the level of formal devices, this evolution can be described as the succession of several stages: an emphasis on spherical forms (the eye as a symbol of the interchangeability of round objects) and the dismemberment of the body as a means of eliminating a sense of the whole, with an emphasis on body parts and their autonomization. The dismemberment of the body leads, in turn, to the motif of death as a textual generative principle.
Taken in its widest sense, death also implies a rupture with the entire intertext of older culture. Death is a frontier: it marks the beginnings of a new poetics, with established tradition expelled beyond its confines. The death, disintegration, or decomposition of established forms is visible in the general convertibility of the world's elements, in the "necrophilic" dilution of forms, the metamorphic flow of one element into another. At
stake here is essentially a metaphoric destruction of established cultural paradigms, and their substitution with a syntagmatic form of thinking, in which the chain, the series of reciprocally replaceable parts, assumes the basic semantic function. This, then, is an attempt at radically renewing the language of film. This chain of semantic and formal shifts—the surrealist metaphor—is the real evolutionary path taken by the poetics and worldview of surrealism, a path presented for us in a condensed way in Un Chien andalou.
At the beginning of this chapter I raised the question of whether a syntagm, structure, a chain of elements, can "normalize" a text without recourse to the intertext of culture. My question can now be reformulated thus: Can a syntagm or chain of elements based on a purely external analogy replace, repress, or destroy the intertext of culture? The argument thus far has sought to prove the impossibility of this surrealist procedure: the very principle by which the syntagm is created, its mechanism of external analogy or simulacrum, can be assimilated by the reader only on the basis of an intertext. For the principle of the simulacrum to work, it has to be based on a wide range of texts, the linguistic norm provided by surrealist literature. The syntagmatic principle, I have shown, is established through both an alternative, "negative" intertextuality and an intensive but parodic absorption of the intertext of the very culture that is being destroyed (Vermeer, Proust, etc.). The classical intertext is destroyed through the feverish construction of a competing intertextuality.
This clash of intertexts—classical and "negative"—allows us to reexamine the principle of the "third text" or interpretant, which was discussed in chapter 1. In the case of Un Chien andalou, the interpretant (the surrealist negative intertext), while largely retaining its function, no longer serves to rectify a semantic error or to create a stereoscopy of meanings. Its function is more radical. It is like a machine for blocking meanings; it normalizes the text by impeding any release into the paradigm of culture, forcing the text to be read in its linear development, the syntagmatic chain of elements. Thus the very syntagmatization of reading, however paradoxical this may seem, is realized through complex intertextual procedures, operations that take place outside the field of the text.
It would appear that such a strategy would be called upon to destroy the film's symbolic dimension, reducing the task of reading to a decoding of external analogies. In fact, the situation is far more complex. Elements wrenched out of their cultural context are not so much subjected to a symbolic reduction as they are rendered obscure, becoming "hieroglyphs" that provoke an endless field of interpretations. They are subjected to a secondary symbolization, one that in a sense is even stronger than might have been possible through the intertext of traditional culture. An arm belonging to a living organism loses its separate meaning by being absorbed into
the human body as a meaningful whole. An arm that is cut off from its body (and metaphorically from the entire intertext of culture) becomes a hieroglyph, giving rise to endless interpretations. In fighting the accretions of symbolic meaning, a new cinematic language has to be sneaky. Buñuel's irony concerning the symbolic meaning of the lion and the eagle, which for Gance represented "ferocity, valor, and imperialism," is also the irony of a victor. At stake is the right to establish the extent of symbolic saturation to which an image can be subject. Clearly, the animals found in Buñuel's own films can be seen as symbols that are far more ambiguous and complex than Gance's, inserted in a text that has been constructed knowingly as an enigma.
When D. W. Griffith constructed his hieroglyphs, he remained content to isolate, say, a woman (e.g., Lillian Gish in Intolerance ) from the general movement of the body. Buñuel and Dali went much further, dismembering Griffith's hieroglyph into its constituent parts and then recomposing them into a chain of simulacra. Text and body are subject to dismemberment, and their autonomized parts become a cluster of hieroglyphic quotations. The fact that we are prevented from reading these quotes (the necessary intertext having been eliminated) in fact heightens their quotability. The search for an intertext is pursued with even greater intensity, as are all operations that generate meaning.
In the case of Un Chien andalou, the "negative" interpretant acquires an extraordinary valence: it allows the film as a whole to be read as a system of references to a general meaning. The viewer is offered a series of metaphors, built on external analogies, all of which address the same kernel of meaning. (These metaphors resemble enigmas: the viewer is continuously forced to intuit the physical similarity on which the metaphoric mutation is based.) We have seen that beyond the chain of analogies there emerges a selection of images, such as the pearl, the skull (linked to the pearl through the established metaphor of pearly teeth), ants, butterflies, and so forth—all of which refer to the general theme of death, eros, and the overarching motif of metamorphosis. In Breton and Soupault's Les Champs magnétiques, we find the image of a "butterfly from the sphinx species," which personifies the enigma of metamorphosis.[118] This butterfly can readily serve to signify the poetics of Un Chien andalou, since the film's meaning is finally found to reside not in a theme but in the enigma of metamorphosis itself, the enigma of the principle of language that lies at the basis of the text.