Given that Surrealism is commonly cited as one of many artistic influences on David Lynch, attempts to view his films within this framework are surprisingly infrequent. Popularising materials tend to limit themselves to casual references, while scholarship inclines more towards psychoanalytical or postmodernist perspectives. (1) Though there are Surrealist elements at work in all of his films, I suggest Lynch’s most recent two in particular – Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) – extend dream-like aesthetics sufficiently enough to move beyond normal parameters and bring the very fabric of their diegeses into question. As such, both films seem to embody the key qualities of a Surrealist aesthetic, and I wish here to use them as case studies in illustrating the extent to which Surrealist values can and do exist in a “post-Surrealist” cinema.
Following Franklin Rosemont’s assertion that the historical contradictions from which Surrealism initially emerged still hold sway, (2) it is doubly pertinent that explicit associations with a Surrealist tradition are few and far between on the part of artists, filmmakers and scholars today. In interrogating the extent to which films might nevertheless incorporate Surrealist values, I firstly consider some problems with regard to harmonious definitions. From such considerations, I secondly foreground some continuities that we can attribute to cinema; the first of these is that as an exhibition space, the cinema itself is inherently surreal, in producing a kind of sustained, collective suspension of disbelief in those who enter it. Discussing this goes some way to explain why connections between Surrealism and the cinema must be revived.
Not all films are Surrealist, however, and more particular properties need to be ascertained, from which we can look more closely at Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire and determine ways forward for a Surrealist aesthetic. The future of this aesthetic, I argue, is determined by a work’s relationship to material reality, in line with André Breton’s 1935 paraphrasing and reiteration of Marx, namely that “the activity of interpreting the world must continue to be linked with the activity of changing the world.” (3) This contributes two appraisals: of the extent to which Lynch employs Surrealism and, therefore, of the extent to which his work might embody a political resistance to dominant filmic conventions. In challenging accepted views, however, Surrealism must necessarily be informed of them; accordingly and effectively, Lynch works within traditional frameworks in order to contravene them.
1. Problems and consistencies
Part of the reason why so little focus is paid to Surrealism today is perhaps due to the strategic assimilation of its values by the bourgeois paradigm actively threatened by and hostile to it. As Roger Shattuck laments, for instance, Surrealist values “spill over easily into the advertising culture.” (4) Any progressive movement must endure such developments. Under its leading theorist and spokesman, André Breton, Surrealism itself spanned a number of decades, saw multiple members join and leave it, and underwent its own revisions, namely in its two manifestoes of 1924 and 1930. Consequently, it seems immediately problematic to treat Surrealism as a homogeneous tradition.
For the purposes of the present discussion, however, some consistencies can be retained. One of these is the idea of “psychic automatism”, which Breton himself described as the expression of thought removed from “any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (5) Defining it as such, Breton had the established order of his native France in mind: if the reason, logic and moral command of the official French elite were responsible for the horrors of the First World War, any oppositional movement must directly challenge them; by definition, the challenge applied to any bourgeois imperialist power in the world. In this way, automatism emphasises the irrational unconscious, because for the Surrealists it was in this that life’s unfulfilled desires were contained, and through it that they were expressed. As such, for Breton it was inconceivable that such expressions were in any way the result of premeditation; (6) as a working method, allowing such expressions to erupt from within the depths of the irrational was an inherently violent proposition.
It is from this violence that Surrealism’s second consistency emerges: this is the “marvellous”. As the Surrealist Louis Aragon wrote, “Reality is the apparentabsence of contradiction. The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.” (7) This is one of Surrealism’s chief strengths: to emphasise, through juxtaposition, that two apparently contradictory ideas comprise the same whole. In response to the established order, which perpetuates current relations as harmonious and without contradiction, such juxtapositions are shocking, convulsive; two entities otherwise assumed to be separate are brought together so that a relationship is primed and its meaning is immediately open to enquiry.
Thus, as an example, we have Salvador Dalí, whose Surrealist paintings modify everyday objects such as clocks into unprecedented shapes and contexts, which are at once recognisable enough to be familiar but different enough to warrant a second take. Indeed, familiarity is retained enough for it to be frustrated. Because seeing is believing, the relationship between familiarity and unfamiliarity lends itself to new opportunities and possibilities that are imagistic in nature but ideological by implication – and unavoidably political. Think of the ways in which Luis Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1928) and L’Âge d’or (1930) force new associations upon the viewer through audiovisual juxtapositions so that spatial conventions are transgressed, narrative expectations are frustrated and interpretative frameworks are foregrounded in and by the consumption process. Accepted truths become open to question.
The cinema doubly facilitates the interpretative frameworks so required of and begotten by Surrealism. As Jacques Brunius (8) remarks, the appeal is two-fold: while its darkness physically accommodates the idea of promiscuity and the imagination demanded by that, it also presents the spectacle of the photographic image, within which two apparently separate realities can converge; key to Surrealist tradition, with moving photography’s unprecedented illusory authenticity, the unfamiliar can gel with the expected.
Additionally, while a stage can be influenced by accidents either side of the proscenium, and a literary work can be read at different speeds depending on one’s attention span, as a cinema audience we have no power over the light source projected upon the two-dimensional plane before us; the image unfolds regardless of our reaction to it. It is this powerlessness that gives the darkened theatre its oneiric quality. As Robert Benayoun notes, (9) a cinema audience has no choice but to give itself up to the image over which it has no control, which in the perceptible sense is akin to a dream-state. Put another way, if when awake our other sensory capacities allow us to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, then upon entering a dream the means of making this distinction are no longer in place. Likewise, the cinema’s own physical preconditions solicit the concentration of our senses wholly upon the unfolding images. As Jean Goudal notes, the “darkness of the auditorium destroys the rivalry of real images that would contradict the ones on the screen.” (10)
Of course, one objection here is that this too is now in doubt. Even without considering the effect confectionaries and other competing technologies have had within the cinema space itself, DVDs, web streams and other forms of consumption are allowing audiences more and more freedom in how they experience a film. On one level, David Lynch himself is one filmmaker embracing these new forms of technology, in making flash animations and serialised shorts available online. On another, though, he is keen on reproducing those qualities unique to the cinema space and extending them into domestic consumption. On a 2005 DVD release of Eraserhead (1976), for example, the access menu is preceded by a screen instructing home viewers on how to adjust their television’s settings, so as to acquire the best contrast and brightness levels for watching the film. As a partial resistance to narrative fragmentation, meanwhile, Mulholland Dr. andInland Empire DVDs have been released sans chapters; though both can be manually forwarded or paused, in theory both films have to be watched in their entirety or not at all. Placing such importance on these viewing methods suggests Lynch is aware of the cinema’s inherently surreal qualities and the possible benefits they lend. But Lynch is doing more than simply aspiring towards a particular consumption method; in order to evaluate the extent of their Surrealism, it is necessary to probe the films themselves.
2. Dualities, patterns
Breton quotes Dalí: “I believe the moment is at hand when … it will be possible … to systematise confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” (11) (in “What Is Surrealism?” 136). Crucially, Breton also intervenes: “in order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be said:immediate reality.” (12) Indeed, the revolutionary strength of Surrealism is characterised not by a rejection of the real but of those elements that are presented and received as the unchangeable natural order. The key to this, as we have seen, lies firstly in an emphasis on the unconscious, in which is contained those ideas forbidden by a repressive political order, and secondly in allowing to emerge from this unconscious these very ideas, whose unfamiliarity is introduced into the established world so as to upset it. Both Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire exemplify this dynamic by hinting towards dreams within their narratives only to appreciably imply that the “reality” beyond them is also questionable; in doing so, both films move beyond the bookends that render the otherwise disturbing nightmares of some of Lynch’s other films ultimately comfortable, in order to pose legitimate challenges to Hollywood practice.
Regardless of their theoretical viewpoints, scholars and critics alike hint at the Surrealist attributes of these two films. For Greg Olson, Mulholland Dr.’s “paradoxical theme of two opposing realities existing at once” (13) is a result of its director’s “belief in a Hindu cosmology.” (14) Mulholland Dr. is full of such opposing realities. When Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) tells assistant Cynthia (Katherine Towne), “But I’m not broke”, for instance, she responds, “I know, but you’re broke”; her initial concession and then direct contradiction both confirms and denies Adam in the same moment. Later in the film, at Club Silencio, a magician summons the sounds of instruments without their physical presence, before a singer collapses while her voice continues; at a micro level, the film intimates its own macro framework, in which two truths can and do coexist. Spiritualist or not, this coexistence upsets traditional narrative conventions in a manner that can be viewed as Surrealist.
Indeed, though the film is commonly perceived as an extended, clever subversion of a traditional narrative, in which the first two thirds seem to constitute a weird, exaggerated state of reality only to be retroactively suggested as a dream following the revelation that the real reality constitutes the final third, I would suggest Mulholland Dr.’s lasting transgression of dominant narrative trends is its ultimate frustration of such a resolution. While writers like Mark Allyn Stewart (15) can make their way chronologically through the film convincingly decoding and concretising its meaning, and others such as Todd McGowan (16) are inclined to view the two distinct segments as representative of fantasy and desire, Olson importantly draws attention to the “nagging question” of where the film’s “base reality” exists. (17) Like the film itself, he concludes with the homeless person behind the Winkie’s diner, who “turns the blue box that signified Camilla’s death over and over in his hands, like a necromancer performing a ritual.” (18) Comprising two halves ontologically distinct enough to seem resolvable,Mulholland Dr. problematises an easy reading by legitimating an interpretation that the whole narrative is the dream-work or master plan of a peripheral character, referred to by B. Kite as “the charbroiled hobo behind the dumpster.” (19)
Like Olson, Kite contextualises Mulholland Dr. against its director’s spiritualism, and suggests the film’s halves are “twinned realities.” (20) In line with the Silencio singer whose voice continues following her own collapse, the film’s narrative, like Diane’s consciousness, “extends centrifugally, … Under this interpretation, the film doesn’t split between a dream and a reality, but offers instead two realities.” (21) In a piece that implies this dualism is comparatively tame, meanwhile, John Orr argues Inland Empire “is a film of so many dualisms it obliterates its duality: a bewildering multitude of figures, places and spaces that seem infinite.” (22) Orr legitimately probes the origin of the film’s many plot strands – are they all merely projections of Nikki’s (Laura Dern) paranoia, or are they artificial constructs whose disparate diegeses are held together by mise-en-abîme? “Stupid question. As usual Lynch is working with a delirious doubling formula that seems to work by process of osmosis but at times is truly out of control.” (23)
This perfectly recalls Jean Goudal’s assertions about cinema’s inherently Surrealist qualities: “In the cinema … One event follows another, seeking justification in itself alone. … [W]e barely have time to call to mind the logical commentary that would explain them or at least connect them.” (24) The first two minutes ofInland Empire alone evoke this. The film begins with a single shaft of light penetrating the centre of a record through an otherwise black frame. The vinyl spins in a texturally crude image; analogue and digital aggressively combine. Hereafter, a delirious prologue ensues, in which a man and woman find a room they have been looking for in a hotel corridor; viewed in black and white with their faces blurred out, the pair act conspiratorially, speaking in Polish, their words subtitled. In the corridor, the images unfold as if from a crime scene re-enactment; once in the room, the camera assumes a height and angle connoting CCTV (see Fig 1).
Fig. 1 Narrative delirium: unexplained places and unidentified faces in Inland Empire’s prologue.
“I don’t recognise this place,” says the woman, evidently a prostitute. “Do you know what whores do?” her client asks. “Yes. They fuck.” If the inexplicable decision to blur these characters’ faces is both intriguing and frustrating, their conversation is complementarily blunt. That the close-up of the woman’s face – from her client’s viewpoint – remains out-of-focus further disorients the viewer. When the sequence suddenly turns into colour and we see a tearful woman alone on a bed, we might reason that she and the prostitute are the same woman. But in actuality, the association is left to suggestion. Lynch asks for such associations but never provides appropriate closure. The tearful woman watches a television, on which are images from later in the same film. Connections are primed but never explained. When Goudal writes that “the foremost factor [in cinema] is the image which … drags the tatters of reason behind it,” (25) he anticipates the violent denial of a seamless suture that Inland Empire displays.
Conversely, what makes such editorial fragmentation seem all the more violent is Lynch’s otherwise careful adherence to convention within it. As Orr notes, Inland Empire’s “cinematic staging, spatial positioning and … cutting is, for the most part, neo-classical in design.” (26) As Orr goes on, however, “the meaning of the relationship between sequences, those notorious Lynchian non-sequiturs, is anybody’s guess.” (27) Indeed, sequences unfolding in shot-reverse shot patterns and so on retain enough familiarity so that their eventual transgression becomes indubitable and, over its three hours, evocative of Goudal’s rhetorical question: “if you are to bring to the screen only various illogical series of images, assembled according to the most capricious associations of ideas, don’t you risk alienating the public?” (28)
Indeed you might. But regardless of a possible ennui provoked by the labyrinthine splintering of its narrative and the perpetual frustration of any finality of meaning, Inland Empire remains an intriguing continuation of Mulholland Dr.’s oneiric aesthetic. The floating feel of the Steadicam that characterises much of the earlier film, for instance, which offsets its otherwise conventional adherence to a classical editorial pattern that sustains the viewer’s “sense of spatial and temporal orientation,” (29) gives way to a lo-fi DV fuzziness that renders elaborate lighting setups (30) utterly dreamlike.
Furthermore, Lynch sustains and exaggerates the silences between lines of dialogue and often delays shot-reverse shot transitions so that moments become pregnant with a hostile or comic atmosphere. I would suggest it is precisely this editorial delay that heightens the absurdity of what Orr refers to as Grace Zabriskie’s “most ‘Polish’ of all the Polish-English accents” in the film. (31) No more exaggerated than other put-on accents in Hollywood, Zabriskie’s is dwelled upon, in the way Lynch refuses to cut immediately to Nikki’s reaction shots, to the point of both hilarity and foreboding: both, because the durational stretch provides the filmic space with an air that is suddenly and unexpectedly interpretable; finalities are opened and the banal becomes absurd.
Orr says Zabriskie’s “intonations [are] exaggerated to the point of caricature, comic and menacing at the same time.” (32) Exaggeration is a common and effective Lynchian trait, by which mainstream filmic conventions are highlighted ad nauseam. In Inland Empire, fragments from Lynch’s online series Rabbits appear, in which the conventions of the studio-bound US sitcom resonate complete with an excruciatingly artificial laughter track. As the dialogue prompting such laughter comprises nothing more than a series of empty non-sequiturs – one such line is, “Where are the paper towels?” – Lynch exploits our familiarity with particular formal traditions in order to draw attention to their insidious nature. Similarly, the laughter track within these episodes is echoed shortly after by the scene in which Nikki and Devon (Justin Theroux) endure implausibly probing questions on a chat show regarding the possibility of a romantic spark between them; the hunger for scandal that the persistent questioning connotes is implicated as another symptom of the same system in which unfunny sitcoms flourish. This illustrates, in Todd McGowan’s terms, “the radicality and perversity of the mainstream itself. … Through the act of taking normality to its logical extreme, Lynch reveals how the bizarre is not opposed to the normal but inherent within it.” (32) Intentionally or not, McGowan’s words chime with the key undercurrents of Surrealism itself, which challenge the mainstream by making explicit that which it seeks to forbid.
Such strategies rely on a synecdochic, associational logic, whereby the image becomes the substitutive form in an aesthetic that wishes to shock and unnerve established ways of thinking. Michael Gould draws attention, for instance, to the importance of archetypes in Surrealist filmmaking. (33) Indeed, it is precisely through these that the marvellous nature of the Surrealist image can be framed. Gould calls this “the revelatory”, that which places “emphasis on the immediacy of the emotion and the importance of sudden revelation, for it is interested in shock and astonishment.” (34) If this is the key component of the marvellous, thenInland Empire seems to be an exhaustive and exhausting stream of attempts to attain it.
Take that unprompted cut, in the middle of a scene in which Nikki tries to comprehend and converse with a room full of prostitutes, to a full-on music video aesthetic complete with Little Eva’s “Loco-motion” on the soundtrack (Fig. 2); Lynch plays things straight to a discomfiting degree, so that the reason behind the switch is never clear – the scene, indeed, seems at once audacious and silly.
Fig. 2 Audacious and silly: prostitutes perform the “Loco-Motion” in Inland Empire.
Likewise, an unbroken, 40-second shot of director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) trying to communicate through a megaphone to an off-screen lighting assistant is sustained for so long that the repetition of its dialogue takes on an incongruity and an almost comic air of unease. Elsewhere, a shot-reverse shot rehearsal sequence, which takes place in an unfurnished stage between Nikki and Devon under the watchful gaze of Kingsley and producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton), unfolds with such a rigid sense of convention that it seems deliberately mannered. The scene’s consequent artificiality is suddenly fractured, however, when Freddie apparently sees movement in the distance, and Devon walks over to check it out; the sudden shift in momentum accrued by the subsequent, swift following shot is in stark contrast to the stilted tone of those preceding it. In all three of these examples, tradition and convulsion combine to such an extremity that the pedestrian is imbued with a palpably new energy. This revelatory marvellous is best epitomised, perhaps, at the moment at which the spatial continuity established by the first hour of the film seems to fracture, and its different mise-en-scènes begin to converge. Henceforth, in Dalí’s terms, the film seems to systematise confusion and discredit reality altogether.
3. Decipherable dualisms?
If such a systematisation embodies Inland Empire’s Surrealist values, the challenge it poses so aggressively to reality seems also to inhibit such values. IfMulholland Dr. benefits from what B. Kite refers to as “a tidier, puzzle-box structure” that keeps the film anchored “within comfortable, explicable parameters,” (35) then Inland Empire contains “too many parallels, too many doubles and too many metamorphoses … [its dualisms] proliferate out of control.” (36) One argument that might be put forth here is that since Mulholland Dr. operates on a comparatively decipherable level, it is less Surrealist than Inland Empire. As Linda Williams (37) points out, producing an oneiric narrative whose more dormant currents can be deciphered implies that its clues are deliberately planted, designed to assist a work’s interpretability and thus flouting its unconscious element.
Would not, however, an entirely unconscious, intuitive method of working preclude the deliberate employment of familiar formal conventions? Indeed, not only do the associational strategies employed by Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire rely on some level of familiarity, as I have already argued, Surrealism as a whole is clearly informed by the social fabric in which it exists. I would contend, therefore, that Mulholland Dr.’s Surrealist values are no less authentic than those ofInland Empire, precisely because an entirely unconscious, intuitive method of working is itself problematic.
It is here that one must intervene upon a contradiction intrinsic to Surrealism, for its revolutionary potential is severely inhibited by it. If the revelatory, convulsive marvellous championed by Surrealism relies on the convergence of accepted ideas and their forbidden opposites, then the irrationality insisted upon by psychic automatism seems to make such juxtapositions impossible. How, for instance, is one to provoke and discredit received ideas without consciously drawing upon them? The extent and endurance of such provocation is determined by the depth of its own reasoning. In short, the opposite of an established order is not irrationality, but is itself a reasoned argument.
Examining Surrealism’s relationship to material reality, Frank Brenner and David Walsh take issue with Breton’s insistence on psychic automatism, pointing out that because the Surrealists’ own art often “took the form of highly-evolved poetic images, inconceivable without an extensive knowledge of literary technique and history,” (38) it is highly unlikely and even naïve to suggest their method was “free of conscious suggestion.” (39) Any work of art is the product, moreover, of a highly complex negotiation between intuition and consciousness, in which interiorised inspiration is physically externalised. This is because the subjective unconscious is itself a product of objective conditions. (40)
This is not to say, however, that Breton was wrong to look to the unconscious realm as the source of unfulfilled human needs in the face of an apparently inhuman system. As Brenner and Walsh also note, for example, because being determines consciousness, then under capitalism itself, “conscious thought contains the adjustments, compromises and frustrations imposed on the individual by the demands of the external world, which means above all the denial of human need and desire. … [T]hese needs and desires do not disappear: they find an outlet in the unconscious, i.e., in dreams and imagination.” (41) Any artistic expression of such needs, then, both draws upon imagination and is deeply informed by the conditions of its time. Indeed, the former seems largely dependent upon the latter, because what is materially the case determines what can be the case.
It is in this regard that Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire are Surrealist, and discussion within this framework profitably illustrates the benefits of (consciously) retaining and continuing such values. Both films work within and against Hollywood conventions in order to confront and implicate them in a particular social fabric that denies emotional happiness and instead begets conspiracy, jealousy, paranoia and murder. Indeed, the narrative of each film seems to disintegrate following a consummation of something as thematically clichéd as amorous desire. (42) Mulholland Dr.’s twinned realities collide following the love scene between Betty and Rita, while Nikki prompts Inland Empire’s proliferation of dualisms by reciprocating the affections of Devon. In both cases, such emotional pursuits are discouraged if not precluded by the industry itself.
However, if Mulholland Dr. is able to pose challenges to Hollywood through the careful retention of a navigable narrative, Inland Empire fragments its associational framework so that it finally fails to avoid what Goudal forewarned against: alienating one’s audience. The extent to which a film continues Surrealist methods is determined by its ability to negotiate between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between established principles and new ways of thinking, between intuition and reason. As has already been noted, in speaking in the name of Surrealism, Breton maintained that the process of interpreting the world should be linked to that of changing it. We should be wary, therefore, of smothering the marvellous by depending too much on an automatic image that drags the tatters of reason with it. Indeed, it is possible that reason is what certain endeavours to change the world are currently lacking.
This article has been peer reviewed.
- One exception of length was published in 1993, years prior to the period in discussion: See John Alexander, The Films of David Lynch, London: Charles Letts, 1993.
- Rosemont, Franklin. ‘Introductory Note’, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, André Breton, ed. Rosemont, London: Pluto Press, 1978. xv.
- Breton, André. “Speech to the Congress of Writers” (1935), Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 240.
- Shattuck, Roger. Introduction. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” (1964). The History of Surrealism. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. Middlesex: Penguin, 1978. 10
- Breton, op cit. 24
- ibid, 36
- Quoted in Shattuck, 22; my emphasis.
- Brunius, Jacques. “The Screen’s Prestige.” The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Trans. and ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2000. 106.
- Benayoun, Robert. “Remarks on Cinematic Oneirism” (1951). The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Trans. and ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2000. 101-11.
- Goudal, Jean. “Surrealism and Cinema” (1925). The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Trans. and ed. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2000. 87
- Breton, André. “What Is Surrealism?” 1934. What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Rosemont. London: Pluto Press, 1978. 136
- ibid; emphasis in original.
- Olson, Greg. David Lynch: Beautiful Dark. Plymouth: Scarecrow, 2008. 546.
- ibid, 577.
- Stewart, Mark Allyn. David Lynch Decoded. Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2007. 75-86.
- McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
- Olson, 573.
- ibid, 577.
- Kite, B. “Remain in Light.” Sight & Sound Mar. 2012: 46. See also Hayles and Gessler, who typically refrain from a Surrealist analysis whilst nevertheless noting Mulholland Dr. “unsettle[s] ontological security” by confusing “the distinctions between reality, dream, hallucination and flashback.” Hayles, N. Katherine and Nicholas Gessler. “The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and Mulholland Drive.”PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 482-99. JSTOR. Web. 22 May 2012. (483-4).
- Kite, 47.
- Orr, John. “A Cinema of Parallel Worlds: Lynch and Kieslowski + Inland Empire.” Film International 7.1 (2009): 28-43. Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text. Web. 3 Apr. 2012. 41.
- ibid, 40
- Goudal, 88
- ibid, 89
- Orr, 39
- ibid; emphasis in original.
- Goudal, 91
- McGowan, 195
- Orr, 39
- ibid, 40
- MacGowan, 12-13
- Gould, Michael. Surrealism and the Cinema. London: Tantivy, 1976, 23.
- ibid, 30
- Kite, 46
- Orr, 41-42
- Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. 16.
- Brenner, Frank and David Walsh. “Art and Freedom: André Breton and problems of twentieth-century culture, Part 2.” World Socialist Web Site. International Committee of the Fourth International, 16 Jun. 1997. Web. 17 May 2012.
- For a brief discussion of Surrealism’s recurrent interest in love as a means of transgression, see Hammond, 39-40.