This trio of Surrealist films features two glorious restorations imported from Europe just for this screening, and live piano accompaniment. Before becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent documentarians, Henri Storck dabbled in Surrealism. His 1929 Pour vos beaux yeux (made in collaboration with painter Félix Labisse) tells the tale of a young dandy who tries to send a glass eye through the mail, to no avail. One of the most delightful works of cinema that Surrealism produced, Pour vos beaux yeux was long thought lost, but the film’s negative was recently discovered and restored by the Cinémathèque française. Thèmes et variations by Germaine Dulac, the sole female director working in France in the Thirties, is a study in motion of a ballet dancer, another example of the “real made surreal.” Considered an Impressionist filmmaker (a practitioner and theorist of “pure cinema”), Dulac provided the Surrealists with one of their most arduous debates with La Coquille et le Clergyman. The film was written by Antonin Artaud (before he was expelled from the group) and directed by Dulac while Artaud was busy acting in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Conceived as a dream – Artaud’s – the film uses a host of camera techniques, including double exposures and distortion, in order to replicate the frantic workings of a clergyman’s psyche. An alchemist’s concoction of amour fou, Coquille was written to be “a shock designed for the eyes,” said Artaud, but Dulac’s phantasmagorical approach caused a scandal and the film was rejected by the Surrealists and by Artaud himself. “Still, whether we read it as a chaotic tangle of associations, or as a profound new language of the unconscious, it is undeniable that Coquille is an extremely powerful and energetic first document of Surrealist cinema, thanks to the efforts of both Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud” (Sandy Flitterman-Lewis). In a twist worthy of Surrealism, the film’s reels were shown in the wrong order for years and it was not until 2004 that La Coquille was restored to its original self, further complicating its disputed interpretations.

Presented with live piano accompaniment by William O’Meara.

Total running time: approx 55 minutes