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Off the Wall Lecture Series: RE-ASSEMBLING REALITY: Surrealism and Surrealist Film in 1920s & 1930s

Presented by Frist Center for the Visual Arts at Frist Center for the Visual Arts

November 19, 2009

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You have seen Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris and delved into the minds of the Surrealists. Now learn more about the tumultuous yet edifying times they lived in by attending the Frist Center's three part Off the Wall lecture series being held in conjunction with the exhibition.

Kelli Shay Hix, moving image archivist at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, will discuss the techniques and goals of the creators of selected early Parisian Surrealist films, as well as the history behind their works.

The post–World War I Parisian Surrealists used the mediums of writing, painting, and photography to expose the “superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations.” But it was the medium of moving image film which gave the Surrealists the opportunity to create a nearly complete parallel world in which reason took a backseat to dreams, and in which traditional editing processes were used to confuse, rather than to clarify, normal patterns of reason. Though entertaining, these films are far from escapist. Much of the meaning in the films relies on the viewers' expectations, reactions, and interpretations of the films. This cinema is not meant to re-enact dreams or to tell a narrative, but to acknowledge a reality “outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”

*Quotes are from The Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton, 1924