Fabrica,
Brighton, Thurs 17th Sept
From
the pulpit, the now accustomed position for addressing Fabrica
events, the speaker intoned “we are gathered here today to give way
to our surrealist urges”. Of course she went on to repeat the
by-now notorious reaction of the British censor to this classic
Surrealist film, back in 1928 - “if there is a meaning, it is
doubtless objectionable”. It was the Bill Grundy moment of its day,
so absolutely the reaction the movement wanted to evoke that it could
surely serve as their epitaph.
Except,
as the speaker went on to tell us, the film then did the double and
managed to antagonise the Surrealists themselves. Some say Antonin
Artaud was himself outraged by director Germaine Dulac's treatment of
his script. (Though inevitably enough accounts vary, and Artaud might
not meet the strict legal definition of a reliable witness.)
Certainly Dali and Bunel's 'Un Chien Andalou' is
often cited as the first film in the style, despite being made a year
later.
The
speaker (whose name has now embarrassingly slipped my ageing brain)
went on to suggest, as a woman Dulac had managed to challenge and
subvert the standard Surrealist fetish of the female body. As the
fantasy writer Angela Carter was later to say of the brethren: “I
had to give them up in the end. They were, with a few patronised
exceptions, all men and they told me that I was the source of all
mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman – and I knew
that was not true. I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination,
too... an equal share in the right to vision.” The idea of a
proto-feminist film-maker playing the Surrealists at their own game
and winning, succeeding in upending their orthodoxies - its certainly
appealing. Yet is it simply too good to be true?
Certainly,
the film starts in the tradition of Surrealist orthodoxy. The
Clergyman pours wine from a shell into vials, only to repeatedly
smash them. The General appears, seizes the shell from him and swords
it in two. We are probably on safe ground assuming the dark 'wine' is
menstrual blood, a kind of alchemic symbol for the essence of woman.
The Soldier interrupts to seize the shell and swords it in two. (The
gesture seems to parallel the infamously stomach-turning eye-slitting
at the opening of 'Chien Andalou', itself often
regarded as a metaphor for penetration.) In short he shows how its
done – with violence. The Madonna/whore dichotomy in attitudes to
women couldn't be clearer cut.
The
film may be best compared not to 'Chien Andalou'
but Dali and Bunel's later 'L'Age d'Or' (1930) –
and not just in the anti-clericalism. Their film is largely
structured around a repressive society keeping the two lovers apart.
While Dulac takes the thing the other way up, follows the Clergyman
as he endlessly tries to get in on the act between the General and
his Wife. When confronted by a Surrealist work, of course you first
reach for your Freud. The Clergyman is Freud's Oedipal child, trying
to off the Father (represented by the Soldier) to get close to the
Mother. When we first see him walk... well in fact he crawls. Hence
the scene where he interrupts them (in, inevitably enough, a
confessional) and assaults the Father. He's then shown proudly
brandishing a key, both a phallic symbol and an unlocker of
mysteries.
There
may be images which feminise the Clergyman – the tails of his
cassock extending like a bridal veil, for example – but this is
from a time when childhood and womanhood were associated. So... do we
need to reach any further than Freud?
But
then what, for example, of the Clergyman's stilted movements? They're
not in the least childlike. Check out when he's running, he looks
more like a stuffed shirt granted motion. (I won't say “come to
life”.) And besides, let's look again at that opening scene. The
pouring and smashing is kind of hard to parse. But it seems both a
male attempt to contain that essence, and the Clergyman repeatedly
attempting to transmute his desire into a kind of religious
iconoclasm. And both repeatedly failing, for like a magic object from
a folk tale the seashell never empties. The Clergyman doesn't even
seem to expect it to empty, he carries on with his ceaseless task in
a ritualised fashion.
And
the scene where he confronts the General and his wife We're rarely
shown two faces in the same shot, and we even see the General's head
split – all images of the fractured self, rather than three
separate characters. And on ridding himself of the Father, the
Clergyman later goes on to undress the Mother. But he's left not with
the naked female body he desires, she impossibly grows more clothing
and he's left clutching her bra. A notably somewhat seashell-like
bra. The title, we should remember, is 'The Seashell and the
Clergyman' - suggesting he is chasing not a woman but a
symbol, an idealisation.
Ultimately,
to break past his mental construction of femininity he must invert
the standard male gaze and look inward. The black globe is like some
relation to the vials of earlier, which is first polished and
treasured by fleets of maids – but then smashed. He sees his own
face in the broken pieces, but on bending down picks up the shell.
This is the key. It simultaneously takes us back to the opening scene
and out of it. To misquote Bakhunin, the destructive urge is not only
creative but liberating. With his mental construction of masculinity
demolished, he's able to drink directly from the shell. It's
definitely a film about the male psyche, in which women only appear
insofar as projections of his mind. But perhaps its angle on the male
psyche does come from outside...
But
then again... I browsed a few analyses of this film through the magic
of this interweb business. And, while I can't exactly claim to have
been thorough, I found myself dissatisfied with all of them. So I
wrote my own and, while I prefer it of the options available, now I
find I'm not dissatisfied with that.
But
of course that's the point of the thing. The most important word in
that quote up top about meanings to be found is “if”. It's like
Artaud is the General, Dulac the Mother and us the poor befuddled
Clergyman. Like him we try to strip Dulac, rob her of her mysteries.
But we manage at most a few tokens. As Artaud said “I never
considered this film as the demonstration of any theory whatsoever.
It’s a film of pure images. And the meaning must be got from the
radiation itself of these images.” To search for an answer in the
film, to study it for clues, in many ways seems to mistake its
nature.
The
alert reader may have noticed I have talked about the film through
the introductory speaker more than its soundtrack. Another quick
trawl through yonder internet suggests the most common problem when
soundtracks are set to this film is that they're too polite, too
refined. They tend to, so to speak, use classical instruments
classically. Perhaps that's simply a result of ensembles taking it on
who “do” silent cinema, with a result akin to the BBC Symphony
Orchestra playing 'Purple Haze'.
Thankfully,
the duo here didn't use supposedly 'contemporary' instruments, like
the film is a period piece. Miles Brown largely performed on
theramin. (Which was already in existence by this point, even if
no-one ever thinks of it like that.) While Drill Folly contributed
found sound, samples and electronics. These throbs, hums and whirs
made for a reasonable stab at the sound of the subconscious,
conveying the repressions of the Clergyman's troubled psyche. While
there doesn't have to be one way to score Surrealist films for today, as I said after Steve Severin's soundtrack to Cocteau's 'Blood of a Poet', music concrete and manipulated sound makes for a pretty good choice –
the interchange between the familiar and the strange.
However
it generally alternated between 'dark' and 'light' sections – with
the 'light' parts more conventionally musical. They were at their
worst when, for the ballroom scene, they literally contributed
ballroom music. Hardly the thing for a style based around creative
juxtapositions and unexpected ruptures! Perhaps they were bound to
come off as second best against the really-rather-splendid Partial Facsimile soundtrack to 'Cabinet of Dr Caligari' the previous week.
The
mudering-the-Father sequence with, despite all I say above, not so
bad a soundtrack...
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