Agulha Revista de Cultura: ABIGAIL SUSIK | Beyond disorientation: surrealism, animation, and the hidden world

Surrealism and the phoenix of animation

Given surrealism’s transnational character as an epochal socio-cultural movement, the surrealist engagement with cinema encompasses a vast and varied history. [1] Yet, what can be said about surrealism’s profound investment in what film critic and director Robert Benayoun called in 1963 “the phoenix of animation”? [2] Moreover, how does surrealism’s extensive engagement with animation relate to its overarching struggle since 1924 to transform human life in revolutionary ways?

Even though many international surrealists have considered animation to be uniquely tied to the movement’s aims, surrealism’s attraction to the medium of animation has never been addressed in-depth in scholarship, perhaps partly because the field of Film Studies itself has often marginalized animation. [3] When the surrealist critic Benayoun called animation a ‘phoenix’, he referred to the rapid development of this medium and its technological supports since the turn of the twentieth century – characteristics he thought contributed to its critical neglect. Conceptualizing animation’s changeability, Benayoun defined animation as a cinematic approach to diverse experiments with the simulation of ‘movement’, in which various filmmaking techniques using images, photographs or objects – ever advancing into more sophisticated methods over time – create the illusion of dynamism out of static materials. [4]

Benayoun’s flexible terms for animation, which also inform the working definition used in this volume, presage Maureen Furniss’s recent argument for framing animation as a continuum between the polarities of abstraction and mimesis. [5] Yet, although such descriptions of animation reveal much of the medium’s quintessentially cinematic essence, Benayoun complained that animation’s cinematic status remained ever in question. ‘They [critics] treat the genre [animation] as if it were a kind of annex to the beaux-arts, an after-dinner amusement’, he said, adding that, ‘over the years, film critics have refused to take notice of what they consider a puerile sop on the weekly theater programs.’ [6] In this regard, Benayoun recalled the words of his friend Ado Kyrou, another surrealist film critic and filmmaker, who opined a decade earlier in the first edition of his book, Le surréalisme au cinéma (1953), that animation should not be limited by such compartmentalizations or considered a separate genre. Kyrou agreed with Benayoun that animation had almost always been neglected in the realm of cinema, which caused animation to generate its own trajectory and ‘myths’. [7]

Contemporary theoreticians such as Lev Manovich have echoed Benayoun and Kyrou in their assessment of the aporias within animation discourse. Because animation accentuates the illusionistic nature of its techniques rather than following in the footsteps of live action cinema and attempting to suspend disbelief through attempted realism, it became, in Manovich’s words, the ‘supplement and shadow’ of cinema and a ‘depository’ for outmoded modalities. [8] But, as Alan Cholodenko has shown, since the 1990s, this marginalization of animation for both popular and scholarly audiences has diminished as a result of the mass popularity of feature-length animation and the digitalization of animation processes, which has supported a re-theorization of film itself as just one form of animation, rather than the other way around. [9]

Following such prescient assessments of animation’s essence and status by surrealist theoreticians such as Benayoun and Kyrou, this volume calls for the repositioning of animation as a central and vital aspect of surrealism’s investment in cinema. In support of such an endeavor, this introduction undertakes a partial overview of select moments in the surrealist history and theory of animation from the 1920s to the present, acknowledging in passing the more frequently discussed subjects of surrealism’s affinity for black humour, burlesque, comedy, comics, pulp cinema and slapstick – but placing the full force of analysis on the medium of animation itself. In addition, Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present is a study grounded first and foremost in the flourishing interdisciplinary field of Surrealism Studies, although its historical approach and methodology are also influenced by Art History, Visual Culture Studies, Popular Culture Studies, comparative Cinema Studies and, of course, Animation Studies. On that note, it is important to clarify that this volume minimizes considerations of animation as superficially ‘surreal’ or ‘surrealistic’ in a vague or commercial sense, especially in what Cholodenko has identified as the hackneyed trope that animation is fundamentally akin to the surreal, given its dreamlike or hallucinatory qualities. [10] Although the important question of surrealism’s admiration for popular culture and, in turn, popular culture’s enthusiastic absorption and recuperation of surrealism is frequently addressed in this book, our investigation follows a historically specific definition of surrealism. This is an understanding of surrealism rooted in the still-unfolding and enormously varied panorama of the International Surrealist Movement (c. 1920s to the present), as lived by members and close associates of its disparate but often connected groups around the world since the last century. With that said, it is important to clarify that surrealism is neither an artistic style nor a rigid set of ideas and formal approaches, and so the matter of surrealism’s engagement with animation, a subject which we only just begin to address in a comprehensive way in this volume, is one of dizzying diversity.

With a purview that includes the geographic contexts of Asia, Europe, North and South America, with glimpses of African and Oceanic contexts, the contents of this book fall into three categories, providing a selective view of a much larger subject that requires further attention in future studies by other scholars: 1) specific cases of the influence of animation-related subjects (directors, studios, techniques, characters, individual films, theories, pre-cinematic devices, optical illusions, special effects, etc.) upon members of the International Surrealist Movement; 2) examples of contributions by members of the International Surrealist Movement to animated film production, animated film sequences, or animation history, theory and criticism; and, 3) instances of practitioners, institutions, films and techniques in the field of animation evincing indirect but substantial ties to the Surrealist Movement, as determined either by surrealists or non-surrealist with adjacent interests. Furthermore, the bulk of the volume focuses on special effects and animation techniques such as clay, collage (found images and photographs), cut-out, direct on celluloid, drawn/cel, puppet and stop-motion animation, but substantial attention is also devoted to contemporary animation and techniques, living animators – and to some degree – digital forms of animation. Nineteen chapters expand upon my introductory statements prefacing each of the book’s three chronologically ordered sections: 1) the early twentieth century to midcentury; 2) post-World War II; 3) the contemporary period.

From surrealist animated paintings to a surrealist theory of cinematic animation, c. 1920s-1930s

Surrealist writer and theoretician André Breton grew up as the medium of cinema itself matured and cinematographic animation was invented. Then, as now, animation included a dynamic range of filmmaking techniques from hand-drawn cartoons to stop-motion sequences, all of which transformed still images into moving pictures. Breton and his cinephile friends began enthusiastically writing and theorizing about cinema during World War I, even before surrealism became a movement in 1924. [11] Yet, the theory and mechanics of cinematic animation were just as central to the formation and development of surrealism as were live action films. Indeed, they saw film itself as a form of animation, especially when augmented by special effects that stretched the human perception of time and movement. [12] In a general sense, then, cinematic animation was a way for surrealists to penetrate the depths of unknown experiences and augur an endlessly astonishing future of expanding consciousness, as related to their call for a surrealist societal revolution.

Breton recognized that the ‘marvelous invention of cinema’ was a form of animation creating a mimicry of continuous movement through the acceleration of still pictures or image frames. Even so, animation as such held a unique place in his conceptualization of surrealism. [13] By 1920–1, Breton became fascinated with the recent developments of slow motion [le ralenti] and time-lapse film [l’accéléré] and other cinematic special effects that had developed since the turn of the century. In a short essay written for Max Ernst’s first exhibition in Paris in May 1921, he compared the German artist’s photomontages, collages and overpaintings to these cinematic special effects whereby “‘oak trees surge up’, ‘antelopes soar’ and locomotives ‘arrive on canvas’. [14] According to Breton, Ernst’s mixed media works engaged deeply with the type of spatiotemporal disorientation or dépaysment made possible by decelerated and accelerated animation effects in cinema, as well as stop tricks or substitution splices wherein subtle transformations take place between shots retaining the same mise-en-scène. For Breton, Ernst was a magician who at long last killed the already-dead tradition of nature morte, or still life. [15]

Breton’s friend Louis Aragon echoed these sentiments in his 1923 text, ‘Max Ernst, Painter of Illusions’, in which he argues that Ernst employs a sleight of hand that, while stabilizing the original context of an image, diverts [détourner] its associations from within through subtle substitutions and displacements, awakening the image to a new reality. [16] Informing such assessments of Ernst’s montage and collage as a form of prestidigitation was the surrealist admiration for turn-of-the-century trick films by auteurs such as the cinémagician Georges Méliès, the legendary innovator of stop-motion animation and other special effects that transformed live action scenarios into phantasmagorias of the féerique [fairytale-esque; fantasy]. [17] Before his death in 1918, poet and surrealist mentor Guillaume Apollinaire had claimed his affinity with Méliès based on their mutual enchantment of “vulgar matter,” and this parallel was maintained by the surrealists thereafter. [18]

Breton continued to develop his ideas about the revelatory power of animated images following the inception of surrealism as an organized movement in autumn 1924, when he published the first installment of his essay ‘Surrealism and Painting’ in the fourth issue of the group’s journal La Révolution surréaliste in July 1925. For Breton, the human eye and mind retain a state of ‘integral primitivism’ and untamed wildness, allowing humans to manipulate the world around them in a virtual and quasi-magical way through interventions in perception and consciousness. [19] His example is the prehistoric paintings of animals in the Lascaux caves. Painting, drawing and other forms of mark-making extend this innate human ability to alter the perception of reality, which is why any art that reconnects with this integral primitivism possesses a social and political revolutionary function for Breton. [20] In the fourth installment of ‘Surrealism and Painting’, from La Révolution surréaliste 9-10 in 1927, Breton’s discussion of the role of ‘mediation’, ‘virtual images’ and ‘hynpnagogic visions’ in Ernst’s work extends his notion of an animated type of plastic artwork sought by surrealism. [21] Breton relates that Ernst believes that the figures he depicts have the independent power of animation, or autokinesis, as if they could ‘step down from the frame’ and reorganize the composition to their liking in a virtual form of tableau vivant. [22] As if echoing Breton’s commentary, in the same double issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Ernst describes a boyhood reverie he had when suspended between sleep and wakefulness, in which his father created a disturbing animated drawing on a wooden panel depicting a vase that morphs into a spinning top and jumps off the panel into the room when whipped by a soft, phallic pencil pulled from his pocket. [23]

The surrealist concept of an animated, living painting filled with dynamic forms that could break through the fourth wall of the picture plane and invade both psychic and physical space continued to be developed in the early 1930s in connection with Spanish artists Salvador Dalí and Óscar Domínguez, as well as other surrealists. [24] Surrealist animated painting was a speculative type of simulacral representation with virtual aspects that hovered somewhere between erotic dream, transgressive fantasy and disturbing hallucination. As a psychoanalytic-cinematographic theory that preceded any extended discussions of animation in surrealism, the surrealists’ exploration of the idea of animated painting in the 1920s laid the groundwork for increasingly explicit attention given to the history of animation by surrealists in the 1930s and beyond.

Breton’s ‘La Peinture animée’ (c. 1936-37)

Many surrealist films were made during the 1930s, some of which included animated sequences of different kinds, but it is arguably in Breton’s writings that we find surrealism’s most extended engagement with animation in the years before World War II. The most important and yet frequently overlooked example of this surrealist discourse on theories of animation from the interwar period is an extraordinary unpublished essay by Breton written sometime between the spring of 1936 and the first months of 1937 called ‘La Peinture animée’ [Animated painting]. This essay was written but never finished during a period of intense reorientation for surrealism in the wake of the Paris Group’s break with the Stalinist French Communist Party a year earlier. The editors of Breton’s Œuvres completes conjecture that Breton prepared the essay for a never-realized volume edited by Paul Éluard that had been planned for the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in June and July of 1936. More recently, Dawn Ades has surmised that Breton instead may have written the essay for Alfred H. Barr’s sprawling exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in late 1936-early 1937, but that his text arrived too late for publication. [25] Barr included Disney drawings in the ‘commercial and journalistic art’ section of the exhibition and also screened a Disney animated short alongside trick film reels by Méliès and two ‘animated cartoons’ by Émile Cohl, so an essay by Breton on related subjects makes sense. [26] Whatever the case, Breton’s ‘La Peinture animée’ is one of the earliest extended discussions of cinematic animation in the history of surrealism.

After briefly mentioning the cartoon characters Betty Boop (Max Fleischer) and Mickey Mouse (Walt Disney), ‘La Peinture animée’ invokes Breton’s 1921 essay on Ernst, slow motion and timelapse cinematography. [27] Breton then proceeds to praise animation for its ever-evolving technologies, which have challenged human vision and quickly accustomed us to novel forms of acute and rapid apperception. He questions when animation will become dissociated from humorous genres associated with childhood and contemplates a future of animation rooted in drama rather than comedy. Breton also declares that animation led to the discovery of a new system of temporal perspective, as opposed to Renaissance one-point perspective, resulting in a radical transformation in the ontological properties of objects depicted in hand-drawn or painted animation. Animated objects, such as weeping pianos and elephants prancing under ‘fixed stars’, are ‘distracted from their usefulness’ and ‘granted full license’ to participate in an ‘entirely imaginary life’. [28] This amounts to nothing less than a renewal of both the sense perception of vision and the production of art, because, in the wake of inventions such as animation, authentic creation must henceforth always be oriented toward a future experience of the unknown. [29] Ades points out that Breton invokes the Bergsonian term durée to describe this new form of spatio-temporal perspective. [30] As part of a larger shift in human consciousness, animation is for Breton part of the surrealist zeitgeist that surpassed mediums such as painting and sculpture, just as the stereoscope and the flipbook had been displaced by the movie camera. [31] In opposition to the artist of the past, the surrealist, seated at a ‘coral desk’, must continually go beyond the kind of disorientation [dépaysement] stimulated by the vertigo of time-based media such as animation, continually seeking the shock of exposure to previously hidden ‘underground paths of penetration” [voies souterraines de pénétration]. [32]

The 1937 debut of the first American animated feature, Walt Disney Productions’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, may have played a role in Breton’s delay in completing and publishing his essay, given the unprecedented international success of this cel animated, Technicolor movie made using a multiplane camera and released with an accompanying musical soundtrack. The revolutionary potential of animation as a critical medium may have receded for Breton in that particular moment of animation’s spectacular commercial denouement. However, a more likely cause was the simultaneous embrace of Disney in a surrealist context by Dalí and Alfred Barr at MoMA. [33] Writing to Breton from the United States in 1936-37, Dalí related that ‘the creators of animated cartoons are proud to call themselves Surrealists’ and Disney was an ‘American surrealist’. [34] Whereas for Dalí, surrealism had no limits in Hollywood, Breton surely recoiled at this presumed alliance of anti-capitalist surrealism with the nascent blockbuster industry. Even though Breton mentioned Mickey Mouse in passing in ‘La Peinture animée’, he would have abhorred the claim from the MoMA press release for Barr’s Fantastic Art exhibition later that year that Mickey was ‘the world’s best loved Surrealist’. [35]

Breton may have sought to counteract the Dalí-Disney showdown looming over surrealism’s engagement with animation, and if that was the case, his answer was recourse to Eros. Perhaps responding to the development of Dalí’s theory of concrete irrationality and his paranoiac-critical method in the early 1930s, which was accompanied by the elaboration of the Spanish artist’s sexually explicit hypnagogic visions, Breton published his own account of an erotic animated painting in 1938. [36] As had been the case with Ernst and Dalí’s accounts of dream visions as animated tableaus relating the tactility of artistic mark-making to the spasmodic or pulsatile movements of sex, particularly in the case of Ernst’s deployment of surface rubbings or frottage, Breton’s dream partly concerned the transfer technique of decalcomania developed by Óscar Domínguez in the 1930s. Breton’s ‘Oneiric Genesis and Execution of an Animated Painting’, recounted like a film scenario a dream he had about Domínguez in February 1937, in which a painting-in-progress by the artist – not unlike Méliès’s fin-de-siècle lightning sketch films – became virtually animated with a vision of animal fellatio. In the first portion of the dream, Breton had stopped to watch Domínguez paint, realizing that what he assumed were a series of knots arranged in a grid structure in the work were actually the hindquarters of several lions who were aggressively licking each other’s genitalia in real-time. The hindquarters of the lions were aligned with the sun and thus created a luminous and gradually morphing spectacle like the aurora borealis: animal as animation. The analysis of the dream that follows in Breton’s essay marvels at how the raw information delivered by the dream, stemming from a wellspring of psychological and erotic content, can become a form of knowledge about the force of human desire. This network of ideas related to the surrealist notions of objective chance and the trouvaille (gifted or found object) had also been highlighted in Breton’s essay ‘Le Château étoilé’, which was published around the same time that ‘La Peinture animée’ was drafted and is also quoted therein. [37] Breton ponders the potential for augury or omen-casting abilities of the ‘riddle-image’ and the textured ‘grid’ or screen of unmotivated but deeply personal associations humans form in relation to the objective and phenomenal world, as in the case of pareidolia – the experience of seeing shapes or patterns in ambiguous images. [38] When human sense perception and cognition combine with subjective processes to alter the shape of the world in acts of either detached or paranoiac observation, a metamorphosis of the real occurs, ‘riddle-images’ or ‘optical remainders’ are produced and reality is animated with our desires. [39]

Breton does not shy away from characterizating both general animation theories and cinematic animation as having the potential to be a unified surrealist means to a psycho-cultural revolutionary end, the long-envisioned surrealist revolution of the mind that might foster the conditions for future collective socio-political revolutionary change. For Breton, animation held great promise for revolutionizing not only art and popular forms of entertainment, but human consciousness itself.

NOTAS

1. For an overview of surrealist writings on cinema, see Abigail Susik and Kristoffer Noheden, ‘Introduction: Absolutely Modern Mysteries’, in Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries, eds. Kristoffer Noheden and Abigail Susik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

2. Robert Benayoun, ‘Le Phénix de l’Animation’, Positif, nos. 54/55 (July-August 1963).

3. Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1982).

4. Robert Benayoun, ‘The Phoenix and the Road-Runner’ [1963], Film Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 3, (Spring 1964).

5. Maureen Furniss, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetic, 2nd edn. (Eastleigh: John Libbey Publishing, 2007).

6. Benayoun, ‘The Phoenix’.

7. Ado Kyrou, Le surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Arcanes, 1953).

8. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Boston: The MIT Press, 2001).

9. Alan Cholodenko ‘Introduction’, in Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007).

10. Cholodenko ‘Introduction’.

11. Georges Sebbag, Breton et le cinéma (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2016).

12. Karen Beckman, ‘Animating Film Theory: An Introduction’, in Animating Film Theory,

ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

13. André Breton, Lettres à Simone Kahn: 1920–1960, ed. Jean-Michel Goutier (Paris: Gallimard, 2016).

14. André Breton, ‘Max Ernst’, in The Lost Steps, trans. Mark Polizzotti (1996; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 61; emphasis in original. Also see Yvan Goll, ‘Exemple du surréalisme: le cinema’, Surréalisme 1 (1924).

15. Abigail Susik, ‘“The Man of these Infinite Possibilities”: Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages’, Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 1 (2011).

16. ‘Max Ernst, peintre des illusions’ is unedited and is part of a letter to Jacques Doucet dated 18 August 1923. It is reprinted in Aragon, Les Collages (Paris: Hermann, 1980).

17. Susik, “The Man of these Infinite Possibilities”. Paul Hammond, Marvellous Méliès (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). Aragon and Breton were probably aware that Méliès’s office was formerly located in the Passage de l’Opéra, and that he gave pre-cinematic performances at the Théâtre Grévin in the Passage Jouffroy (where, between 1892 and 1900, Émile Reynaud also projected the earliest animated films, Pantomimes Lumineuses, with his Théâtre Optique system) (these locations are mentioned in books such as Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and Breton’s Nadja (1928)). For an early surrealist reference to Méliès, see Salvador Dalí’s 1932 essay, ‘Abstract of a Critical History of the Cinema’. See also Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 3rd edn. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000). Animator Paul Grimault and former surrealist Jacques Prévert interacted extensively with the elder auteur before his death in 1938. Former surrealist Georges Sadoul encountered the auteur in the late 1920s and started writing about his films in the mid-1940s. Georges Sadoul, Georges Méliès (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1961).

18. Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Éditions Corréa, 1946).

19. André Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’, La Révolution surréaliste 4 (July 1925). For a translation of this text, see André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1928), trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002).

20. Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1925)’.

21. André Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’, La Révolution surréaliste 9-10 (1 October 1927) emphasis in original.

22. Breton, ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture (1927)’.

23. Max Ernst, ‘Visions de demi-sommeil’, La Révolution surréaliste (October 1927).

24. Georges Sebbag, ‘The Animated Painting of the Surrealist Dreamer’, in Surrealism and the Dream, by José Jiménez, Georges Sebbag and Dawn Ades (Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2013). See also Sebbag, Breton et le cinéma; Georges Sebbag, Foucault Deleuze: Nouvelles impressions du surréalisme (Paris: Hermann, 2015).

25. Dawn Ades, ‘Surrealism and Fantastic Art’, in Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, ed. Nicholas Hall et al. (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2019).

26. Alfred H. Barr (ed), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936).

27. André Breton, ‘La Peinture animée’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 2. Also see the notes for this entry.

28. Breton.

29. Breton.

30. Ades, ‘Surrealism and Fantastic Art’.

31. Breton.

32. Breton. Breton’s theorization of the cognition of animation prefigures Torre’s application of process philosophies to animation. See Dan Torre, Animation: Process, Cognition and Actuality (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

33. Salvador Dalí, ‘Surrealism in Hollywood’ [1937], trans. George Davis, Dali & Film, ed. Matthew Gale (London: Tate Publishing, 2007),

34. Dalí on American animators: Letter from Dalí to Breton, 28 December 1936, quoted in Mark Polizotti Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995); Dalí on Disney: postcard to André Breton, Feb.-March 1937, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

35. MoMA, ‘The Exhibition of Fantastic Art…’, [press release] n.d. MoMA Library. Quoted in Jorgelina Orfila and Francisco Ortega Grimaldo, ‘Fantasyland or Wackyland?: Animation and Surrealism in 1930s America’, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas vol. 11 no. 1 (September 20, 2020). For Eisenstein’s 1940s essay comparing Dalí with Disney in terms of protoplasmic anima (lifeforce, soul), see Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986). Also see Keith L. Eggener, ‘“An Amusing Lack of Logic”: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment’, American Art 7, no. 4 (1993).

36. Salvador Dalí, ‘Rêverie’, Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution 4 (December 1931). André Breton, ‘Accomplissement onirique et genèse d’un tableau animé’, Cahiers G.L.M. 7 (March 1938).

37. André Breton, ‘Le Château étoilé’, Minotaure 8 (June 1936). This text was incorporated into Part 5 of Breton’s book L’Amour fou (1937). On this subject, see Georges Sebbag, ‘Breton rêve de Domínguez’, in La Part du jeu et du rêve: Óscar Domínguez et le surréalisme, 1906–1957: exposition au Musée Cantini de Marseille du 25 juin au 2 octobre 2005 (Paris: Hazan, 2005). Also relevant is Breton’s discussion of the fixed-explosive and convulsive beauty in L’Amour fou. See Ramona Fotiade, Pictures of the Mind: Surrealist Photography and Film (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018).

38. André Breton, Mad Love = L’amour fou, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987); emphasis in original.

39. Breton, Mad Love = L’amour fou. Here I am influenced by my correspondence with Arnaud Maillet.

ABIGAIL SUSIK (Estados Unidos, 1977). Traduzido do inglês-Abigail Susik é uma historiadora de arte, crítica de arte, curadora e teórica americana de arte de vanguarda e contemporânea. A área de pesquisa acadêmica de Susik inclui surrealismo, dadaísmo, fotografia, filme experimental, animação, arte de protesto, arte erótica, arte de novas mídias e mapeamento de projeção. Susik escreve principalmente sobre surrealismo transnacional, movimentos de resistência contracultural e teorias antitrabalho ou abolicionistas, incluindo a história e a teoria da greve e sabotagem. É autora de um importante livro intitulado: Sabotagem surrealista e a guerra contra o trabalho (2021).

JULIA OTXOA (Espanha, 1953). Poeta, narradora y artista gráfica Entre sus últimas exposiciones : “Llocs de Pas” Espectáculo colectivo audiovisual-MACBA-Barcelona 2006, “Absinthe Review” Nueva York 2007; “New Sleepingfis Review”, Nueva York 2007; “Certamen Internacional de Fotografía Surrealista”, Eibar 2007; “Fragmentos de Entusiasmo”-Catálogo de la exposición Antología de la Poesía Visual española 1964-2006”-“Poesía Visual Española” (Antología) Editorial Calambur,Madrid,2007; “La Fira Mágica”, Exposición colectiva de Poesía Visual Ayuntamiento de Santa Susana Barcelona, 2007; “Homenaje a Manuel Altolaguirre”, Exposición Poesía Visual – Instituto Cervantes en Fez (Marruecos, 2007 ); “Miguel Hernández – Muestra de Poesía Visual” (Universidad Miguel Hernández-Elche, 2008); “Exposición libros de artista”, Museo de San Telmo San Sebastián, 2023; “Tres senderos que convergen”, Centro cultural Oquendo, San Sebastián. Julia Otxoa es la artista invitada de esta edición de Agulha Revista de Cultura.