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Cinema is dead. But alas, its funeral is afar.
The advent of cinema was a cause for excitement; a horizon of possibilities. Today, mainstream cinema offers little. In a state of monopolised control, Western screens are littered with recycled narrative structures enshrouded by idealism, presenting nothing more than glorified representations of society. This thriving, capitalist-driven industry is, however, becoming increasingly transparent. Behind the façade of advanced technology is a predictable fantasy-land devoid of humanity. A land where no thought or reflection is encouraged; a land of passive experience.
As mainstream cinema’s stolidity becomes apparent, other art forms are providing an alternative. This is evident with the popularity of the recent exhibition ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’ at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), which provided a chronological overview of a movement that counteracted a conservatism very similar to the state of cinema today. The Surrealists attacked rationality with avant-garde approaches as a means to reunite the unconscious and conscious realms of experience.1 Antonin Artaud, an early Surrealist, hijacked cinema as a medium for exploration and developed a film theory that transcended the conventions of the time, and indeed, that remains relevant to cinema today.
Artaud is best recognised for his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, an art form that encapsulated austere physical exertion and a non-verbal language that lay on the boundaries of thought and gesture.2 His aim was to liberate instinctual energy within the spectator and uncover the underlying brutality of human existence. His film theory is closely linked to these ideas and originated as a reaction to realism in film, which he believed simply mimicked real-life experience through systems of cinematic codes. Artaud believed this hybridisation of literature... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline