At the beginning of my research, I frequented Eric Losfeld's bookstore assiduously, and, while discussing with this extraordinary publisher, I had gotten my hands on a book he had published under the "Arcanes" label in the "Ombres blanches" collection, that of Ado Kirou. His way of appreciating all films by closing his eyes seduced me and revolted me at the same time. In fact, his approach to surrealist cinema was indispensable, even if it made me laugh with its unnuanced assertions. I had the opportunity to talk about it directly with him in 1964. He had nothing to take back from his essay. Forty years later, with access to the films he was dealing with, and especially the analyses on the subject having multiplied, it was time to give the floor to amateurs and scientists who envisaged the question less radically. Finally, if cinema is characterized above all by the adaptation of literary works, it must be recognized that surrealism is characterized by its inadaptation...

See on this page the journal Mélusine No. 24

The surrealists are the age of cinema. Growing up with it, they are above all cinephages. Everything in cinema was made for them to agree with joy. And yet, they were quick to declare themselves "robbed as in a wood". Taking up this dossier on new terms, the present volume questions certain cinematographic productions of the surrealists: The Seashell and the Clergyman (Artaud), The Pearl (Hugnet), The Golden Age (Buñuel and Dali); on their unfilmed scenarios; on the undoubtedly surrealist aesthetic at work in other films produced outside the movement, on their avowed or unavowed posterity.

Table of contents:

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See:

Isabelle Marinone: Anarchism and Cinema, Panoramic View of a History of the 7th Art (PDF)

The Surrealists in and Around Cinema (PDF)

French Cinémathèque

Surrealism in Cinema by G. Modot

Alain and Odette Virmaux (1988)

Ado Kyrou, Surrealism in Cinema, New Edition, Ivtrea, 2005:

Extensions:

"Burlesque Cinema, Another Origin of Surrealism". Thesis Defense by Charlotte Servel (dir. N. Piégay & L. Le Forestier, Paris Diderot)

Dominique Rabourdin, Surrealist Cinema, Nouvelles éditions Place, 2017,

Alain Joubert, The Cinema of the Surrealists, Maurice Nadeau, 2018

Buñuel, Ferreri, Fields, Forman, Greenaway, Hitchcock, Jarmusch, Kubrick, Polanski, Prévert, Renoir, Sternberg, to name just these... If there is not strictly speaking surrealist cinema, these directors have nevertheless reflected the state of mind of the surrealists. Alain Joubert chose to present in this work one hundred and sixty-two films from the twenties of the last century to 2015,— famous or less known — where the desire to revolutionize human understanding pierces through.