TOYEN PÉRET DVD
October 26, 2015
Two new films and two of the best from the Phares collection, animated by Aube Elléouët, are dedicated to intimates among André Breton"s intimates, his "faithful" throughout their lives, Benjamin Péret and Toyen. Breton"s friendship and admiration for "Benjamin the impossible" from the early twenties, evoked in the first pages of Nadja, were as indestructible as Péret"s for Breton and Péret and Breton"s for Toyen. We are here at the very heart of surrealism, of what has never ceased to make its worth.
TOYEN THE ORIGIN OF TRUTH
By Dominique and Julien Ferrandou
BENJAMIN PÉRET POET THAT IS TO SAY REVOLUTIONARY
By Rémy Ricordeau.
Seven doc 2015, 93 and 94 minutes, 23 euros
Her great discretion and her refusal of any form of compromise long prevented Toyen from occupying in the constellation of surrealist painters the place that belonged to her, one of the very first. The director in this collection of films on Yves Elléouët, Alice Rahon, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, Dominique Ferrandou, respects once again the usual chronological and didactic model, too restrictive for a woman who made all conventions explode. We follow step by step the great stages of the life of this very young woman who became, with Jindrich Styrsky, one of the emblematic figures of the Czech avant-garde: her participation in Devĕtsil, the stays in Paris from 1925 and the discovery of surrealism in all its novelty. In 1927, "in opposition, she writes, to realism and naturalism" her painting evolves towards "artificialism", which she defines as "the identification of the poet and the painter." This is all the more important, her friend Radovan Ivšić specified, "...that the whole of her activity can be considered as a true defense and illustration of this youthful intuition. For through the very diverse aspects of her painting, Toyen never ceased to testify to this total identification of painter and poet." One of the great interests of this film is to reveal major works from this decisive period.
After Breton and Éluard's visit to Prague in 1935, Styrsky, Toyen and their friends Nezval and Teige participated in the international publications and exhibitions of surrealism. During the Nazi occupation, Toyen was on the list of intellectuals to whom all public manifestation was forbidden. After the Stalinist regimentation of her country, she no longer had the possibility of working there freely. A young surrealist who chose to live in Prague today, Bertrand Schmitt, well placed to know what was happening under a totalitarian regime, recalls it in a way that sends chills down the spine: "In 1946, Paul Éluard returned to Prague, André Breton was still in the United States, and Toyen asked him for news of André Breton, saying: "But what becomes of André?" and Paul Éluard let her know that she had to choose, it was either him or André Breton, and Toyen chose and said: "In that case it"s André Breton." And Paul Éluard said to her: 'If that"s how it is, I"ll do everything to destroy you.'"
In 1947, she had no other choice but exile. With Jindrich Heisler, another major figure of Czech surrealism, she settled in Paris, which she would never leave. Until the dissolution of the group in 1969 she fully associated herself with all its activities, including political ones. She illustrated the journals, poems and books of Breton, Péret (who affectionately nicknamed her "baroness"), Octavio Paz and newcomers like Gérard Legrand, Elie-Charles Flamand, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Radovan Ivsic and Annie Lebrun. Perhaps this film would have remained wisely classic if some of those who had known how to surround her throughout her life, who remained close to her after Breton"s death, had not participated in a decisive way. They did not come to tell a few "picturesque" anecdotes, nor to show off their knowledge. They are poets and speak of what is essential to them, freedom, love, poetry. Georges Goldfayn, one of the animators of L"Age du cinéma with Robert Benayoun and Ado Kyrou, the youngest of the group in 1950 when he met Toyen to become one of her intimates (she entrusted him with the choice of titles for her paintings), had always refused to express himself in front of a camera. He came out of his silence because he has the conviction that what he knows about her, and about Péret, he is today the only one who can transmit it. In front of Annie Lebrun, he puts all his energy, all his conviction, hammering his words, to explain the attitude of the magnificent woman who said loudly: "I am not a Painter!" "I tried, he explains, to show you the determination and strength with which Toyen expressed herself, to specify that she had this singularity of being what she was, but it was by defining herself as a person who was not a painter. Yet she had all the technical means of painting, she was extremely attentive, fussy in the use of all technical means associated with painting, but she did not define herself as a painter. This means that she was referring to the fact that she had a poetic activity. Her specific singularity: it was that she was a poet." "Breton had found the words to salute Toyen, whose face medaled with nobility I can never evoke without emotion, the deep trembling at the same time as the rock resistance to the most furious assaults and whose eyes are beaches of light..." The beauty of this film is that it does not content itself with showing – a little too classically — her admirable paintings, her great cycles of drawings and her exquisite pornographic fantasies, but that it gives the floor to those who had known, admired and loved her and shared her demands, because they themselves were poets, like her.
"What is surrealism?
It is the beauty of Benjamin Péret listening to the words family, religion and homeland."
That a film entitled Poet that is to say revolutionary opens with these words of André Breton is a strong sign. For one of the main participants, Guy Prévan, author of Péret Benjamin, permanent revolutionary, and himself "full-time refractory", "these three words that united Breton and Péret and others of course, were poetry love and freedom. It is with freedom that one can make the joint, poetry supposes freedom, that"s why it doesn"t like honors. Politics as Péret conceived it also had as its objective "freedom, to achieve freedom". So to "change life".
In publishing in New York, in 1943, under the title The Word is Péret"s his preface to the Anthology of Myths, Legends and Popular Tales of America, Breton saluted "a spirit of unalterable freedom that has never ceased to be endorsed by a life singularly pure of concessions". Rémy Ricordeau, the director, knows Péret enough not to open the lukewarm water tap. His film is anything but "wise" and "well-thinking" because it only involves those who have known and understood this man who died in 1959, more than 55 years ago. The youngest are — perhaps — 80 years old, but they speak of a man who beautified their life as no "specialist" will ever be capable of doing. Thanks to them, this film is up to its title: Poet that is to say revolutionary.
Almost all were part of the surrealist group around Breton (and Toyen). Their presence is a challenge to time: Georges Goldfayn speaks of Péret as if he had left him the day before: "There is no being who has so completely identified with poetic activity, with what he calls intuitive knowledge. There is no being who has been so much as him." Michel Zimbacca sees Péret again writing the inspired commentary for the film The Invention of the World. Jean-Claude Silbermann admires that "in Benjamin automatism found its raison d"être in poetry itself". Alain Joubert clearly defines Péret"s positions at the crucial moments of his life, the Spanish war, prison, exile in Mexico, political struggles, and shares with Guy Prévan, who speaks as a political militant of the militant Péret, the role of narrator. Maurice Nadeau is a young man in 1939 when the responsibility of Clé, the journal of the FIARI – International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, founded by Breton and Trotsky, which nevertheless had two issues before the war, is entrusted to him under Péret"s control, of whom he keeps a better memory than of Breton. I attended in 2012, a few months before his death, the filming of what must be his last interview, 75 years after their meeting. He was over 100 years old: "I didn"t take him for a surrealist like the others finally. Because he was a surrealist who worked and earned his crust. Finally he had a job. The others could live from paintings, from thingamajig, I don"t know what, I never wanted to know. But he, he was in the concrete, in life. That"s it."
Breton is present with his voice, his Radio Interviews, the reading of Nadja and some extracts from his (unpublished) letters to Péret, including that from New York, May 26, 1943, where he congratulates his "Very dear Benjamin" on the preface to his future anthology, which he will publish all business ceasing:
"You have written a text of the utmost importance, this preface. It's even the first time that you decide to express yourself in a manner other than strictly poetic, despite my instances of 20 years. And it"s better than a success: you give at the first stroke, as I have had many occasions to say and as everyone has agreed with enthusiasm around me, the first great manifesto text of this era, what we can call between us a masterpiece."
The floor is also largely given to Péret himself with recordings for radio and his poetry, jubilant when it is said by Breton and Pierre Brasseur, another accomplice of the twenties. His words appear on screen, many short texts punctuate the film. Poetry gushes in continuous jets, "like from a spring". And we take the time to listen to essential passages from his great "manifestos", including the splendid Dishonor of Poets: "The poet has no duty to maintain in others an illusory human or celestial hope, nor to disarm minds by instilling in them unlimited confidence in a father or a leader against whom all criticism becomes sacrilegious. On the contrary, it is for him to pronounce the always sacrilegious words and the permanent blasphemies [...] He will therefore be revolutionary, but not of those who oppose today"s tyrant, harmful in their eyes because he disserves their interests, to praise the excellence of tomorrow"s oppressor of whom they have already constituted themselves the servants. No, the poet fights against all oppression: that of man by man first and the oppression of his thought by religious, philosophical or social dogmas. He fights so that man reaches a knowledge forever perfectible of himself and the universe".
We are not surprised that such remarks could earn their author solid enmities, which did not die out with his death. Jacques Prévert then had the opportunity to take his defense: "Benjamin Péret, he was a complete poet, who never wrote things halfway. He held to his ideas, his friendships, his dreams. Benjamin Péret, he was and he is always Benjamin Péret."
"What"s the use of lowering your head if the sky is high?", he wrote to Toyen.
Postscript: The Association of Friends of Benjamin Péret, 50 rue de la Charité-69-002-Lyon, which supported Rémy Ricordeau"s film, has just published the fourth of the Benjamin Péret Notebooks, with files on Benjamin Péret's Brazil and on André Breton and his surrealist friends in Saint-Cirq Lapopie, as well as an important unpublished work in French, Blacks on Whites in Brazil, written in 1934 for Nancy Cunard"s famous Negro Anthology. And The Enraged Rusts, published long ago under the pseudonym of Satyremont, finally find their original title, The Enraged Balls, at Prairial editions. 72 pages, 8 euros.