The Shadow and its Shadow [Paperback]

Paul Hammond (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Here is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. Forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical essays document Surrealism’s scandalous and nonreductive take on film. The essayists include such names as Breton, Aragon, Desnos, Dalí, Buñuel, and Man Ray, as well as many of the less famous, though equally fascinating figures of the movement.

Table of Contents: Available light / Paul Hammond

Some surrealist advice / The Surrealist Group
War letter / Jacques Vaché
On décor / Louis Aragon
Cinema U.S.A. / Philippe Soupault
Battlegrounds and commonplaces / René Crevel
Against commercial cinema / Benjamin Péret
Buster Keaton's College / Luis Buñuel
Abstract of a critical history of the cinema / Salvador Dalí

The marvelous is popular / Ado Kyrou

As in a wood / André Breton
Picture palaces / Robert Desnos
Plan for a cinema at the bottom of a lake / Bernard Roger
The lights go up / Jacques Brunius
Surrealism and cinema / Jean Goudal
Introduction to black-and-white magic / Albert Valentin
Crossing the bridge / Jacques Brunius
Sorcery and cinema / Antonin Artaud
The screen's prestige / Jacques Brunius
Remarks on cinematic oneirism / Robert Benayoun
The cinema, instrument of poetry / Luis Buñuel
Malombra, aura of absolute love / The Romanian Surrealist Group
Data toward the irrational enlargement of a film: The Shanghai Gesture / The Surrealist Group

The film and I / Ado Kyrou
Cinemage / Man Ray
Another kind of cinema / Marcel Mariën
Intention and surprise / Nora Mitrani
The ideal summa / Petr Král
Turkey broth and unlabeled love potions / Gérard Legrand
The fantastic - the marvelous / Ado Kyrou
Concerning King Kong / Jean Ferry
Larry Semon's message / Petr Král
Hands off love / The Surrealist Group
Chaplin, the copper's nark / Jean-Louis Bédouin
Manifesto of the Surrealists concerning L'ge d'orr / The Surrealist Group

Zaroff; or, The prosperities of vice / Robert Benayoun
Eroticism / Robert Desnos
Eroticism = love / Ado Kyrou
Au repas des guerrières / Nelly Kaplan
Female x film =

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an ‘ethic’ of love, reverie and revolt." -- Sight & Sound

From the Publisher

Paul Hammond’s introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial — often Hollywood — cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order.

Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior — as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies.

As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle’s latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life — there, to provoke new adventures.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers; 3 Rev Exp edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087286376X
• ISBN-13: 978-0872863767
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "must" for film buffs, popular culture and art students., January 4, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Shadow and its Shadow (Paperback)

Now in a revised and expanded third edition, Paul Hammond's The Shadow And Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings On The Cinema gathers together a fascinating, informative, and challenging collection of writings by Surrealists on their love of, and involvement with, the movies. Here are to be found the writings of Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Salvador Dali, Many Ray and many others. This highly recommended compendium of commentary is a "must" for professional and academic film history, popular culture, and surrealism reading lists.