Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9:1 (2016), i-iii

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Anemic Cinema: Dada/Surrealism and Film in the Americas
Introduction to the Cinema Issue
Samantha Kavky
Pennsylvania State University

In 2015 two JSA editors chaired a session at the annual College Art
Association conference on the topic of Dada/Surrealism and Film in the Americas.
The proposal, reproduced below, attempted to set some limitations on such a broad
topic:
No visual medium seems as close to surrealist theory, or
as conducive to realizing surrealist aims as film, particularly in its
ability to transform photographic reality into signs of dream and
desire simulating the psychoanalytic structure of the unconscious.
While surrealist inspired themes yield a rich legacy within American
filmmaking, the impact of surrealist theory can also be found in
more experimental formal considerations and investigations of the
potential and limitations of the medium itself. Much of this formal
experimentation comes out of the Dada movement with the work
of Hans Richter, Viking Eggling and Marcel Duchamp. Marcel
Duchamp’s six-minute film Anemic Cinema (1926) presents a sequence
of spinning “rotoreliefs,” painted records that create optical illusions
of depth and protrusion when spun; the series also features nearpalindromes of punning phrases that induce a similarly expansive
effect in language. Duchamp’s playful interrogation of “depth” and
dimension as cinematic illusions— as mechanical by-products of the
cinematic process of turning a reel— begins to suggest the critical
possibilities of his notion of “anemic cinema.” The term, itself a
near palindrome, alludes to the productive flatness and limitation of

Samantha Kavky: bsk10@psu.edu
Copyright © 2016 (Samantha Kavky). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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the cinematic medium: dimension, depth, and even poetic [or erotic]
enjoyment are calculated effects, rather than imaginative wellsprings.
One question this session poses is: to what extent does
such “anemia” characterize the work of surrealist film, and Dada
or surrealist-inspired film, in the Americas? That is, how might the
limitations of the cinematic medium, rather than the illusory allinclusiveness of its effects, be instrumental to American surrealist
filmmaking, broadly conceived? From the early experiments of Man
Ray to Luis Buñuel’s work in Mexico and Salvador Dalí’s work in
Hollywood; from Maya Deren, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Kenneth
Anger to Guy Madden and David Cronenberg; how does surrealist
film approach the conditions of its medium? And in line with recent
publications such as Bruce Elder’s Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic
Effect, what might be the reciprocal impact of film on the movements
themselves? We invite papers that investigate the relation between
Dada/Surrealism and film in the Americas, and encourage a wide
range of topics, including but not limited to the legacy of Surrealism
on experimental film, as well as on the commercial movie industry;
films produced by Surrealists or their associates; or the influence of
Dada and Surrealist art and thought on the medium.
Despite this attempt to narrow the field, we received an extremely wide range
of submissions. Maybe that should not have been surprising. The papers included
in this special Cinema Issue of Journal of Surrealism and the Americas bears witness to
this heterogeneity of responses. The three papers published here diverge widely in
their methodologies, style, and topics of inquiry, a divergence that poses a challenge
to presenting a coherent issue, and indeed, in formulating this introduction. Robert
Belton offers an intriguing study of the 1928 filmic collaboration of Man Ray and
Robert Desnos, L’Etoile de mer. His paper presents a refreshingly candid account of
the sometimes tortuous process of iconographic analysis necessitated by the layered
symbolism and references in this canonical surrealist film. L’Etoile de mer combines
surrealist themes such as dream, desire and the Freudian unconscious with Dada
visual effects in what Belton calls the opposite of Anemia, a sort of polythemia, a
proliferation of meanings including the political. The relevance of the film to the
Americas resides not only in the nationality of Man Ray, but also in the surprising
results of Belton’s analysis. The other two papers authored by Ana María León and
Bruce Elder travel forward in time to the mid-century emergence of Surrealism
in a 1948 Argentinian architectural film La Ciudad Frente al Río directed by Enrico
Gras, and in the works of San Franciscan poets and filmmakers during the 1960s,
respectively. León moves from architecture to film to psychoanalysis, demonstrating
how each medium played a role in manipulating the Argentinian public to accept

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an “image of a utopian Argentina invented by Perón.” Elder also investigates the
influence of Surrealism on utopian visions in the experimental film and poetry
of American counter-culture. As disparate as these topics may be, some of the
links between them emphasize several core elements of Surrealism, including its
adaptability and flexibility across disciplines.
If we think of the pulsating disc of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema as akin to
a kind of focus, adjusting the view of the camera, zooming in and moving back
out, each paper enacts a similar movement: honing in on significant details, then
expanding outward to the larger social and political context. This telescoping
movement emerges as something inherent to the surrealist project. By attempting to
link the depths of the individual psyche with cultural, social and political revolution,
Surrealism sought to collapse the personal and the political. In all three examples
of surrealist or surrealist inspired works analyzed here, Surrealism positions itself in
opposition to modernism with its images of order and efficiency—and aligns itself
with a series of alternatives: the erotic, the childish, the hysteric, and the mystic.
Yet in each case, these subversive elements are not limited to the interiority of an
individual psyche, but through film, become public and communal propositions.