Ethnographic Surrealism

Life is a madness.

Andre Breton, realized that there is that aspect that is normally ignored. In his "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924) Breton mentions that the slight madness in our actions is in an "incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts..." (Breton). Surrealists have a mission to reveal a "madness that one locks up" (Breton). However strange that Breton is defending the insane calling them "victims of their imagination." And with this acceptance to take this mission Breton wrote "On no account will [they] view them as his salvation."


For some reason it makes to have a surrealistic method of filming life. Most of what we see in our everyday life will oddly misconstrued into our subconscious. In James Clifford's essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" he wrote, "An ethnographic surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness--the unexpected" (Clifford 145).This can best be expressed in the film "Un Chien Andalou." The film practically places a blitzkrieg of attacks--that within each new frame there is a new image that does not connect to the previous and will not connect to the future image. Yet in the film there is a possibility to analyze and see a plausible message of life in it. The general idea being, responsibility, love, and loss.

Continuing forth with the text Clifford wrote, "At issue is the loss of a disruptive and creative play of human categories and differences, an activity that does not simply display and comprehend the diversity of cultural orders but openly expects, allows, indeed desires its own disorientation" (140). I can agree with this according to art and in the procrastination of life. The first aspect art, was explained through the author Chuck Palahnuik, when I saw him speak once. He explained that his best writing came through sleep deprivation and moments of disorientation. For some students, in the second aspect, disorientation is when their mind can think the clearest.