(This panel brings together two seminars– Surrealist Narratives and Feminized Minoritized Bodies, Displacement and Independent/art ‘World’ Cinema. We see overlaps in our seminars in the way surrealist aesthetic codes continue to inform literary, cinematic and visual texts.) 

Over a century has passed since Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and yet surrealism persists, albeit in various guises and a variety of media. This seminar will explore surrealist narratives across eras and cultures. In so doing, we take inspiration from Anna Watz’s approach in A History of the Surrealist Novel, which “seeks to challenge critical biases that have defined surrealism in predominantly masculine and European terms,” and emphasizes the long reach of surrealism, from prior to 1924 and into the twenty-first century. 

Surrealist narratives, with both of those terms broadly defined, may refer to the canonical European texts of the mid-twentieth century, or may go much further afield, to consider, for example, medieval dream visions, oneiric films, AI as a form of automatic writing, and weird fiction. “Narrative” is also to be interpreted widely, including novels, films, television shows, and new/digital media, and narratological approaches, particularly as surrealism intersects with unnatural narratology. 

In cinema, particularly art, and independent ‘world’ cinema, surrealist practices may take on forms and gestures like long silences, muteness, and mark the enigmatic, unspeakable, unanswerable, and untranslatable, and aesthetic conventions that might be likened to the Deleuzian time-image. While the Deleuzian understanding of the time-image involves extended waiting times where nothing happens, where actors behave like spectators, and where paralysis, immobility, and muteness signal a break from the action-image, the seminar’s additional focus on minoritized/feminized bodies considers such aesthetic practices in terms of the status of such bodies in many ‘art’/world cinema films. In some instances, these qualities and aesthetic conventions appear to offer alternatives to commercial/popular cinemas. In others, global ‘mainstream’ and popular ‘world’ cinemas, surrealist narratives have been dismissed as ‘weak’ cinema. The value and function of surrealist aesthetics, and whether these offer narrative a more emancipatory course for feminized/minoritized bodies may be considered. In asking about the surrealist narrative trajectories of different world

cinemas, considerations of the infrastructure/economic networks and production practices of different world cinema cultures are also valuable.