I made this video while in my senior year at Harvard. It served as my creative final project for a history class on Surrealism. In addition to the video, I also wrote an explanatory essay, featured below.

My video, Play with Me, is my personal, creative response to the surrealist texts, films, history, art, and theory we have studied in this class, as reflected in its structure, tone, content, and themes. From the start, I knew I wanted to make a video as my final creative project. As we have discussed in class, film was and is often viewed as the most accurate of mediums to fully embody surrealism for its ability to express dream-like scenarios without explicit plot, logic, linear structure, or even the familiar languages already known and spoken (which I do use, in part, in my video, in small ways), but instead a reliance on metaphor, suggestion, and visual and aural interplay. Filmic language is a language unto itself, and films like Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy, and several others were of particular inspiration in the execution of my own creation.

I. The Whole

The framework for my video (a medium with which I am more familiar than with film, and one that is more democratic, in a way, for its equipment accessibility and editing freedom) is steeped in surrealism, but also in Dadaism (and even futurism, if only for the emphasis that technology, specifically digital video, plays upon the product). The very title suggests a major tenet of Dada -- that of provocation and play. The guiding force of the video is in the deck of cards that herald this statement (a set of novelty picture-cards from the 1940s, which feature nudie girls, as evidenced by the first card drawn) that are utilized in a game without logic or rules; all that is certain is that an unseen force is shuffling and choosing a card, and the selection then determines the next causal event. This almost Tarot or fortune-telling angle ties into surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington and her fascination with mysticism, which stands in opposition to standard religions, which are certainly rebuffed in such surrealist film works as The Seashell and the Clergy and L’age D’or. This element of slightly sinister spirituality, and its reliance upon fate and random effect, also ties into Hans Arp’s works with chance. While I, the creator, knew what card I would plant or impose onto the deck to determine my next scene, the randomness of my choices may seem based not on choice, but on chance; the unpredictability only emphasizes the seemingly haphazard, but very calculated, motions associated with the shuffling and selection of cards, which determine the future, if only of my video. (These cards, however, were, in the end, somewhat based on chance. The owner of the house I shot in, a friend of mine, heard my intentions for my video and offered up his collections of cards. From these sets available, I chose the ones I would use in my video. Thus, despite some tailoring on my behalf, the cards I chose were somewhat based on chance, that of the available cards from which I might choose. It was perhaps good luck that from his available cards I found ones that suited my video’s outline and plan perfectly.)

The overall structure, however, while propelled by the cards, is somewhat based upon Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy, whose foundation and plot is also episodic in nature. In the film, each dream is masterminded by a different artist, and the dreams that ensue begin with the distortion of an object and person exhibited in the lead-in scene, and then the dream spirals off into far more independent complexity, until the initial impetus is often left far behind. (Several of these dreams served as individual inspirations, but I will delve into that more specifically when I discuss the different parts of my video more thoroughly.)

Thematically, I see the entire video as more a study of heimlich/unheimlich, the familiar made unfamiliar, and the home turned into a place of dread and danger. I emphasized this point, which I believe is made most clearly in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (a film, like mine, inspired by surrealist ideas, though not made during the original era), in the setting of my video. (Cocteau, too, in the perversion of his home art studio, and exploration within a temporary home, a hotel, also succeeds in this aim marvelously.) The mise-en-scene for all of the card sequences is on the same oilcloth-covered kitchen table, and could even be the same kitchen table at which she and her two “twins” sit, trying their lot to see who receives keys, and who a knife. All of the other sequences happen (although less obviously) in the same house, some even in the same room. I employed familiar household objects and fixtures (a refrigerator, pushpins, a bread plate), but used them in distorted, unlikely ways. Thus, I perverted their meanings to make unsavory entities that otherwise might not have had connotations at all.

What is most necessary to mention is that my video is certainly a video, utilizing sound and motion. With regards to the sound, running throughout the entire video are musical segments, in seven parts, titled “Masks and Voices,” part of a greater project called “Voiceworks” (1992) by avant-garde composer David Cunningham. I chose the piece for its classical, yet unconventional structure, somewhat Gothic tone, jarring yet fitting rhythms, and the segmentation of the short pieces, which I coordinated with different parts of the video. I thought it somewhat fitting that the pieces had title like “magic words” and “not speech,” when I had hoped to create a sense of magic and new language interplay within my video. Further, Cunningham’s utilization of many other voices and found sounds reflects in my video through my use of selective influences and culled inspirations.

As for the motion, it is not typical to moving pictures. In effect, I have made pictures move by the use of stop-motion animation, a technique that surrealist filmmakers we have studied used (like in many of Maya Deren’s work, as well as Cocteau’s), but also signatorial of a more modern surrealist, a personal inspiration to me, modern surrealist Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. He uses toys and childlike materials (clay, dolls, socks, stuffed dead animals) and his home settings, whether artificial or “authentic,” to develop absurdist situations, most particularly evident in my favorite work, Alice (1988), which is his own version of Alice in Wonderland. In that work alone he delves into the objects of a stilted Victorian childhood, Freudian theories and dream interplay and representation. Thus, I think he ties in directly with the surrealist film lineage we have established, and I regard him as a stepping-stone between the older film history studied and my own work.

In addition to the Svankmajer emulation, one of the effects of my choice to utilize stop-motion animation was to pay homage to photography, both “straight” documentation and even “trick” photography that we have studied, through the use of mirrors, spatial and optical illusions. My video could almost be a series of still photos set in quick succession, almost a flipbook of sorts, for none of the effects I created were done in post-production, with a few subtle exceptions. (At times I fade sounds or dissolve from one scene to another, or hold a freeze frame for prolonged exposure to an image, but otherwise there were no post-production special effects.) This reliance upon the captured image and its juxtaposition with other images or artistic elements (through disjunctive editing, or even just linear editing) I believe creates a bridge between old technologies and newer ones that my generation (and even the past generation, for video is only about 30 years old) can use in our artwork.

Further, the omission of (seen) human intervention serves to create a new sense of agency for my objects, and brings inanimate items to life in their own, unconventional ways. By their very nature, objects are objectified and used against their will, but in my video, objects act according to their own laws within a mini-world that is bounded by the cards and their resulting actions and the confines of the home. The traditional function of the objects is eliminated, a new motivation is adapted, and thus a new order is created.

II. The Parts

This new order is cultivated by the episodic series and their interplay with each other to create a whole in-video world, as well their individual merits and mysteries.

My video begins with the “Play with Me” card deck being shuffled and one card being picked out of the deck, presumably by chance. The card is the only one shown in the video that actually belongs to the “Play with Me” deck, and is of a naked blond woman posing coyly with a decorative mirror that covers part of her face, somewhat obscuring her identity. Next, we see a fake ponytail moving on its own from the sidewalk, up the front stairs to a house, and then across the front porch into the house’s entrance. The naked woman (who, to me, links to the featuring of women, particularly nude women, in surrealist photography, and the questions of objectification versus admiration), with her mirror, represents elements of vanity, which I see as furthered by the independent hair extension, which serves an exclusively superficial, and supplementary, purpose. The door opens for the ponytail, indicating that the house may have a will of its own, or that the ponytail has a mind of its own, without even having a mind connected to it. Further, that a ponytail, a term linked to Carrington’s writings and paintings, and a concept that would once be thought of as exclusively natural, but now is completely synthetic and unconnected to horses, has independent life and propels the video from outside to inside, is no coincidence.

The next card drawn is from a set of magician and magic-themed cards, and features a severed head resting upon a sword that is propped upon an armchair. This show of head-related disembodiment continues the theme established by the ponytail, but furthers it by use of optical illusion and the introduction of magic and supposed heresy. The episodic event that this card fosters is my own take on Marcel Duchamp’s illusory art toy the Rotorelief. Instead of directly imitating his work, however, I instead chose to make my own, as inspired by elements previously set forth in my video. I use a turntable to create the motion, but instead of making a paper optical illusion, as Duchamp did, I use sequins, which to me connote the glitzy costumes used in magic shows, but also tie into the vanity associated with the first card. I use dissolves and different lens focuses to emphasize the colors and patterns of the sequins, and thus create an illusion out of the materials. Rather than emphasize their temporal, “real” qualities, I instead work with light and optics of motion to dizzying effect (which is what Duchamp intended in his works).

The next card is from a German history set (which in itself ties into Dada and surrealism’s post World War II notions) and features soldiers gathered around a corpse. This card leads into (surprise!) my own exquisite corpse, made with the help of some friends. In my video, I make the motions occur as they would, but without the human interactions that make the pictures appear. Thus this scene ties into the last one of illusion and creation without obvious, but implied, agency. The card and the picture create a wordplay link to “exquisite corpse,” but an actual exquisite corpse is created, which, by chance, ends up being a somewhat personified creature (or “corpse”) itself.

The next card brings in some of my favorite standard surrealist elements (doll parts and legs, as related to Hans Bellmer), but also ties to the idea of parts of a corpse, as well as to toys and Alexander Calder’s circus, and even to Fernand Leger’s mannequins in motion. The card is from a horrors of war series, and features occupants of a plane trying to float on the water on which the plane has crash-landed or attempting to swim to safety. The action with which this coincides involves a pair of small doll legs kicking about in a jar of jam within a refrigerator, seemingly part of a person who is drowning within the jam. In addition to tying into the card, this also is a direct reference to Benjamin Peret’s writings, in which he is an advice columnist of sorts, offering consolation to a woman whose sister has just died by drowning in jam. Also, the fact that a refrigerator is supposed to keep things fresh, and instead is the housing for a dying, deteriorating “person,” perhaps keeping her “alive and kicking,” seems an interesting swap of expectations and purpose. Finally, I put the context of this occurrence within the house, and use my own techniques to create animation, and thus put my own spin on a concept (“death by jam”) created by a truly inspiring surrealist writer.

The last card is a rather childish one, from an animals series. I chose the vulture because in my attempts to emulate surrealist artists, I could seem as though I were just picking through the detritus of past artists and consuming elements I wanted for myself. I also liked the idea of a childhood object entering into the video, as surrealists do admire the imaginations of children and madmen. The event that transpires is then of a fake cake box, which represents a kind of perversion of the table and the anticipated food that would be on it, especially in relation to dead (or never alive) food that vultures would eat. The pushpins are the innards of the cake, which is my own version of Man Ray’s “The Gift,” but instead of an iron ripping up a shirt, a tasty-looking cake instead serves as a kind of Halloween candy cautionary tale, with pushpins inside to harm the person who takes a bite. The fact that the cake is fake is also a twist on the proverb, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too” -- my attempt to represent a proverb in a somewhat distorted way, much as the surrealists did. The pushpins are also a sort of connection to talons or pecking beaks, but also are a throwback to Alice/Alice in Wonderland in which eating cake or cookies led to size changes, as portrayed by the pushpins’ actions. Further, pushpins are seemingly overlooked office supply objects, so I decided to give them new purpose and motion that would otherwise not be anticipated or envisioned.

Finally, the plate upon which the fake cake box rested is the final backdrop for the conclusion of the video, in which the destruction of the order created in the video signifies a circular act, that of a closed system that exists only in the video, a circuit that runs and then self-destructs, the end of a dream that ends as illogically, yet seemingly sensically, as it began.

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contact: allison.tanenhaus at gmail.com