Kristoffer Noheden

Magic Art Between the Primitive and the Occult: Animal Sacrifice in Jan Švankmajer’s Drawer Fetishes

This chapter considers the Czech artist Jan Svankmajer and the six ‘drawer fetishes’ he created in 2014–2015. The drawer fetishes are positioned within the context of Svankmajer’s general tendency towards alchemical transmutation of everyday objects, and the chapter argues for a reading of them as magical objects with the double effect of changing the world and transforming life. Indicating a wealth of surrealist forms of magic and art magic still to be excavated by scholars, the chapter underscores the continued relevance of surrealism’s turn towards occultism and magic as alternative paths to rationalism and reason, and as vehicles of radical transformation, even as discourses of (post-)colonialism and modernist primitivism are brought into the analysis.

Initiation into the New Myth: Primitivism and Poetics in the Surrealist Documentary Film

This chapter traces the manifestations of surrealist myth and magic in the surrealist documentary short films L’Invention du monde and Quetzalcoatl, le serpent emplume . The films were made by Jean-Louis Bedouin and Michel Zimbacca, with narratives written by the poet Benjamin Peret. The chapter places the films in relation to the surrealist contribution to the documentary film, and discusses how they bring a surrealist poetics into play with a primitivism reformulated under the influence of surrealism’s search for a new myth and an intensified exchange with surrealism’s non-Western others. Caribbean surrealists, including Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, and the surrealist occultist Pierre Mabille are significant names in this development.

Magic Art and Minor Myths: Jan Švankmajer’s Transmutation of Material Reality

This chapter discusses the Czech animator, artist, and filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s films in relation to his cultivation of a personal mythology, interest in alchemy, and attempts to create a magic art. It places Svankmajer’s films in the context of other surrealist uses of animation, including those of Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, but argues that they are best understood in relation to his own work across the art forms. The chapter shows that Svankmajer negotiates between Czechoslovak surrealism’s focus on concrete irrationality and French surrealism’s assertion of the importance of myth and magic. The result is a creation of minor myths that can be understood as instances of what Gaston Bachelard calls the material imagination.

Surrealism Is What Will Be: Nelly Kaplan’s Myths of Revenge

This chapter discusses how Nelly Kaplan’s feature films bring the surrealist search for a new myth into a new historical context as well as into a new film format. Kaplan is most well known as a pioneering feminist filmmaker, but this chapter shows that her films also contributed to the surrealist search for a new myth and a magical transformation of society. Kaplan made her feature film debut A Very Curious Girl at a time when several surrealists, including Ado Kyrou and Robert Benayoun, turned to feature filmmaking, under the influence of Luis Bunuel’s late films. Kaplan combines an appeal to popular genres with narratives about revenge against patriarchy in ways that resonate with surrealism’s new myth, but which also brings it into contact with feminism and eroticism.

Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth

This book examines post-war surrealist cinema in relation to surrealism’s change in direction towards myth and magic following World War II. Intermedial and interdisciplinary, the book unites cinem ...

The Artist-Magician as Filmmaker: Wilhelm Freddie’s Films and the New Myth

The Danish artist Wilhelm Freddie made the two experimental short films The Definite Rejection of a Request for a Kiss and Eaten Horizons together with the filmmaker Jorgen Roos in 1949 and 1950. This chapter examines Freddie’s films in relation to the development of the surrealist short film, his participation in Le Surrealisme en 1947 , and his organization of the rarely discussed 1949 exhibition Surrealistisk manifestation in Stockholm. The chapter also discusses how Freddie’s films coincided with his “esoteric period,” and consequently examines how they relate to magic, occultism, and surrealism’s search for a new myth, and so brings in Walter Benjamin, Eliphas Levi, and Andre Breton in the analysis.

The Imagination of Touch : Surrealist Tactility in the Films of Jan Švankmajer

This article is a theoretical examination of tactility in the Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajers film Down to the Cellar (1983). Švankmajers deployment of tactile images in a surrealist context shows the need for a discussion of the imaginations role in the embodied film experience. Departing from Laura Markss The Skin of the Film, this article seeks to explore the surrealist embodied imagination through surrealist poetics of analogy, as defined by André Breton, and the link between these and Walter Benjamins writings on mimesis. Finally, the film is viewed from the perspective of Gaston Bachelards ideas of “the imagination of matter,” where matter is seen as a highly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelards notion of the imaginations multisensory properties further lends credence to Švankmajers aims to liberate the imagination of the spectator through images that invoke touch. Kristoffer Noheden is a PhD candidate in cinema studies at the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University. In his dissertation, he examines surrealisms attempts to create a new, re-enchanting myth with a focus on its expressions in surrealist cinema. He is the co-editor, with Daniel Brodén, of the anthology I gränslandet: Nya perspektiv på film och modernism (Gidlunds, 2013). He is also the translator into Swedish of books by William S. Burroughs, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, and others, and co-runs the surrealist-oriented publishing house Sphinx.