Monday, March 19, 2007

The Devil We Know




Faust (1994) - d. Jan Svankmajer (b. 1934)


'In proposing a new etiquette for seeing, Surrealism often harks back to Romantic and occultist cosmologies which posit a latent harmony beneath the discontinuities of the world's surface. Always eager to startle and often to mystify, Surrealism typically postulates bewilderment as a precondition of insight. Its approach to creativity tends to grapple with jagged elements of disparity, of prolixity, of sheer unprocessed excess, in the hope of eliciting a more thrilling - because delayed - vision of equilibrium and clarity. A Surrealist typically distrusts any revelation which lacks a complementary aura of enigma: the naked truth cannot be embraced without its veils.'

From Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Svankmajer by Roger Cardinal