As in a Wood

René Clair, Entr'acte (still), 1924.

Written in 1951 for the surrealist journal L’Âge du cinéma, André Breton’s essay “As in a Wood” reflects on cinema’s postwar drift toward theatrical conventions and insists on cinema’s potential to disorient and re-enchant perception at a moment when standardization threatened to dull its force, leaving a statement that still resonates with later avant-garde and experimental practices.1 

For my part it would be to gainsay myself, to disavow what conditions me in my own eyes, what appears to affect me beyond measure, to disown, as is customary, the disappointments wrought by the cinema, that form of expression one has been able to believe in to a degree greater than any other called upon to promote "real life."

In an era of inhumanism, when most writers consider it an honor to be "engage," that is to say, in contempt of all that could qualify them spiritu­ally (in the true sense of the word), when they opt for one of two contrary camps, each of which muses on the extermination of the other; when painters who have made a constant profession of atheism herald their work on religious on religious edifices;2 when for a whole hour on 28 September, under the title "The Variety Cup of France," French radio can inflict upon its listen­ers a concert given by "artistes" from the Prefecture of Police, complete with an Inspector's monologue, an air from Pagliacci, a bit of piano play­ing by a handcuffed man, a Prevert poem recited "from the heart," and a choir of "tiny singers from the pointed tower" (sic), in an era like this I don't think the cinema is a genre about which there are grounds for par­ticular outcry.

I have never deplored the incontestable baseness of cinematographic production except on an altogether secondary, subordinate level. When I was at "the cinema age" (it should be recognized that this age exists in life—and that it passes) I never began by consulting the amusement pages to find out what film might chance to be the best, nor did I find out the time the film was to begin. I agreed wholeheartedly with Jacques Vache in appreciating nothing so much as dropping into the cinema when what­ever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and leaving at the first hint of boredom—of surfeit—to rush off to another cinema where we behaved in the same way, and so on (obviously, this practice would be too much of a luxury today). I have never known anything more magnetizing: it goes without saying that more often than not we left our seats without even knowing the title of the film, which was of no importance to us, anyway. On a Sunday several hours sufficed to exhaust all that Nantes could offer us: the important thing is that one came out "charged" for a few days; as there had been nothing deliberate about our actions, qualita­tive judgments were forbidden.

Nevertheless, it happened that certain "comic" films claimed our atten­tion: they were, of course, by Mack Sennett, the first Chaplins, certain Al St. Johns. At this period I recall putting on an unrivaled footing a Diana la charmeuse in which a beautiful actress in the title role moved bewitchingly through a landscape of innumerable towers (it is useless to dwell on this: at this remove I only see a wasteland between the towers—magnificent). All we could grant of fidelity used to go to those serials previously so de­cried (The Exploits of Elaine, The Laughing Mask, Les Vampires): "Beginning on Saturday, on this screen, episode XIX: 'The Creeping Glove'—You can count on us."

We saw in the cinema then, such as it was, a lyrical substance simply begging to be hauled in en masse, with the aid of chance. I think that what we valued most in it, to the point of taking no interest in anything else, was its power to disorient.

This disorientation works on many levels, I mean to say, it admits of different degrees. The marvel, besides which the merits of a given film count for little, resides in the devolved faculty of the first-comer to abstract him­self from his own life when he feels like it, at least in the cities, as soon as he passes through one of the muffled doors that give on to the blackness. From the instant he takes his seat to the moment he slips into the fiction evolving before his eyes, he passes through a critical point as captivating and imperceptible as that uniting waking and sleeping (the book and even the play are incomparably slower in producing this release). How come that the solitary spectator I have in mind, lost in the middle of these face­less strangers, at once takes up with them that adventure which is not his and is not theirs? What radiation, what waves, perhaps not resisting at­tempts to map them out, permit this unison? One dreams of what might be undertaken by means of this constellation, so that it lasts. . . . It is a way of going to the cinema the way others go to church, and I think that, from a certain angle, quite independently of what is playing, it is there that the only absolutely, modern mystery is celebrated.

As to this mystery there is no doubt that the principal contributions made to it are love and desire. "Every week, for 150 million human be­ings," writes Rene Clair,3.  "the screen speaks of love. . . . And we may won­der if these representations of love are not one of the essential charms of the cinema, one of the secrets of the enchantment it exerts on the masses. . .. " One is surprised that he is not more sure of the fact. What is most specific of all the means of the camera is obviously the power to make concrete the forces of love which, despite everything, remain defi­cient in books, simply because nothing in them can render the seduction or distress of a glance or certain feelings of priceless giddiness. The radical powerlessness of the plastic arts in this domain goes without saying (one imagines that it has not been given to the painter to show us the radiant image of a kiss). The cinema is alone in extending its empire there, and this alone would be enough for its consecration. What incomparable, ever scintillating traces have films like Ah! le beau voyage or Peter Ibbetson left behind in the memory, and how are life's supreme moments filtered through their beam! But even if elsewhere the tension is much less sustained, noth­ing can alter the fact that on the fringe of the least dedicated as well as the emptiest lives the curve of a beautiful arm will reveal long shores of light. 

The temptation is so great to make this disorientation last and to in­crease it to an impossible degree that it has been able to tempt my friends and me along the path to paradoxical attitudes. To be precise, it is a ques­tion of going beyond the bounds of what is "allowed," which, in the cinema as nowhere else, prepares me to invite in the "forbidden." And what if one chose to remain forever in this arbitrary but changing world which—just as it is—is worth so much more than the other. . . ? It is somewhat within this perspective that it came to me to evoke the time when "with Jacques Vache we would settle down to dinner in the orchestra of the former Theatre des Folies-Dramatiques, opening cans, slicing bread, uncorking bottles, and talking in ordinary tones, as if around a table, to the great amazement of the spectators, who dared not say a word.”4

(The moment I cited this passage I thought of a Declaration printed by Malcolm de Chazal, dated Curepipe, Mauritius, 25 September 1951, of which this forms the conclusion: "The Sense of Night revealed is what gives the Key to the Opening. There is no other key, there cannot be one. Be­cause the Secret of Success consists solely in breaking up antinomies. And only the Night has this power." The cinema is the first great open bridge which links the "day" to this Night.)

Always on the track of increasing disorientation, there was a time when I sought delectation in the most miserable cinematic productions. I used to find myself most at home with French films: "I have always been greatly attracted," I noted one day, "to the treasure of imbecility and vulgar eccen­tricity which, thanks to them, manages to sparkle weekly on the screens of Paris. For my part I swear by the French screenplay and French acting. With them one is assured of at least being able to amuse oneself resoundingly (as long as it is not, of course, a 'comic' film, then human emotion in its need for extreme exteriorization may be found there).”5 "A superdisorientation is to be expected here, not from the transference of a normal act from everyday life to a place consecrated to another life, which it profanes, but between the "lesson" the film teaches and the manner in which the person receiving it disposes of it. I speak in Nadja of a naked woman totally preoccupied with herself in the sidestalls of the Electric Palace (quite undressed, seen from the central stalls): she would have seemed to me to be of a less phosphorescent whiteness if she had not appeared during the projection of a film of unlim­ited insanity in which everything was used as a pretext to show the "Lord's Table." This was the work of a priest who signed himself Peter the Hermit, and I think the film was called How I Killed My Child.

One sees that as far as the cinema is concerned I remain comfortably "on this side," so that praise or complaint accorded such and such a film has little relevance. Nevertheless, that does not prevent me from pronounc­ing myself "for" or "against" and from defending such judgments with passion if need be. A hand is taken, then, in the necessary game of feelings and ideas, a game which can only be nourished and maintained by what is offered it. At this point it is fitting to make the best of a bad job. Once again social, ethic, and aesthetic criteria hungrily dispute their quarry.
 
Here as elsewhere one cannot refrain from a certain nostalgia for the idea of what the cinema might have become, and to allow that the sordid­ness of the epoch, together with certain conditions—worse than the oth­ers—of its "exploitation," were enough to clip its wings as soon as it flew the nest. I see Charles Fourier as a revolutionary only to the degree that he maintained and made sensible the idea that the whole cultural develop­ment of humanity has been effected in a sense which does not respond to any internal necessity, but only from pressures which might as well have been others, and differently exerted. Furthermore, such a conviction does not involve anything that revokes human success at any level, but accuses its strictly contingent and thereby larval character. And it is within our compass to perceive the original means of the cinema and to judge the more than parsimonious use to which they have been put. Twenty-five years have rolled by since Monsieur J. Goudal, in the Revue hebdomadaire, brought to light the perfect adequacy of these means for the Surrealist expression of life second by second. Nowhere else but in the cinema could we be fitted to receive that Key to the Opening which Chazal speaks of, which can make the mechanism of correspondences operate as far as the eye can see. But, of course, to keep to a theatrical type of action has been preferred. You can judge the result from these words, which I borrow from a professional: "I confess that today I rarely go to the cinema. Most films bore me, and I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is going on. It's invariably necessary to explain the plot to me afterward."6 

"We know now," I have had occasion to say, "that poetry must lead somewhere." The cinema had everything it needed to subscribe to that view, but taken together—let us be specific: where its controlled activity is concerned—the least one can say is that it has not taken a single step in that direction. 

1951