Surrealistic Images Research Articles

Air War and Dream: Photographing the London Blitz

This paper treats Lee Miller's photographs of the London Blitz as a species of dream, which is to say, the Surrealist's images are regarded as a special form of thinking in which the conflicts and horrors of the times are represented in an effort to discharge their destructive force. This treatment calls upon Freud's discussion of dream-work, but also upon Didier Anzieu and Wilfred Bion's later writings, which consider the defensive and protective qualities of oneiric life. Miller's photography, like dream, provides a glimpse into the interior dimension of human existence. The essay argues that this interior dimension provides protection not only from inner psychological and biological traumas, but also from social and political aggression. In the era of air war, photography provides a powerful tool of civil defense.

A Display Case for Everyday Wonders

Gunvor Nelson: most Swedes probably don't know the name. Even within Swedish film circles there has been a troubling lack of knowledge about Gunvor Grundel Nelson's importance to the medium. The University of Karlstad's 2002 hosting of an international conference and retrospective of Nelson's roughly twenty films and videos thus offered a welcome chance to introduce anew someone who is a leader within the international avantgarde. Nelson's work is deeply rooted in her homeland (and not least in her home town, Kristinehamn)-witness trace elements in many of the films she made even during the years she worked in California. The (characteristically bilingual) catalogue, Still Moving-I ljud och bild (Still Moving-In Sound and Image), published by Karlstad University in conjunction with the conference, with John Sundholm as editor, presents Gunvor Nelson's work from several points of view. It's clear how much in her life, as in her work, was unplanned, beginning with her study of art in the U.S. that led to her marriage to a San Francisco artist. Her work in film began almost accidentally as well: together with her friend and neighbor Dorothy Wiley (also married to an artist), Gunvor collaborated on the prize-winning Schmeerguntz (1963) (the title comes from her father's nonsense language: it's a homemade, German-sounding word for sandwich). Some argue that this film is an example of early feminist filmmaking; Nelson herself maintains that the film had no origin in feminist consciousness. For her it simply shows-sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes almost grotesquely-the physical experiences of women: we see pregnancy, morning sickness, the schmutz wiped from a baby's bottom, a discarded sanitary napkin, all cut together with advertising images of models and beauty contest contestants. At the time, San Francisco cinematheque curator Steve Anker wrote that Schmeerguntz created a rapidfire attack on the most cherished of all American icons: motherhood and the home.2 Nelson and Wiley's next collaboration resulted in Fog Pumas (1967). This film was also, in many ways, an attack on established conventions of film narrative, through characteristically surrealist images that undercut logical narrative connections while the film simultaneously conveyed a healthy, quotidian sense of comedy. The images joined together, tentatively, loosely, dreamily, absurdly. . . . Nelson begins to explore her own method of film expression in her next films (though she would also return to collaboration with Wiley). At first the results were uneven, as Nelson herself admits: . . . as I jumped into different projects I had to find what that particular film needed.3 Some viewers may have found her constant searching for new means of visual and auditory expression schizophrenic or a bit unstable.4 But the fact is that, over the years, this casting about has resulted in an impressive plainness and clarity of expression able both to cultivate repeating traits and to find new, unexpected, forms. Name Is Oona (1969) is one of the most memorable of her early films. Here Nelson's own daughter and a horse play leading roles. The sound track lingers in the mind, combined with the image track's dreamlike mystery: the insistent, rhythmic repeating of the title sentence, My name is Oona, Oona, Oona. Sound plays a key role in Nelson's later work as well, often in the form of peeled-off, dissonant resonances-vocal, instrumental, or everyday sounds-that either work together with the images or simply overpower them. With Nelson's films there is no clear hierarchy of expressive registers. The ten-minute film Take Off (1972) became a success: an obviously mature stripper is seen, first going through her anticipated routine, then stripping off her own body. One body part after another disappears as if in a Melies trick, calling silent film to mind. Take Off became the biggest success since Nelson's debut: clearly here, as in Schmeerguntz, she had brushed up against several touchy subjects and accurately sketched a portrait of the comparatively exposed position women occupy in commercial visual contexts. …

A Study on Multipurpose Fashion Design with the Motif of Surrealist Objects

Surrealism's method of expression and inspiration has been a continuous influence on fashion. What is important is how to identify and research a source of inspiration, and how to use this inspiration to guide the designs that can be worn on a real human body. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to show how to develop ideas and designs from Surrealist objects and how to contribute to the development of designs to the diversity in visual and functional effects along with the changes in consumer's interest. Documentary studies about Surrealism and Surrealist-inflected fashion applying the works of Surrealist and fashion images as a tool of historical research were proceeded. And the ideas for theme, the motifs for print patterns, and the concept of designs were borrowed from Surrealist objects touching on the imagery between the real and reflected, optical and artificial, and the designs were developed with several different visual and functional effects changing color, pattern, size, and length with the function of zippers in each item. It also gives the person wearing it amusement because it includes the concept of play and D.I.Y. With effective planning, it is possible to attract consumer's interest in the market.

Alice Neel's Portraits of Mother Work

The American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984), who is best known for her riveting portraits of public figures, also created a rich and remarkable range of images of mother work from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. Transgressing, parodying, and critiquing the Madonna and child genre and the social construct of mother as it shifted over most of the twentieth century, Neel consistently made the experiences of mothers, the interrelationship of mother and child, and familial relationships the subjects of her work. These images of mother work also included class and race analyses of mothering and family. They included a degenerate Madonna, macabre surrealistic images of babies, her daughter-in-law as a first-time mother anxiously holding her squirming infant, a breastfeeding Haitian mother and her disabled child, many intimate portraits of Neel's own children and grandchildren, families from her neighborhood in New York's El Barrio and from the primarily white art world.

The Graywolf Annual Four: Short Stories by Men ed. by Scott Walker

372 Western American Literature Once aLegend. By TackCummings. (NewYork: Walker and Company, 1987. 182 pages, $16.95.) “It was tough, lusting after the wife of the man who’d been my idol.” This observation by Drew Hardin, 25-year-old naive narrator of this formula West­ ern, reveals both the principal focus of this novel and its often wooden diction. Hardin rides into Staffold, Arizona, in 1915 to meet legendary manhunter Frank Ladd, whose fame rests on his capture of railroad robber Ike Tolbert. Tolbert has just been released from his 20-year prison sentence and has imme­ diately murdered his judge. Ladd, learning of Tolbert’snew crime the very day young Hardin arrives, determines to capture Tolbert again. Drew hopes to witness this second capture, especially when he sees Lola, Ladd’s 35-year-old wife of “well-formed figure” who once was a trick-shot artist. The trio head north, catch up with Tolbert, who then escapes through a cave filled with “bat pee,” and encounter Indians before finding their man in Colorado. Finally old Ladd outwits a modern young sheriff and manages, with the help of Lola (“Little Sure Shot”) on two dramatic occasions—well, you can imagine the outcome. Although the author of five other novels, Cummings falters here. The too obviousplot and the shallow characterizations preclude even enough credibility for sheer escapism. Drew Hardin knows only what he has read from books and expresses his learning woodenly: “I read a book about how mercenary women are.” He expresses vaguely his disillusionment with his hero: “He had made some mistakes in judgment that had had their effects.” Lola says to an Indian of sixth-grade education: “You must be a matriarchal society.” Yet Lola is potentially the most interesting character; all the action swirls around her. In short, this $16.95 progeny of powder-burners, despite an effective chase scene in the penultimate chapter, fizzles. The effect of change in the West is an old theme, seen in works as various as Frederic Remington’spainting The Fall of the Cowboy and Elmer Kelton’s most recent novel. If you want to see this theme handled with skill that evokes real interest in characters and actions, ignore this mediocre formula Western and read instead Kelton’s The Man Who Rode Midnight. BOB J. FRYE Texas Christian University The Graywolf Annual Four: Short Stories by Men. Edited by Scott Walker. (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988. 226 pages, $7.50.) This volume of thirteen stories proves a welcome addition to Graywolf Press’sreputation for handsomely published and easily affordable samplings of noteworthy new fiction. Like its fine companion volume, The GraywolfAnnual Two: Short Stories by Women, almost all of the stories in this fourth annual have been previously published in magazines or collections. Reviews 373 Richard Ford’s “Great Falls” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Car­ ried” are the best examples of the understatement and gentle insight that run throughout most of the tales in this collection. Ford’snarrator recallshis experi­ ences as an adolescent boy watching through a series of ambiguous episodes the break-up of his parents’marriage. Ford’s achievement is that he manages to identify clearly and simply the subtle and sudden forces that can change the course of a life forever. O’Brien’s story depicts a platoon of young soldiers in Vietnam “humping” a burdensome load of physical and emotional baggage across mountains, through jungles and into ambushes, stopping only to joke away their fears or dream of loves left behind. Ultimately, the objects carried in their packs become symbols of the men themselves, as their fading photo­ graphs and assortments of weaponry become physical manifestations of their hopes, horror and courage. Other stories, such as William Kittredge’s “Phantom Silver,” are more boldly imaginative in their approach and evocative in their imagery. Kittredge transforms the legendary figure of a Lone-Ranger-type Western hero from a rescuer of the innocents into an aging, incestuous shell of a man, mutilated in form, whose silver bullets fire impotently into the onrushing tide of the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. Frederick Busch’s “Dog Song” similarly employs brutal, almost surrealistic images in...