Thread: Hello from a Surrealist

Hey Laby! So, what kinds of surrealism are you into? I love various kinds of surrealism in movies, stories and art - going all the way back to the beginnings with Dali and Buñuel in Un Chien Andalou, plus of course Dali's paintings, through more recent incarnations such as the films of Jan Svankmejer and the Brothers Quay, up to cartoonish surrealism like Tim Burton or Monty Python. I've done a fair bit of automatic writing and come up with some pretty interesting stuff, but some of it just went in sort of ridiculous circles. Seems like you have to remain fearless and as soon as you interject a bit of caution or get afraid of what's being revealed it sort of slams the door shut and it loses its spark.

I also find that the various incarnations of artistic surrealism tend to be built on a particular flavor of current ideas concerning the unconscious. Example - in the automatic writings or the paintings of a given period, people tend to produce a lot of the same kind of imagery or ideas over and over, based on what they expect to find in the depths of the unconscious owing to the popular theories of the day. I don't mean to knock surrealism, I just think it's really hard to go in exploring there without some pre-ordained ideas of what you're going to find. I've even found that my own ideas about it have evolved over the years and what I find there now is different from when I used to be for instance influenced more by Freud (now it's largely Jung).

Who are some of your favorites, and some interesting things you've discovered about Surrealism and dreams?