Surrealism; Daisies and Everything Everywhere all at once

A few weeks ago I wrote an Essay about surrealism. this is that essay

“We have succeeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as superstition or myth; and we have prescribed every way of seeking the truth which does not conform to convention.” (Breton, 1924, p. 1)

The Surrealism movement was announced in 1924 by Andre Breton. It was an attempt to override the conformity and logic that has become present in art instead preferring to use dreams and automatic writing. The first surrealist film, “The Seashell and The Clergyman” was released in 1928 and was quickly followed by a barrage of others, A notable example being Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966), a banned Czechoslovak film about two girls who decide that nothing matters. Surrealist films often play with the film medium a more so than that of classic Hollywood, They use episodic structures, play with time and use jump-cuts, a character can be in an apple orchard one second and then an apartment the next whilst still continuing the same dialogue. In contemporary film we see links back to the surrealist art form, major production companies such as Disney or Universal use tricks from Surrealist film especially in regards to editing, but keep it mostly realistic, however in recent years with the popularity of multiverse films, directors have been allowed more control to lean into surrealism, companies like A24 have a lot more control creating several films heavily inspired by surrealism, but one stands above the rest, Everything Everywhere all at once (2022). Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have created a visually stunning film that retains the Spirit of Surrealist film.

Andre Breton was an avid enthusiast of Sigmund fraud’s Freud's studies of the unconscious mind. in his first surrealist manifesto he Breton states, “if the depth of our minds conceals strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is our greatest interest to capture them” (Breton, 1924, p. 1). During the tail end of World War 1 Andre Breton started to meet with several other writers and artists to chase these goal and started the movement of surrealism. The surrealists invented a process called “automatic writing”, where you put yourself in a psychological bubble on the verge between consciousness and unconsciousness to try access the ideas in the depths of their minds thereby blocking out the restrictions and taboos of the world.

Surrealism soon fell into two camps, Verbal and Visual. Verbal was concerned with poetry and novels, mediums where time can be played with whilst visual was concerned with photography and paintings where space can be manipulated, however goal of emulating dreams required the surrealists to find a way to combine the two. “The main reason surrealists turned to film was to unite the two divergent directions of the verbal (temporal) and visual (spatial) arts in the most perfectly “automatic” of textual productions” (Williams, 1981, p. 14). in 1918 Pierre Reverdy among other surrealist poets had started to investigate the medium of film and its applications to surrealism, they started to write manuscripts for films however in the limited avant-garde film circuit of the time none were produced. a decade later Germaine Dulac’s film “the Sseashell and the Cclergyman” was released followed soon after by several other surrealist films. As the surrealist film is based on the model of dreams and Dreams aren’t often aligned to the laws of reality allowing this allowed the directors of surrealist film to use editing techniques classic Hollywood would never dare to cutting scenes and shot together without worry for the internal logic of the film. In Dulac’s film, a clergyman wrestles with his own erotic imaginings and society's constraints, (Bradshaw and Gilchrist, 2007) opposing society is a common theme of surrealist films, especially in the 1966 film Daisies.

Daisies (1966) is a prime example of surrealism; it is a film by Vera Chytilova a notable Surrealist and Czechoslovak new wave director. Many of her films were banned by the Czech government and because of that many have never seen the light of day. Daisies was banned because it shows wasted food and promiscuous women and was seen as an attack on establishment values and therefore was banned (Final Girl Studios, 2022). In 2006 it was rediscovered and re-released. The film follows two girls both called Marie as “they play a game of “it matters? It doesn’t matter (‘Vadi? Nevadi”)” (Hannes, 1985, p. 211). the story is told in an episodic structure, most of the scenes could be moved around and the story would still be the same. Chytilova said in an interview “We Decided to be bound by nothing absolutely nothing. We would free ourselves of all the implications of the story and keep only the dialogues very precise and very evocative, which would remain absolutely fixed, these dialogues assured us of a base, they guaranteed that we would not abandon the meaning of the film, they were in a sense the guardians of that meaning” (Rivette and Delahaye, 1968, pp. 72) Chytilova wanted the primary goal of the film to be a commentary of societal norms rather than telling a cohesive story.

Jaroslav Kucera the cinematographer and Chytilova’s husband said in regards to the colour of the film “I wanted to use color concepts to disparage a lot of things, I had no intention whatever of arousing an aesthetic impression of beauty. But somewhere, early in the game, it turned out that the structure of things with respect to each other created aesthetics whose results I didn’t expect at all” (Liehm, 2018, pp. 253) An example of Kucera’s use of colour is the First Restaurant scene, it starts in black and white as the Marie’s see it as boring, however when they start eating the colour starts to rapidly change along with rapid jump cuts creating “the impression of a meal of interminable length” (Hannes, 1985, p. 217) Before the train it jump back to greyscale when the man says that Marie 2 can’t come with them, it soon changes back when Marie 1 leaves the train and the girls are together again. There are also several fragmenting effects especially in the final apartment scene where the girls cut each other up and the screen displays fragmented shots with someone’s head on one part of the shot whilst their body is on the other side of the frame, this is essentially the conclusion to the theme of self-destruction present throughout the film. Overall Daisies uses lots of surrealist techniques to make us question the taboos of the world.

surrealism has left a lasting impression on the film and wider arts industry. surrealist films such as Daisies (1966) often have dance/musical sequences, the second scene of Daisies sees the Marie’s dancing around a tree. This translates to the contemporary Musical film such which contains dreamlike spaces where the characters create musical numbers such as in “I’m Just Ken” from the Barbie movie (2023), the scene has the kens fighting on a beach using normal objects such as tennis rackets or donuts as weapons. There are also lots of references to surrealism in the current trend towards multiverse movies, The Marvel cinematic universe even credits “Dreams as windows into the lives of our multiversal selves” (Raimi, 2022) an idea that is in line with the surrealist movement. No film shows this more than the critically acclaimed film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere all at once.

Everything Everywhere All at once, follows the story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) “A middle-aged Chinese immigrant who is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led” (IMDb. n.d.). The film contains lots of surrealist imagery at one point Evelyn goes to a universe where everyone has sausages for fingers or when Joy (Evelyn’s daughter) kills a guard using a sex toy. while the basic editing of surrealism is present it uses the film’s internal logic of the multiverse to justify it, Evelyn and Joy fight whilst universes change around them flashing the viewer with different colours and images similar to how Kucera uses colouring in Daisies. Everything Everywhere All at once also shares the theme of “nothing matters” common among surrealist films except it takes the opposite view to the majority of surrealist media claiming “"If Nothing Matters, Then All the Pain and Guilt You Feel Goes Away." (Kwan, D., & Scheinert, D. 2022) rather than the nihilistic angle of Daisies, Kwan and Scheinert show us nothing matter and therefore we should live.

“I seek the gold of time”

Andre Breton’s tombstone

Andre Breton died on Wednesday the 28th of September in 1966, 93 days before Vera Chytilova released Daisies and 55 years later A24 released Everything Everywhere all at once a film ripe with surrealist themes perfectly translated into the modern era. It is clear the surrealist movement has heavily affected film and art as a whole. The editing techniques created by surrealism are still present today and the themes of “nothing matter” are uttered in the books and films of the present. Breton and the surrealist movement has enhanced contemporary cinema creating some of the best pieces of cinema in the last 50 years.

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