Leveling the world: Metaphor and deshumanización in the cinematic dissolve

Abstract

José Ortega y Gasset’s essay “La deshumanización del arte” (1924) describes the distinct mode of perception that he attributed to the modern artist. According to Ortega, the avant-garde artist views all entities—from inanimate objects to human beings—strictly from the outside, perceiving only the “lights, shadows and chromatic values” that constitute an entity’s visible surface. This form of seeing engenders a leveled vision of the world in which the presence or absence of inner experience is irrelevant, and subjects and objects are thus rendered equivalent. Ortega and likeminded avant-garde poets considered metaphor to embody this mode of vision because it posits similarity among patently disparate beings and things; through metaphor, the differences in category that separate two compared entities are shown to be less significant than their shared esthetic qualities. This article investigates the relevance of the cinematic technique of dissolve—in which two images are briefly superimposed so that one appears to change smoothly into the other—to Ortega’s concept of dehumanized metaphor. I examine the role of the dissolve in Un chien andalou (1929) in order to demonstrate the function that it served for Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and other filmmakers inclined toward Orteguian dehumanization. By joining together and implicitly equalizing human beings and things on the basis of their visual likeness, the dissolve employed the same strategy as verbal metaphor but was able to convey more vividly the lack of differentiation between subjects and objects.

Keywords:

• Dissolve
• dehumanization
• Un chien andalou
• metaphor
• Spanish avant-garde

Notes

Notes

1 As Geist points out, with the publication of “La deshumanización del arte,” Ortega did not discover or create the phenomenon of dehumanized art within the Spanish avant-garde. The essay can be considered a significant work of criticism on the avant-garde, because it articulates a proclivity that had been palpably present within Spain’s art scene for several years; the value of the essay is that it identifies, describes and explains this proclivity as no other theorist or critic had previously done. One noteworthy example of dehumanized art in the years prior to the publication of “La deshumanización del arte” can be found in the work of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose greguerías (first published in 1911) frequently posit humoristic equivalence between subjects and objects on the basis of their visual likeness. The effect of the publication of Ortega’s essay was both to bring greater clarity and awareness to an existent trend and to encourage more artists to engage in this form of art; in the years following the publication of the essay, dehumanization experienced a boom in popularity.

2 Salvador Dalí constitutes just one example of the tendency of artists within the Spanish avant-garde to engage prolifically in a multitude of genres and to draw inspiration from the conventions and possibilities of many different art forms. Dawn Adès notes of Dalí’s work during the avant-garde period that “there is a constant triangulation formed by the flow of film, painting and text” (“Why Film?” 14).

3 It is important to note that Ortega also had political reasons for championing art that dispensed with a subjectivist, human-centric viewpoint. Dehumanized art, which gives the viewer no familiar point of entry with which to understand and identify with the artwork, is inherently less comprehensible to the average viewer than the mimetic representation characteristic of Realism. Much of the essay is devoted to Ortega’s celebration of “el arte nuevo” for appealing only to a narrow “minoría selecta” of highly educated intellectuals; for Ortega, a large part of dehumanized art’s merit lay in its ability to separate members of this superior minority from what he considered to be the uncultured masses.

4 Ortega’s concept of dehumanization is not limited to transformations of human beings into objects, but also encompasses the abstraction, stylization and denaturalization of objects that fall within the category of “lo humano”: the world as it is viewed and experienced from a human-centric position. In the above quote describing dehumanization, Ortega includes the example of a house being abstracted into a stark, foreign shape. Although this example does not involve a human figure changing into something inanimate—it presents the transformation of an object into another object—it accomplishes the goals of dehumanization because it strips the subjective qualities associated with “home” from the image of the house. As the house is pared down to a minimal assemblage of straight lines, it ceases to present itself as a refuge of safety and comfort and becomes as unfamiliar and value-neutral as any other abstract shape. This transformation satisfies Ortega’s desire for dehumanization because it provocatively dispenses with the subjectivist lens that imbues certain objects with the meaning and emotions they hold for human beings. While this article focuses specifically on the transformation of subjects into objects, it is important to note that for Ortega, dehumanization’s “flight from the human” can also include the aestheticizing and distancing of objects that carry special meaning for humankind.

5 De Torre also concurred with Ortega’s concept of dehumanization and considered “La deshumanización del arte” to accurately convey the artistic motivations underlying his own Ultraism and similar poetic movements such as Creationism. Within the pages of Ortega’s essay, “hemos encontrado la reproducción o, mejor, la vertebración orgánica y aun la corroboración de varias ideas y numerosos puntos de vista que llenan el plano teórico de las vanguardias […]. La teoría de la ‘deshumanización’ del arte enlaza fraternalmente con las teorías creacionistas” (“Problemas y perspectivas” 278).

6 In affirming the god-like character of the modern poet and exalting the poetic image that has no precedent in the real world, Cansinos Assens articulates the principles underlying Huidobro’s creacionismo movement. This movement was heavily influenced by the ideas of Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, both of whom promoted artistic imagery that constituted creation rather than reflection of reality. In The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations (1913), Apollinaire emphasizes the modern painter’s necessity of seeing himself as a god endowed with powers of genesis: “Above all, the painter must contemplate his own divinity” (10); “Only photographers manufacture duplicates of nature” (11); “Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it aims, not at an art of imitation, but at an art of conception, which tends to rise to the height of creation” (17). Similarly, in a 1918 article, Reverdy characterizes the modern poetic image as that which brings together previously connected entities: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It is not born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more distant and true the relationship between the two realities, the stronger the image will be. […] One can create […] a powerful image, new to the mind, by bringing together two distant realities whose relationship the mind alone has grasped” (qtd. in Williams, Figures of Desire, 3).

7 See, for example, Gwynne Edwards’s A Companion to Luis Buñuel (2005), which extensively analyzes Un chien andalou as an illustration of Buñuel’s impulse toward aggressivity and his interest in shocking the public, his sexual anxiety and association of sex with death, and his hatred of the church and other bourgeois figures of authority.

8 Not all critics are in agreement that the function of the hand-sea urchin-armpit-crowd sequence is primarily to underscore the similarity of shape between otherwise unconnected entities. Raymond Durgnat (1977) interprets the sequence as a psychoanalytic commentary on the convergence of masculinity and femininity: “If we take these four shots as visual metaphors, the equation is: mutilated hand equals woman’s armpit, i.e. castrated male genitals equals vagina. But the concave symbols (hole in hand, armpit) are transformed into convex ones (sea-urchin, top of head) in a steady recrudescence of masculinity. But it is on a female basis, and linked with feebler forms—the lowly animal, the intellectual” (27). Matthew Gale (2007), similarly, reads a sexual allusion in the repetition of spiky, hairy shapes: “The film’s fade between a sea urchin and a hairy armpit […] is allusive of pubic hair.” Gale connects the ambiguity here between armpit hair and pubic hair to a subsequent instance of dissolve: “The other passage in the film involving underarm hair—in which the man’s mouth is haired-over and the woman checks her armpit—also carries over some of this perverse and disturbing sexual tension” (87).

It is indeed possible that this sequence contains some degree of semantic meaning (that is, a connection between the images that goes beyond the purely formal coincidence of shapes). My claim is that, while a semantic connection among images joined by the dissolve may exist, the function of the dissolve is to subordinate any semantic meaning to the images’ visual similarity. In other words, the dissolve communicates the idea that all inner, non-aesthetic characteristics of the depicted entities are much less significant than their outward appearance; the viewer may remain aware of the semantic meaning of the sequence, but the dissolve’s effect is to make this meaning seem insubstantial and irrelevant. Ortega addresses this aspect of metaphor in “La deshumanización del arte” when he declares that, as the new art effectuates a “triumph over the human,” “es preciso concretar la victoria y presentar en cada caso la víctima estrangulada” (366). The “strangled victim” in the case of the dissolve sequence is the perception of each element in the sequence (the hand, the sea urchin, the armpit and the crowd) as beings and things that contain meaning and embody specific qualities, rather than mere aggregates of “lights, shadows and chromatic values.”

9 The introductory sequence of Un chien andalou also serves the goals of deshumanización by diverging from the human-centric point of view that is typical to most artworks. Williams points out that metaphor traditionally functions by beginning with a human image and employing an image from nature as the second term in the metaphor, the purpose of which is to deepen the reader’s or viewer’s understanding of the initial term. In Buñuel and Dalí’s film, this order is inverted: “Here it is precisely the element that usually appears to be the artificial or consciously constructed part of the figure—the ‘background’ moon and clouds which would in a more typical metaphor function to comment upon or embellish the diegesis—that occupies the active diegetic position of the metaphor, while what we would expect to be the more dominant diegetic element—the cutting of a human eye—functions as the embellishing commentary of the figure” (“Dream rhetoric” 94). The fact that the human drama in this sequence succeeds rather than precedes the inhuman images suggests that the inanimate objects in the scene hold greater importance than the human characters; the mutilation of the eye seems to exist only to complement the more significant figures of the moon and cloud.

10 For further reading on the connections between Dalí and Buñuel’s cinematic work and their pre-film literature, see Agustín Sánchez Vidal’s commentary in Luis Buñuel: Obra literaria (1982) and Antonio Monegal’s Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine: Una poética del objeto (1993).

11 One small but interesting point of connection between “La meva amiga i la platja” and the dissolve sequence of Un chien andalou is that both involve sea urchins: in the prose piece, the frenzied activity of the ants on the painting of the baby causes it to “move with the silent, anesthetized motion of sea urchins.”

12 Foix’s poem also shares with Dalí’s text a bizarre confusion among items of vastly different sizes: Foix’s poetic speaker is unable to tell the difference between a horse, human figures, an enormous structure that “covered half the sea with its shadow” and an umbrella. This aspect of the technique employed by both writers is especially redolent of the dissolve, given that in film, the juxtaposition of images of large and small entities that take up the same space in the camera frame creates the illusion that they are the same size. In Un chien andalou, for example, the smooth transition from the sea urchin to the woman in the middle of the crowd induces the viewer to momentarily forget that the latter is several orders of magnitude larger than the former.

13 “Paintings like Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood [1927], and especially Little Ashes [1928] do seem to be trying to achieve in paint effects more natural to the manipulative possibilities of the camera and photographic techniques: superimpositions, montage, fades and dissolves […]. In Little Ashes, for instance, the lumpen pink torso seems to be dissolving, metamorphosing, from one form to another” (“Morphologies of Desire” 142).