Grandville the Precursor

Abstract

This 1934 essay casts the nineteenth-century graphic artist J.J. Grandville as a precursor of surrealism, Walt Disney and George Méliès. Mac Orlan claims that his primary motivation in writing the piece is to connect Grandville and cinema, exemplified here by the Technicolor Disney Silly Symphony, The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934). This essay, which touches on its author’s signature theory of a “social fantastic,” carries a certain supplementary value in having been included in Walter Benjamin’s preparatory materials for his Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, assembled between the late 1920s and his death in 1940.

KEYWORDS:

• Pierre Mac Orlan
• J.J. Grandville
• Walt Disney
• George Méliès
• graphic humor
• “social fantastic”

Notes

1. For discussion of Vuillermoz’s, Jeanne’s and Faure’s responses, see Kristian Moen, “‘The Miracle of Our Century’: Sergei Eisenstein, Élie Faure and Colour in the Silly Symphonies,” Screen 54, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 383–9; for Diebold’s response, see idem, “The Future of Mickey Mouse (The Animated Film as a New Cinema Art),” Art in Translation 8, no. 1 (2016) (this issue); for discussion of Stokes’s, Haskell’s and Asquith’s responses, see Michael O'Pray, “Eisenstein and Stokes on Disney: Film Animation and Omnipotence,” in Jayne Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies (London: John Libbey, 1997), 195–202; and for Benjamin’s response, see Walter Benjamin, “L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée,” Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung V (1936): 40–68 [in English, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), in Selected Writings, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–33.

2. This is due to the few English translations of Mac Orlan’s writings being limited almost completely to texts dealing with photography: see his preface to Atget, photographe de Paris (New York: E. Weyhe, 1930), later reproduced alongside idem, “The Literary Art of Imagination and Photography” (1928) and idem, “Elements of a Social Fantastic” (1929), in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 41–9, 27–30 and 31–3, respectively.

3. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).

1. Mansion is the pseudonym of Léon-André Larue (1785–1834).

2. Published posthumously in 1848.

3. Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908).