Surrealism (TV, Literature and Music)

Bunuel's my favorite director. Lynch can't compare. Bunuel was a true European Spanish Surrealist, meaning Freudian, marxist, anticlerical, focused on history, class, the Church. Lynch doesn't bring this level of intellectualism to his art. However, I'm thankful there's a David Lynch. It's very rare to have an American director during this generation following his own whims over a long career. I wish he were more prolific; he's slowed down a lot in the last decade or so... If one make the mistake of expecting Bunuel when watching Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, one will definitely be disappointed. These are not Bunuel-esque films. They are Lynchian films.

 

The closest that Surrealism has come that is similar in "style" when you step back, and look at the two films that Bunuel and Dali put together almost 80 years ago, would be something like FAUST in the early albums, where the sound effects kinda ran together and you might, or might not make a story based on that.

 

Ron Geesin, has a lot of surrealistic moments in his own albums, but the fact that Roger has gone out of the way to trash him, has left him in a corner, and sadly so. Some of the stuff is there is fairly close to surrealism, but again, I actually think that his point of view and thoughts, helped Roger, later, make sense of sound effects better than anyone else in music, however, that would be totally considered against a surrealistic thought or idea!

 

In many ways, Syd Barrett, would have been way more surrealistic, were it not for his penchant for satirical commentary about anything he did, which was very "British", and probably his own way of making fun of the Sgt Pepper's obsessive idea that it was psychedelic, when half of it was silly, and not stoned or psychedelic at all! And it's "meanings" broke the stoned/psychedelic ideals which would be more in line with "surrealism" than not. In many ways, even the moments in "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Astronomy Domine" or "A Saucerful of Secrets" could be considered "surrealistic, if you take those "improvised/experimental" sections and accepted that there were no "meanings" to be extracted from them! But in IO, it becomes a sort of outer space signal like morse, or beep beep, and that is the start of AD and also the other single "Point Me to the Sky", and then in ASoS it becomes just instruments on a run to nowhere, finally coming together to make something out of nothing, so to speak! The "meaning" side of things, takes away the surrealistic concepts.

 

This makes PF not be surrealistic at all!

 

However, later, you will find some massive surrealism in Gerald Scarfe's cartoons in "The Wall", many of which add a lot more to the story and its concept, than it's really there, and actually help create a story, from a bunch of songs! I don't think that Roger, or any of us, would want to admit that, or accept that. It would be much harder to put the whole thing together without the sound effects and the cartoons that are now framed in your mind every time you hear this monster!

 

I still have a concern that someone thinks that something is surrealistic simply because they said melted clocks in their lyrics, when the very idea of melting the clock, for DALI, was much more about the heat where he lived, than it was about surrealism itself! I always thought that was hilarrious!

 

Hipgnosis' album covers, not all of them, but many of them, are excellent examples of surrealistic art works.  But Storm and friends, almost always made a comment, or editorial about the music within with them ... and most of them fit really well, in my book!