Riven by internal dissension, the European Dada movement was largely over by 1922. Many of its members formed another group, the Surrealists. While many dadaists considered Breton to be a traitor to dada, others made the transition directly into surrealism. After a brief period of what was termed "le mouvement flou,"(the fuzzy movement) in which the surrealists defined the movement by reference to the discarded dada, Breton (known as the Pope of Surrealism) published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. It was surrealism's declaration of the rights of man through the liberation of the unconscious. The goal of surrealism was to synthesize dream and reality so that the resulting art challenged the limits of representation and perception. Surrealism abandoned the dada goal of art as a direct transmitter of thought and focused instead on expressing the rupture and duality of language through imagery.
The surrealist image could be either verbal or pictorial and had a twofold function. First, images that seem incompatible with each other should be juxtaposed together in order to create startling analogies that disrupt passive audience enjoyment and conventional expectations of art. This technique was perhaps an influence of Soviet montage theory, with which the surrealists were familiar. Second, the image must mark the beginning of an exploration into the unknown rather than merely representing a thing of beauty. The surrealist experience of beauty instead involved a psychic disturbance, a "convulsive beauty" generated by the startling images and the analogies they create in the mind of the viewer.
Emak-Bakia (1927)
"Surrealism resembled Dada in many ways, particularly in its disdain for orthodox aesthetic traditions. Like Dada, Surrealism sought out startling juxtapositions. Andre Breton, who led the break with the Dada ists and the creation of Surrealism, cited an image from a work by the Comte de Lautreamont: "Beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." The movement was heavily influenced by the emerging theories of psychoanalysis. Rather than depending on pure chance for the creation of artworks, Surrealists sought to tap the unconscious mind. In particular, they wanted to render the incoherent narratives of dreams directly in language or images, without the interference of conscious thought processes.
The ideal Surrealist film differed from Dada works in that it would not be a humorous, chaotic assemblage of events. Instead, it would trace a disturbing, often sexually charged story that followed the inexplicable logic of a dream. With a patron's backing, Dadaist Man Ray moved into Surrealism with Emak Bakia (1927), which used many film tricks to suggest a woman's mental state. At the end she is seen in a famous image, her eyes closed, with eye balls painted on them; she opens her eyes and smiles at the camera. Many Surrealists denounced the film as containing too little narrative. Ray's next film, L'étoile de mer (The Starfish, 1928), hinted at a story based on a script by Surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It shows a couple in love, interspersed with random shots of starfish, trains, and other objects. At the end the woman leaves with another man, and her cast-off lover consoles himself with a beautiful starfish.
A split-screen technique creates a bizarre effect in 'The Seashell and the Clergyman': the officer, dressed in baby clothes, seems to split in two.
Germaine Dulac, who had already worked extensively in regular feature filmmaking and French Impressionism, turned briefly to Surrealism, directing a screenplay by poet Antonin Artaud. The result was La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928), which combines Impressionist techniques of cinematography with the disjointed narrative logic of Surrealism. A clergyman carrying a large seashell smashes laboratory beakers; an officer intrudes and breaks the shell, to the clergyman's horror. The rest of the film consists of the priest's pursuing a beautiful woman through an incongruous series of settings. His love seems to be perpetually thwarted by the intervention of the officer. Even after the priest marries the woman, he is left alone drinking from the shell. The initial screening of the film provoked a riot at the small Studio des Ursulines theater, though it is still not clear whether the instigators were Artaud's enemies or his friends, protesting Dulac's softening of the Surrealist tone of the scenario. With The Seashell and the Clergyman, Dulac overhauls narrativity entirely and presents us with pure feminine desire, intercut against masculine desires of a priest. Above all, Dulac is responsible for "writing" a new cinematic language that expressed transgressive female desires in a poetic manner.