"The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages

Authors

  • Abigail Susik PhD Columbia University May 2009 Currently: Postdoctoral Fellow, Millsaps College, Beginning fall of 2011, Assistant Professor of Modern Art History, Willamette University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2011.27

Keywords:

Max Ernst, Georges Méliès, Collage, Cinema, Film, Outmoded, Obsolesence, Surrealism, Dadaism, Dada, Modernism

Abstract

On more than one occasion in his critical writings of the 1920’s, surrealist leader André Breton compared Max Ernst’s collages to cinema. In his first essay on the artist in 1921, Breton aligned Ernst’s collages with cinematic special effects such as slow and accelerated motion, and spoke of the illusionistic ‘transformation from within’ that characterized Ernst’s constructed scenes. For Breton, Ernst’s collages employing found commercial, scientific and journalistic images approximated the naturalistic movement of film, and thereby contributed to the radical obsolescence of traditional two-dimensional media such as painting and drawing, which remained frozen in stillness. Thus, Ernst’s images were provocative witnesses to the way in which modern technology fundamentally altered the perspectivally-ordered picture plane. But at the same time that Ernst’s collages rendered painting obsolete, they likewise depended upon fragments of outmoded popular culture themselves. For Breton, Ernst was a magician, “the man of these infinite possibilities,” comparable to cinematic prestidigators like turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès. By drawing on the influence of recently outmoded popular culture such as early trick films, Ernst provides a crucial early example of the post-war fixation on counter-temporalities and anti-production. At once technologically advanced and culturally archeological, Ernst’s collages cannily defy strict categorization as “Modernist.”

Author Biography

Abigail Susik, PhD Columbia University May 2009 Currently: Postdoctoral Fellow, Millsaps College, Beginning fall of 2011, Assistant Professor of Modern Art History, Willamette University

Beginning fall of 2011, Abigail Susik is Assistant Professor of Modern Art History at Willamette University in Oregon. She is currently completing a book, The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the Outmoded, which performs a comparative analysis of literature, art and popular culture in early French surrealism in relation to the theory of Walter Benjamin. Other research projects include essays devoted to planned obsolescence and the European avant-garde, Victorian influences upon surrealism, and the appearance of ocean flotsam in contemporary art. Forthcoming work will appear in Public and The Great Divide? High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2, among other publications.

Max Ernst, le chien qui chie...la chanson de la chair (The Dog Who Shits...The Song of the Flesh), c. 1920. Photomontage, gouache, and pencil on photographic reproduction mounted on board with ink inscription, 15 x 21 cm (5 7/8 x 8 1/4).

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Published

2011-06-01

How to Cite

Susik, A. (2011). "The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages. Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 1, 61–87. https://doi.org/10.5195/contemp.2011.27

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Articles