Between the World Wars, a disturbing new spirit surfaced in the world of art and letters, a call to liberate the imagination and explore the tangled world of the unconscious. The Surrealists infused new Freudian findings with the symbolist poetry of... [more]
Between the World Wars, a disturbing new spirit surfaced in the world of art and letters, a call to liberate the imagination and explore the tangled world of the unconscious. The Surrealists infused new Freudian findings with the symbolist poetry of suggestion in order to unearth that most elusive of objects: the human soul. Surrealists blended automatic writing, dream symbolism, and free association in unexpected, often random combinations.
Like their painting cohorts Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, Surrealist writers Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, and Jean Cocteau allowed their subconscious hallucinations and sexual desires to dictate the assortment of images, symbols, and impressions they freely juxtaposed. Their goal: to collapse the boundaries of the rational. Their works pushed Dada's revolutionary fervor one step further by expressing the unspoken impulses that both exalt and destroy life, and by toying with the limits of the "real" and the "known." In the process of defining this new terrain, Surrealism teased disturbing, eccentric, and absurd imagery from artists as diverse in medium and era as Paul Klee, Dylan Thomas, and Bob Dylan. [show less]
Woman of the Dunes is a novel by Kōbō Abe and a film based on the novel directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. The novel was published in 1962, and the film was released in 1964. Kōbō Abe also wrote the screenplay for the film version.