Ado Kyrou's Surrealist Cinema Theory Revisited

A 1962 text by Ado Kyrou, 'Le surréalisme au cinéma', argues that cinema is inherently surrealist. Kyrou, a critic and filmmaker, views surrealism as a mode of thought beyond Cartesian logic, seeking both freedom and destruction of images through unconscious chance, primal impulses, and madness. Applying Freudian concepts of latent and manifest content, he contends that in cinema, dream becomes real, collapsing these levels. Luis Buñuel's 'Viridiana' and 'The Exterminating Angel' serve as prime examples. Kyrou also discusses earlier works: futurist films by Marinetti, Dada films by Man Ray, Hans Richter, and Marcel Duchamp ('Anemic Cinema', including its anaglyph version), and expressionist films like 'Nosferatu' and 'The Golem'. He dismisses Cocteau, Dreyer, Bresson, Bergman, Welles, and Stroheim, but praises Sternberg, Renoir, Tod Browning, Méliès, Feuillade, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Chaplin, and Harry Langdon. Kyrou traces an alternative film history through forgotten films, flawed masterpieces with moments of genius, and dark gems like 'The Night of the Hunter'. Despite subjective biases against experimental cinema's 'pederasts', his work anchors a modern cinema idea where images have their own life, escaping fixed meaning. The text was published in artpress.