%0 Journal Article
%T "The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst¡¯s Cinematic Collages
%A Abigail Susik
%J Contemporaneity : Historical Presence in Visual Culture
%D 2011
%I University Library System, University of Pittsburgh
%R 10.5195/contemp.2011.27
%X On more than one occasion in his critical writings of the 1920¡¯s, surrealist leader Andr¨¦ 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 M¨¦li¨¨s. 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.¡±
%K Max Ernst
%K Georges M¨¦li¨¨s
%K Collage
%K Cinema
%K Film
%K Outmoded
%K Obsolesence
%K Surrealism
%K Dadaism
%K Dada
%K Modernism
%U http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/contemporaneity/article/view/27