Obsessed with a general's woman, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.
Artaud’s scenario for The Seashell and the Clergyman set the groundwork for subsequent surrealist film initiatives and was the first to develop many of the æsthetic principles typical of the movement. Reportedly, Buñuel had seen Artaud and Dulac’s film whilst preparing for Un Chien Andalou and, interestingly, both films share similar cinematic devices. Both films employ disruptive temporal structures that unfold with the fabric of a dream and incorporate visual shocks designed to impact viscerally upon the viewer. In this respect, the purpose of the infamous eye-slitting in Un Chien Andalou is comparable with the exposure of the woman’s breasts in The Seashell and the Clergyman. Four years later, Artaud accused Buñuel and Dalí of stealing cinematic devices from his own film :
The Shell was indeed the first movie of its kind, a forerunner […] In all fairness, the critics, if there are any left around, should recognize the relationship of all these films and say that they all descend from The Shell and the Clergyman, but without the espirit of The Shell, which they all failed to recapture.
Behind Artaud’s conspiratorial tone, there is a truth: namely, that Un Chien Andalou and The Seashell and the Clergyman share a lineage. Although both films employ the techniques that characterise our understanding of surrealist cinema, Artaud’s vision predates Buñuel’s. Yet, Artaud’s importance has been sadly undervalued, especially considering that it was his ideas that became iconic of all subsequent surrealist cinema. The Seashell and the Clergyman penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted. Remarkably, Artaud not only subverts the physical, surface image, but also its interconnection with other images. The result is a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically’, truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.
However, on 9 January 1928, the premiere of The Seashell and the Clergyman was abandoned after a disruption in the auditorium. Somewhere in the darkness of the Studio des Ursulines, two voices insulted Dulac, and, before long, the premiere descended into a chaotic cultural riot. Obscenities were shouted, mirrors were broken and violent blows were exchanged. Accounts of Artaud’s own involvement that night are ambiguous, one claiming that he sat quietly with his mother, whilst another recounts how he ran wild. Either way, the events were triggered by a high-profile dispute between Artaud and Dulac, in part, fuelled by Artaud’s exclusion from the filming and editing of his own text.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017775/
Silent with French and German intertitles; English and Portuguese subtitles
My rip of the Germaine Dulac: Trois films de la grande pionnière du cinéma muet (1922-1928) DVD
Germaine Dulac - La coquille et le clergyman (1928)
