salvador dali

Deux Dupieux

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Keeping up with Quentin Dupieux is hard work, even as a fan.  The prankster Frenchman’s filmography is as prolific as it is silly, as he’s only surpassed in his routine creative output by Matt “The Madman” Farley.  Every time I review “the new Dupieux” for this site, he’s already released at least two more recent films on the Euro festival circuit, which will inevitably be followed by yet another new Dupieux before those achieve US distro.  So, while I am here to write about the two “new” Quentin Dupieux movies that arrived in America this year, I also have to acknowledge that his actual-latest film, The Second Act, has already premiered at Cannes and is still pending US release.  That’s three new features total since I reviewed Smoking Causes Coughing at last year’s Overlook Film Fest (and three more films than most aspiring directors will get to release in their lifetime).  The man is a machine that produces silly comedies at an alarming rate, like that haywire conveyor belt of chocolate treats that tormented Lucille Ball.  This must be how more serious critics feel about Hong Sang-soo.

The best of this year’s silly treats was the semi-biographical comedy Daaaaaalí!, in which Dupieux pays flippant homage to master surrealist Salvador Dalí.  The absurdly elongated title is in reference to how the multiple actors who portray Daaaaaalí pronounce their own name, often while bragging in third-person.  Dupieux is unafraid to poke fun at his artist-subject’s ludicrous ego and public misbehavior, likely because his own creative debt and reverence for Dalí is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated aloud.  The matter-of-fact surrealism of Dupieux’s humor already amounts to a career-long tribute to Dalí in its own way, so much so that the director finds it difficult to complete a film about the much more famous artist without feeling like a failure.  Daaaaaalí! is a loopy, prankish comedy about the impossibility of making a worthy, satisfying movie about Salvador Dalí.  Dupieux’s onscreen avatar is a young journalist who repeatedly attempts to film a full-length interview with Dalí but can never quite pull the fluff-piece documentary together, mostly due to whimsical sabotage from her subject.  Instead, Dupieux sends her down a labyrinth of circular-logic dreams, time-jumps, and actor swaps that make no linear narrative sense, attempting to match the audience-trolling humor of Dalí’s work at large while staging living-tableau recreations of specific Dalí paintings.  That way, Dupieux can’t disappoint himself in his homage to a personal, professional hero, since he openly admits defeat before the project starts in earnest.  With Daaaaaalí!, Dupieux combines the professional self-parody of Deerskin and the anything-goes-at-any-moment sketch comedy of Smoking Causes Coughing into a single, silly picture – finding a delightfully uneasy middle ground between his two career-best titles to date (assuming he hasn’t released an even better one since I started typing this paragraph).

Something I’ve noticed about Dupieux’s recent output is that his increasingly silly ideas for movies are outpacing his already hectic production schedule, so that recent works like Daaaaaalí! and Smoking Causes Coughing play more like sketch comedy revues than single-concept feature films.  That’s not the case with his recent title Yannick, though, which is an unusually focused & abrasive effort from the goofball auteur.  An all-in-one-night black comedy about a low-rent theatrical production that’s threatened at gunpoint by an audience member who doesn’t appreciate the show, Yannick finds Dupiuex holding his audience hostage and heckling us about our own grossest impulses in a single-location limbo.  The most interesting angle on it is trying to figure out if Dupieux considers himself one of us or one of the suffering artists who find it impossible to please us, mocking dissenters in his audience for making their personal criticisms loudly, publicly known to the detriment of fellow theatregoers who are quietly enjoying themselves.  There is some formal playfulness in how he shoots the players from the audience and the audience from the stage like two warring sides of a never-ending conflict, pontificating on how even a successful stage play is already a kind of hostage situation in reverse.  It’s just unclear whether his portrayal of the play’s titular heckler as a braying jackass is an insult to the audience’s intelligence or if he’s supposed to be a common-denominator mouthpiece voicing populist derision against needlessly pretentious, fussy art, which is something Dupieux might identify with as a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to being as silly as possible at all times.

If you’ve gotten used to Dupieux’s rapid-fire delivery of absurdly silly ideas in movies like Daaaaaalí!, the feature-length, single-idea fixation of Yannick can be a little tiresome, even at a mere 67 minutes of runtime.  It’s still interesting to decipher within the larger context of Dupieux’s career as a public figure, which is always what happens when you watch too many movies from a single director.  Out of context, Daaaaaalí! is likely still entertaining as a remarkably silly movie about a remarkably silly art-world icon, but the larger project of Dupieux’s career leads us to wonder where the director sees himself in the onscreen relationship between portraitist and subject.  That goes doubly for Yannick, where the most interesting piece of the puzzle is deciphering what our auteur du jour is attempting to communicate about the relationship between artist and audience.  It’s the same way that fellow Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is about Tarantino’s relationship with his industry, or the same way that every Matt Farley movie is now about the greater Matt Farley project, most recently exemplified in the self-parodic Local Legends: Bloodbath.  To be a Quentin Dupiuex fan is to be someone who routinely watches two or three of the silliest movies released all year in a single sitting and puzzling through what they’re saying about Art and The Artist.  Dupieux used to make movies like the killer-car-tire horror comedy Rubber about how nothing in life has any meaning or reason behind it; now he makes movies about what believing & embodying that ethos has done to his art and to the artist behind it.  I’m assuming he doesn’t have a solid answer to that personal quandary yet, since he he’s been making a lot of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Luminous Procuress (1971)

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Like a lot of people, I found Kyle Edward Ball’s childhood nightmare simulator Skinamarink compelling both as an experiment in form (especially in its layering of visual & aural textures) and as a breakout success story (from microbudget outsider art to TikTok meme to wide theatrical distro).  Unlike its loudest, proudest champions, however, I can’t say I was fully captivated with it as a narrative or emotional experience.  I found Skinamarink effectively, impressively creepy, but I can’t say I felt the revelatory breakthrough in form that my fellow horror nerds found in its darkened corners.  I suspect that’s because I’m not a regular visitor to the spooky YouTube channels and creepypasta message boards where Kyle Edward Ball cut his teeth as a short-film director before making a splash in that debut feature.  In a lot of ways, Skinamarink is the exact low-fi creepypasta horror that We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was mismarketed to be, and its most ecstatic praise appears to be coming from creepypasta enthusiasts who are relieved to finally see their online obsessions projected at feature length on the big screen.

I mention all this because I recently did have a revelatory, emotional experience watching a film that shares formal similarities to Skinamarink; it just happened to be steeped in the visual art traditions of drag & genderfuckery instead of online creepypasta lore.  Luminous Procuress is the sole feature film of visual artist Steven Arnold, whose own experimental short-film production & programming happened to be platformed at the legendary Nocturnal Dream Show screenings in 1960s San Francisco, not on YouTube in the 2010s.  I recently purchased a DVD copy of the film’s 50th Anniversary restoration while playing tourist in San Francisco, unfamiliar with its history beyond its proud credit “introducing The Cockettes” – the genderfucked drag krewe that performed as carnival sideshow accompaniment for Arnold’s Nocturnal Dream Show programs.  I was a little worried that a feature-length dose of Cockettes-era hippie drag wouldn’t be able to sustain itself, so I was oddly relieved when it turned out to be an experimental anthology of “silent”, psychedelic vignettes.  Like Skinamarink, Luminous Procuress is a film composed entirely of vibes & textures; those vibes & textures are just slathered in acid & glitter instead of childhood fears & digital grain.

The titular Luminous Procuress is Arnold’s childhood friend & lifelong partner in art, Pandora, posing as a kind of drag queen sorceress in a California hippie commune.  Two himbos wander into her pleasure palace looking for a good time, and the Procuress obliges by guiding them through a series of gorgeous bootleg-drag tableaus: the bejeweled-beard Cockettes posing in tropical Carmen Miranda drag and staging a Last Supper food fight; pre-Deep Throat hardcore sequences shooting straight & bisexual sex as if they were far-out geek show attractions; Kenneth Anger-inspired occultist rituals worshipping a stoic sci-fi futurelord.  Their cumulative effect seeks psychedelic holy ground between the transcendent sensuality of Pink Narcissus and the thrift store glam of Vegas in Space.  Besides Arnold’s auteurist vision as director, The Cockettes’ self-styled Old Hollywood wardrobe, and the glorious “hair creations by Nikki” (modeled by Pandora, naturally), the most important name among the credits is experimental musician Warner Jepson’s, whose noise music soundscapes are almost entirely comprised of synthy bird chirps & shrill baseball stadium organs.  It was Jepsen who provided the film with its deliberately obscured, unintelligible Charlie Brown dialogue track, adding the texture of spoken language without any of the pesky words or meaning of traditional dialogue getting in the way of the tripped-out glam on display.

If there’s any legitimate reason to discuss Skinamarink & Luminous Procuress as a pair, it’s in their shared connections to the experimental cinema foundations of Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou.  Kyle Edward Ball appears to make direct homages to that landmark surrealist short, both in Skinamarink‘s nonsensical time-passing title cards and in its ocular gore.  Steven Arnold’s connections to Un Chien Andalou‘s history is much more direct, as Dalí was such a massive fan of Luminous Procuress that he took Arnold in as a protege in his Court of Miracles.  In all honesty, though, any experimental, surrealist work made after 1929 owes some debt to Un Chien Andalou, so these films are likely only paired in my mind because I happened to watch them the same week.  Both are largely silent, experiential pieces with only the barest of plot structures to justify their liminal-space tableaus.  Of their two premises, I happened to connect much more deeply with a drag queen sorceress asking “Hey, y’all wanna see something weird?” than I did with a childhood nightmare simulation where all doors & windows disappear from a suburban home.  What’s incredibly cool about the two films’ modern distribution is that they’re both widely available outside of the fringe event spaces where experimental works of this ilk would’ve been exhibited a half-century ago: art galleries, universities, and Salvador Dalí’s hotel room. Skinamarink may be a far-out, revelatory work in the context of niche internet media being projected in suburban multiplexes, but it’s also part of a long tradition of experimental filmmaking – including, apparently, 16mm footage of drag queens playing dress-up on LSD.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #176: Un Chien Andalou (1929) and 2022’s Sight & Sound Exiles

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Welcome to Episode #176 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss four films that recently fell off the Sight & Sound Top 100 list, starting with Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s landmark surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929).

00:00 Welcome

02:44 Resurrection (2022)
05:40 The Innocents (2022)
07:17 After Blue: Dirty Paradise (2022)
10:00 Please Baby Please (2022)
13:33 Dimension 20
15:45 The Menu (2022)

22:33 The Sight & Sound Top 100

27:40 Un Chien Andalou (1929)
44:02 The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
1:04:18 Wild Strawberries (1957)
1:26:26 Rio Bravo (1959)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

L’Age d’Or (1930)

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The short-form collaboration between surrealist masters Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, is standard Film Class 101 material by now. I’m saying this as someone who’s never actually taken a proper film course, but has been shown the film in creative writing lectures, heard it referenced in Pixies lyrics, and (most recently) seen Agnes Varda mull over its legacy in her recent art instillation documentary Faces Places. The juxtaposed images of clouds intersecting the moon and a cow’s eyeball being cut-open with a straight razor are an especially gory slice of early cinema just as fundamental to the medium as Méliès’s trip to the moon, Charlie Chaplin’s sliding through machine gears, and a steam engine train rapidly approaching the screen. It feels ignorant, then, that I was not aware of the 17min short’s feature length follow-up, L’Age d’Or. His second collaboration (and final, due to a social falling-out) with Salvador Dali, L’Age d’Or was Buñuel’s first feature-length film. It maintains the surreal juxtaposition of highly political, violently non-sequitur imagery from Un Chien Andalou, but this time hung off a more recognizable narrative and sustained for a full hour. As that story is remarkably thin & self-subverting, however, L’Age d’Or often plays like a loose anthology of comically surreal vignettes; it’s essentially a sketch comedy revue with a fine art pedigree. That kind of highfalutin pranksterism is very much on-brand for both Dali & Buñuel (who would later reuse a lot of images & political tactics from this feature debut in works like The Exterminating Angel) so it’s bizarre to me that this work isn’t cited more often along with Un Chien Adalou as a significant text.

In addition to being a loose collection of silly non-sequiturs, L’Age d’Or might also be undervalued because it’s such a cheaply horny work. The thin narrative that binds its anthology of vignettes concerns a romantic couple among social elites who really want to fuck, but keep getting cockblocked by the wealth class & The Church. The pair lustily make eyes across the room at various social get-togethers until they passionately go at it, right there in public, only to be pulled apart mid-coitus. Even considering the flagrant sexuality of Pre-Code Hollywood films like Baby Face, this animalistic lust feels absolutely scandalous in a 1930s context—something Buñuel gleefully juxtaposes with the rigid social propriety of wealthy social events & religious ceremony. The sexual activity depicted onscreen is far from pornographic, but it is scandalous all the same: fantasies about a woman’s stockinged legs, muddy bouts of public exhibitionism, the fellating of fingers & toes, a minutes-long tribute to de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, etc. These acts themselves doesn’t matter as much as the elite’s response to them. High society types ignore incongruous, troubling events like the murder of a child, the intrusion of a comically oversized chariot helmed by drunks, and the posthumous decay of Catholic higher-ups who rot on beaches in their finest robes. However, any display of sexual impropriety sends them into a riotous uproar, and they continually tear the two lovers away any chance they find to go at it. It’s all the same hypocritical tension between proper manners & animal desires that would continue throughout Buñuel’s career. Yet, its arrival at such an early stage of cinema combines with the ramshackle DIY energy of a creator at the beginning of their career to make for something distinctly fascinating.

It’s said Buñuel was a new adapter of cinema as a medium around the time of Un Chien Andalou & L’Age d’Or, so it’s difficult to pinpoint which aspects of his work were intentional rule-breaking pranks and which were novice mistakes. Buñuel shot L’Age d’Or entirely in-sequence and without cutting any footage in the editing room; all exposed filmstock is included in the final product. One of the earliest French films to use sound, the film features both spoken dialogue & silent film intertitles as if it weren’t sure what to do with the technology. Often, the only auditory elements included beyond the music are of sound effects like gun shots & slaps. Sometimes this feels like an uneasy filmmaker not properly using all the tools in their arsenal. Often, however, it plays like just as much of a prank as the film’s horned-up plot, especially in the case of a toilet flush sound effect accompanying the image of bubbling water. Buñuel opens L’Age d’Or with a short documentary about scorpions that seemingly has nothing to do with “plot” in any direct, discernible way, but its inclusion feels like an artist who knows exactly what reaction they’re intending to evoke. Later, he documents modern Rome with the wildly uneven cinematography of someone who’s never held a camera before in their life. In either case, it’s a young, defiant personality thumbing their nose at the already-established rules of a still-developing artform, while weaponizing that new artform against the hypocrisy & wealth disparity of an amoral, grotesque society. That throwing-punches-before-figuring-out-the-rules attitude affords L’Age d’Or an infectious DIY punk spirit, even if Buñuel would later better hone his skills in more put-together ruminations on the same topic.

As a lover of both pretentious smut & silly hijinks, I couldn’t help but be enamored by L’Age d’Or. The ancient cinematic depictions of gore & fornication fully satisfy my instant-gratification need for pure entertainment value, while the inclusion of Surrealist heavy-hitters like Dali & Max Ernst (who appears in a minor role) as collaborators allows me to pretend I’m watching Important Art. I understand how the prurient subject matter & the extended runtime might keep it from being as standard of a classroom tool as Un Chien Andalou, but you can easily detect its influence on important, artsy-fartsy filmmakers as wide-ranging as David Lynch, Ken Russell, Roy Andersson, Guy Maddin, and Monty Python throughout. That’s wonderful to able to say about a series of sketches detailing a romantic couple’s thwarted attempts to fuck in public.

-Brandon Ledet