Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

How are they different from each other?

Discuss.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

In movies I am not sure.

Clearly Ionesco was an absurdest.

Salvador Dali was a surrealist.

Most feature films called surrealistic actually have surrealistic moments, but aren't really surrealistic because they have stories you can follow.

I think absurdism is always connected to comedy and comes from the stage and is dialogue oriented and surrealism is tied more to visuals.

I'm doing this without any research so i could be completely wrong.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

This is the basic way to put it. I think the only other way is to use examples:

Luis Buñuel is an absurdist. If you watch any of his more art house stuff (Phantom Of Liberty, Exterminating Angel), he focuses on symbolism that exhibits absurd behavior. Most of his films are extremely funny because of this, though not many people get them because they're probably making fun of them. Generally, absurdism has a caustic purpose in that sense, and can be given meaning equally by the creator and interpreter.

David Lynch is a surrealist. Surrealism, I don't think, has a specific purpose, but rather goes outside the box to explore the realms of the medium, hence why Lynch's films are generally "unintelligible", when really they're just an artist having fun with the obscure. They garner meaning MOSTLY from the audience seeing as how impersonal they generally are, however in the instance that surrealism is very personal, it's influenced by either dreams or imagination.

The similarities, therefore, are that they can either mean next to nothing or many things, and they're both highly inaccessible if you don't like to use your brain.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

also lol at the tag

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

Too bad I don't know anything about either... Winter's the surrealism/absurdism champ. He even wrote an absurdist play... and a surrealist one too, I think. For me, the absurd would be something like walking out into the street and getting hit by a car or something. This is also called cosmic irony. In other words, the universe doesn't care about you.

Dr. Strangelove would be absurdism, I think. Or at least leaning very strongly towards absurdism. Same with Catch-22. Not sure if absurdism is always satirical, as winter says, but surrealism certainly does not have to be.

The two are really close, so it's a great question. I'd love to uncover a formal distinction eventually instead of just tossing out examples.

I take it you haven't seen too many of his films? I'd classify him in both categories.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

If you don't get it, it's surrealism. If you claim you get L'Age d'or, you're a lyin' MoFo. Or maybe you're just DogStarMan. :cool:

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

i think traditionally surrealism applied to the stuff which andre breton called surreal in his surrealist manifesto (sometime in the 20s). the underpinning for it is coopting the idea of the unconscious (lots of references to freud) and particularly applying it to attack the idea of rational/common-sense logic, which also had a large political dimension. i think rationality and the ego and super-ego were loosely equated with conventual bourgeois morals. i don't have a strong bead on a lot of the people involved, including breton, but i believe they celebrated not just early 20th century phychologists and philosophers like freud but also glamorized many of the female patients freud labelled "hysterics", though i can't remember any specific names off hand. film has the added dimension of narrative, and i guess for someone like bunuel the assault on "logic" would mean the conventional logic of narrative continuity. the absurdism of someone like bunuel is two-fold, i think. on the one hand are the incongruous images which often flirt with some sort of narrative sense only to deliberately evade satisfying that expectation in blatant and sometimes clever ways. on the other hand the whole fact that it would have this sort of deliberate "anti-logic" message means it would still have to have some sort of logic to be readable as such, which may have been a self-aware ironic absurdity.

absurdism is just one device of assaulting "borgeois logic", that was a major linking agenda between many avant-garde movements in the post ww1 years, so naturally there's a lot of overlap, but i think it might be useful to look at surrealism as something with that sort of transgressive "anti-logic" agenda, while absurdism is just one tool among others that the surrealists, dadaists and whoever else used.

how well this label applies to lynch and other contemporary film-makers (or even bunuel, for that matter) i'm not sure. i think the term is kind of loosely applied to anything "unreal" these days out of ignorance, but admittedly i'm not all that up on the history of these terms either, so i could very easily be wrong.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

if anyone's actually interested in reading the surrealist manifesto, here it is.

I would too but I think for the most part he was basically blending them together, but when I think of him I think of The Milky Way and The Discreet Charm, but if we want to talk about his surrealist stuff then there's always The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Linespalsy explained it well.

I see surrealism in a movie like Inception, and absurdism in a movie like Crank. To me, to be effective, surrealism would be anchored in reality, whereas absurdism would go shamelessly over the top.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

It would be hard to rule out Videodrome as either Absurd or Surreal.

Excellent, excellent post, man. Should be a Wiki entry or something, I swear.

Yah, I think this is a good move to take Breton's manifesto as the definitive parameters of surrealism, since it exists. I think you're right about our everyday use of the word being wrongly attributed. A better, less pre-defined word can and should be used in place of it. This is a mistake that I must begin to correct in my day to day life, starting now. I've always assumed people like Lynch to be surreal, but yes, we should look into whether it at all adheres to the manifesto.

Great thread, g_p.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

Good god can I post or what? Sorry the hostile universe got in may way and deleted three of my previous posts.

Okay now that I have gotten that out of the way.

Absurdism is a philosophical stance. Man searches for meaning in meaningless and hostile universe.

The Theater of the Absurd however is definitely surrealist.

Surrealism is a revolutionary movement or was initially. It attacked rational thought with acts of meaningless but honest lunacy. Mad men were celebrated. And because man is a always looking for meaning even when he believes there isn't one, Freud became the patron saint of the Surrealists and his Interpretation of Dreams their bible. And if you are looking for one of the Surrealist's hysterical glamour girls, Dora is a name you can chew on.

I definitely see Lynch as a surrealistic director though I imagine to be a true Surrealist ya had to be there i.e. in Paris in the twenties.

lol at the tag.

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

Regarding Theater of the Absurd, I am only familiar with Beckett's work..
Though I want to see Edward Albee's Zoo Story, especially after having seen Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf?

I think the perfect example of a surreal film would be Andalusian Dog.
But then there are films like Synecdoche. NY, Being John Malkovich which have me confused.
They seem like a blend of both.

Hence why I brought up similarities, even if their message is different, the ebb and flow are generally related and theater of the absurd follows the same rules, or lack of

Re: Absurdism Vs Surrealism
 

I got an idea about the thread when I saw on an another forum some guy seeking recommendations for Surreal films.. Some other guy replied dispensing some suggestions as related to absurdism & not surrealism, made me really curious about the difference between the two..