The Animate Image Subjectivity and Objectivity in Spanish Avant-Garde Texts on the Cinema (1923-1931)

Abstract

This dissertation examines texts from the Spanish avant-garde (1923–1931) that present the advent of cinema as a force that alters the fundamental distinction between subjects and objects. I analyze a selection of avant-garde literary and theoretical texts to demonstrate the presence of a persistent leitmotiv throughout the art of this period: the idea that the mode of vision employed in film-watching is one that makes no distinction between surface and depth, between what actually experiences thought and emotion and what merely has the appearance of doing so. The texts explored over the course of this dissertation identify the cinematic spectator’s instinctive understanding of the film image as an animate being; they depict the spectator relating to the human figure onscreen as though it were the real person it copies rather than an inert reproduction. As I demonstrate, these texts posit a connection between this mode of perceiving the film image and the dissolution of the notion of a significant difference between subjects and objects, or entities with and without inner worlds. They suggest that the movie screen is an arena in which reality consists solely of what can be perceived by the eyes, thus situating images and real people in a relationship of equivalence. My first chapter analyzes Salvador Dalí’s essays on photography and film during the late 1920s, which exalt the camera as a source of objectivity and “neutral vision”: a mode of seeing that circumvents the subjectivist hierarchies of regular life in order to lessen the power of human beings and increase that of objects. In Chapter Two, I employ close-readings of Francisco Ayala’s short stories of 1927–1930 to show that Ayala consistently presents the technique of close-up as a dehumanizing force that converts the filmed person into an object-like amalgamation of independent parts. Chapter Three focuses on Pedro Salinas’s poetry and short stories of 1924–1931, in which the theme of the double that usurps the original recurs frequently in connection with technologies such as film that substitute “electronic presence” for real presence. My fourth chapter centers on Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s 1923 novel Cinelandia, a parody of Hollywood that, I argue, depicts cinema as following the logic of physiognomy: the pseudoscience of character whose founding belief is the idea that man lacks a distinction between appearance and essence. In my final chapter, I connect José Ortega y Gasset’s 1924 essay “La deshumanización del arte,” which advocates for art that places human beings and objects on the same plane by attending only to their visible surfaces, to the cinematic dissolve as it is employed in films like Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929). The artists whose work I examine exhibit conflicting attitudes toward the effects of the film image: some celebrate cinema as a vehicle for dismantling the traditional subject-object hierarchy, while others express anxiety about its consequences for interpersonal relationships. However, they are united by their adherence to the idea that film weakens or nullifies the essential distinction between the human and the nonhuman. By identifying these artists’ suggestion that film engenders a new way of relating to one’s surroundings that extends beyond the walls of the movie theater, this project speaks to the fundamental transformation of perception and reality that was wrought by the arrival of cinema.