Behind Conventional Walls

The short film above is Dom (house), made in 1958 by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica. Borowczyk did a few of these cut-out late surrealist animations, like the cranky interstellar constructivism of Les Astronautes with Chris Marker, and (sort of) interestingly by the 1970s he was a maker of quasi-surrealist softcore, to occasionally unintentionally amusing effect (Immoral Tales, the magnificently titled Behind Convent Walls). Dom centres on an (already) retro-futuristic vision of the home, which in this case is in one of the Haussmannian apartment blocks or rental barracks that can be found in practically every central European capital. So spaceships and musique concrete co-exist with marauding wigs under crumbling neo-renaissance facades, appliances grow unruly heads of wire and dirt, rhizomatic hatstands share a room with a phantasmagoria of picture postcards and family photographs, and almost predictably, Tenniel's Alice illustrations appear near the end.



This brings to mind some of the points in an I.T post on East European surrealism amongst other things, which is apparently one of a series. The work of the interwar montageur Jindřich Štyrský is described as 'simultaneously archaic and modern, in both form and content', a dream-world made up of 'machines, discarded consumer objects, nature and animals'. In his essay 'Dreamkitsch' Walter Benjamin recognised the Surrealist montage as a reaction to the phantasmagorias of the late 19th century home, with the twisted chairs, the objets d'art, the blanketing patterns of the carpets, all of which then become eroticised and reorganised in a conscious marshalling of the unconscious. In a sense, as implied in the link between psychedelic and late 'Victorian' design, the late 19th century was already surrealist, it only needed this latency to be drawn out. While in the west it seems to disappear and then briefly return with late 60s design, this version of Surrealism seems very resilient in postwar central Europe, especially Czechoslovakia. Most obviously in the films of Jan Svankmajer, but note also many of the films on this youtube channel. Or the film adaptation of Nezval's Valerie and her week of wonders.



In this catalogue it's argued that Lenica and Borowczyk's Dom was a reaction against the clean, plastic & formica spaces of postwar design, the 'thaw modern' that was especially prevalent in Poland, and which, via the infelicities of the command economy, ended up (allegedly) making most new interiors look remarkably alike. That's as maybe. But a couple of decades earlier, in the case of the Czech interwar avant-garde, we have something close to the rosetta stone of left Modernism, the otherwise lost missing link between productivism and messthetics, between the lurid collage of erotic Victorian detritus and the block of gleaming communal workers' flats. The same designers and artists - Karel Teige, Vitezslav Nezval, Oldrich Tyl, Jindrich Štyrský and many others, unnecessarily obscure and far too often untranslated - devised the idea that Constructivism and 'Poetism' (the latter of which morphed into the Czech wing of the Surrealist International) were aligned, part of a project for the revolution of everyday life.



Rather than being the inveterate opponents that you come across in innumerable analyses by the likes of Peter Wollen (more on which soon) - a polarisation in aesthetics between lovely jolly Surrealists, far from repressed, fully up on their Freud, with their eroticisme, parlour games and love of kitsch and clutter, and on the other hand grim Fordist functionalists with their allegedly limited view of human 'nature' - here both were pursued as part of a common project. This sense of a common project is especially odd when it comes to the house. There's obviously a certain fetishistic affection for the apparently obsolete in their collages, and at the same time these people could be found demanding the minimum dwelling - a tension similar to Benjamin's unsolved contradiction between the cry 'efface the traces' and the obsessive search for the same traces. Were the interiors you find in the collages supposed to be purely for the imagination, and those of Jaromir Funke's elegant sachlichkeit photos of new dwellings intended as the actual space for living? Or would one spill into the other?