Surrealism

1. Surrealism: Surrealism means super-realism. Surrealism literary means ‘above and beyond reality’. Surrealism sought to free the imaginative human mind & reveal the unconscious encouraging and rejection of logic & reasoning. Many surrealists had an interest in the cinema, but more the popular cinema of the day, rather than the more 'poetic' styles. A favorite surrealist game was to wander around Paris going into any film screening, staying for a few minutes (or until they got bored) and then moving on to the next screening, and so on. Thus creating their own exquisite corpse narratives. Historical background: Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement that emerged in reaction to the horrors of World War I. Artists responded to the horrors of war by challenging the prevalent norms of society and its values. With a spirit of idealism, artist and writers shared a belief that they could change the world by freeing the unconscious mind from rational thought. Surrealism, this term was coined by ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’ in 1917 to describe his own play The Mammaries. Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. Richard Huelsenbeck, a poet, and painter- musician Hugo Ball selected the word at random from a German-French dictionary. “Dada” was coined in Zurich in 1916. A nonsense word, it means “Yes-Yes” in Russian, “There-There” in German (baby talk), and “Hobby horse” in French.