SOURCE: Christensen, Peter. “Benjamin Fondane's ‘Scenarii intournables.’” In Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, pp. 72-85. New York: Willis Locker and Owens, 1987.

[In the following essay, Christensen examines three of Fondane's film scenarios in an attempt to place them within Dadaist and Surrealist film theory of the 1920s.]

In 1928 Benjamin Fondane published his Trois Scenarii—Ciné-poèmes in Brussels through Esprit Nouveau. These scenarios were not reprinted until they appeared in 1984 along with five essays on film in an edition, Ecrits pour le cinéma, edited by Michel Carassou, the chief instigator of the Fondane revival.¹ These scenarios, “Paupières mûres,” “Barre fixe,” and “Mtasipol,” have not yet found their way into a history of Dada/Surrealist film practice and theory. This essay will try to correct this situation by providing a background to the scenarios, an analysis of them, and a comparison of them with other avant-garde films and scenarios of the 1920s.

The best introduction to Fondane's career as a poet and existentialist philosopher is still John Kenneth Hyde's Benjamin Fondane: A Presentation of His Life and Work (1971). However, Hyde does not consider Fondane's scenarios or essays on cinema.² Michel Carassou's introduction to Ecrits pour le cinéma [E] is too brief to analyze the content of the scenarios, but he points out why Fondane was attracted to silent films:

Because he had lost all confidence in words, Fondane was able to get excited about silent films. Totally freed from language, and thus from rational discourse, and from the norms and limits which it engenders, the cinema seemed to him like a new form of knowledge, more authentic even than poetry. It offered a chance to arrive at another conception of the human—at something lived which no longer allowed itself to be in contradiction with thought.³

Fondane's own six-page preface, “2 × 2,” to the scenarios also does not discuss the filmscripts themselves, only the rationale behind them. Fondane, who began as a symbolist poet, writing in his native Roumanian, wanted his scenarios to be read only, not filmed. Near the close of “2 × 2,” he writes:

Let us therefore inaugurate the era of unfilmable scenarios. A little of the amazing beauty of a foetus can be found there. Let us say at once that these scenarios written to be read will be suddenly drowned by literature (note the trace of acid in my cine-poems), the true scenario being by nature very difficult to read and impossible to write. But then why deliberately hold on to this nothingness? Because a part of myself which poetry represses, in order to be able to pose its own agonizing questions, has just found in the cinema an all-purpose amplifier.

(E 19-20)

It seems as if the hope that Fondane, as a young man, originally had in poetry was first transferred to the provocations of Dadaism and Surrealism and then to film. His later move to existential philosophy in the Faux Traité d'Esthétique (1938), was furthered by the death of silent film, as well as by the approaching death of Surrealism as it degenerated into a codified means of gaining knowledge and avoiding encounters with the real (“le réel”).

In “Présentation de films purs” (the first of four theoretical essays on the cinema), delivered in Argentina in 1929 before a film screening for Vittoria Ocampo's circle, we see Fondane's messianic hope in a nebulous new world instigated by the avant-garde.

To the attentive eye, the modern spirit, including Dada and Surrealism, is characterized not as a destructor but as an “agent provocateur,” obliging European civilization to produce at an accelerated rate the acts of suicide necessary to make place finally for something else.

(E 64)

In a striking analogy, Fondane states that Dada was to cubism what the Terror was to the States-General or what the October Revolution was to the February Revolution. The nihilistic and catastrophic element of Dada is apparent in the idea of films which cannot be filmed; they do not harden into works of art, but exist as events in the reader's mind. For Fondane, the pure film (“film pur”), a term not specifically defined by him, was “an individual operation of beginning from scratch, of analysis, of transformation—an episode of struggle” (E 62). The sound film, Fondane thought, had no element of contestation about it. In his 1930 essay, “Du muet au parlant: Grandeur et décadence du cinéma,” Fondane insists that the sound film is dangerous because it purports to give access to the real, whereas it only opens up on a false reality (E 81).

Fondane's attraction to the film was primarily due to its movement. In “Le Cinéma dans l'impasse” (1931) he writes:

The cinema is an art of movement—the only one perhaps which seriously mocks space, all the while borrowing from space the elements of its magic and enhancing its prestige. Dialogue forces this nomad to stabilize itself. In so far as it approaches theatre, it becomes a servant of space, a bad servant.

(E 90)

Although Fondane goes on to denounce the hold that dialogue was having on film, he was not against the theatre as such, for he himself wrote three plays in the course of his career.

In his last cinema essay, “Cinema 33,” written for the special film issue of Cahiers jaunes, No. 4, 1933, Fondane compares his own despair at the death of silent film with that of two celebrated contemporaries:

I regret that today, spirits as different but equally clairvoyant and honest as Salvador Dalí and Antonin Artaud, in their hatred for current cinema, agree on reproaching it for the only things which it has preserved of film as film, the only things which keep it being film and not something else. Dalí reproaches it for movement, that is, for its mode of being, and Artaud is critical of its images for being a copy of reality, that is, for seeming to be. These arguments have to be taken as welcome reactions, but excessive ones.

(E 104)

Fondane continues by saying that Artaud hoped to find in the Theater of Cruelty the lost path of the cinema. By 1933, Fondane had once again turned to poetry (rather than theater as did Artaud), having completed and published Ulysse (written 1929-1933). He did have a chance to work on two films, Rapt (1934), as a scenarist to Kirsanov in the adaptation of Ramuz's novel; and Tararira (1936), an absurdist experimental film which he made in Argentina, but which is now lost.

The four theoretical essays on the cinema show Fondane's sympathy for Dadaism through his valorization of movement and love of absurdity. They do not criticize Surrealism, but neither are they polemics for the movement. Elsewhere we can find sharp criticism of Surrealism: (1) in the short articles collected by Carassou for the appendix of the recent edition of Faux Traité d'Esthétique; (2) in Rimbaud le voyou (1933, but written c. 1930), with its attack on misinformed Surrealist appropriations of Rimbaud; and (3) in Faux Traité [FT] itself (1938). Another group of articles, contributed to Cahiers de l'Etoile in 1929-1930, and apparently neither reprinted nor analyzed by critics, offer some further reflections on film which Fondane does not make elsewhere.

In the essay, “Brancusi,” in praise of his fellow countryman, we sense that Fondane fears that the film medium may not come up to the level of his own expectations of valorizing the arbitrary side of life:

To achieve apparent order, clarity, and intelligibility is not the difficulty for the great artist—as if order for us were not the most natural thing that is, the siamese twin of all mental activity. No, the artist's wager is to save, in spite of order, a certain arbitrariness; to give free rein to profound obscurity, and to make seem unintelligible that which is too unintelligible. It's not difficult to show us how to eat gracefully a roasted chicken; this is quite intelligible. But it is quite something else to eat an old shoe sole with muddy nails in the same elegant fashion, as Chaplin does in The Gold Rush. That's where the automatism of a rule strives to make manifest a whole level of basic absurdity, the only province of human lyricism. But let us never think that the intention of the artist is to create art. Brancusi believes such an idea less than anyone else.⁴

For Fondane order is only apparent. The profound natural state is the arbitrary and the absurd. Those artists who can enable us to see the unintelligibility of life behind its apparent orderings are Fondane's heroes. The constant transformation of objects in his screenplays is an attempt to capture this sense of disorder.

Fondane had begun his artistic career with an idealist appreciation of the art object, an attitude he broke with totally. In “Réflexions sur le spectacle” we see another of Fondane's objections to the cult of art: its ignorance of the presence of creativity in human endeavors outside the realm of canonized art:

The characteristic of our time (Is it for this that civilization feels itself in danger?) is to have understood how small and paltry the role of art is next to other activities to which it has refused the name of “creations.” Our age has pointed out the marvelous which is everywhere to some extent—in a match box or in an electric carpet sweeper. It has elevated the form of a car or airplane to the great honors of architecture and clearly pushed aside the idea of a theatrical event (“spectacle”) as we have previously conceived it. From now on a meeting, a parade, an exit from the subway, and a shop window, are as much a part of theatre as a play or vaudeville performance. Now that cinema has threatened to replace it, the theatre itself seeks new laws, and sports have furnished some of their own. It is a significant fact that today's chronicle of theatrical events is equally attentive to a boxing match, a tennis match, a play, a film, and the miraculous tightrope walk. The technique of risk and the effect of surprise are well worth the technique of formal production and the effect of harmony.⁵

Stressing the elements of risk and surprise, Fondane says that Breton's convulsive beauty will have to be achieved while art is in the process of being formed, not after it is finished and dead as an art object. The sensibility of the “spectacle” is opposed to the cult of art objects because “spectacle” stresses movement. For a long time, art has been a reconstitution of movement rather than movement itself. By extension, we can say that the unspooling of the unfilmable film in the mind avoids this mediating process of reconstitution.

Fondane had little sympathy with the bourgeois art of 1930. In his review of Marc Ickovic's La Littérature à la lumière du matérialisme historique, he sees no cause to feel that Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin offers much in the way of visible revolt, since it adopts traditional bourgeois forms for its proletarian message. Although this may be a simplification of Eisenstein's film-making practice, it does indicate Fondane's belief that revolt would have to develop the new artistic forms to go with it.

Is a book written according to the givens of the bourgeois novel, a book by Gorky or Barbusse, proletarian because it serves the proletarian cause through its apparent ideological evaluations? Is Battleship Potemkin a film representative of a new culture, or is it (and here must I give pain to Léon Moussinac?) a film which is indistinguishable from European-American films except for its subject matter (and even here Germinal came first) and its exceptional success? Truly, the gap is smaller between Battleship Potemkin and a European film than between a European film and an American film.⁶

Fondane's desire for revolutionary art forms rather than old art forms expressing revolutionary messages, reflects debates on art in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and anticipates the Narboni/Comolli statement in Cahiers du Cinéma in the wake of May 1968.

In Trois Scenarii it is the Surrealist revolt which is questioned and found wanting. This critique is made through the fate which overtakes each of Fondane's male protagonists. In “Paupières mûres,” “l'amour fou” leads the hero to fall pathetically to his death from Notre Dame. “Barre fixe” ends with the protagonist accommodating himself to bourgeois existence after a useless experience of Surrealist social anarchy. In “Mtasipol” the man's dream foreshadows his own symbolic suicide and does not lead to any privileged state of being. The scenarios are double-edged, for they use Surrealist elements to ask questions about the validity of the movement at a time (1926-28) when such prominent figures as Soupault, Artaud, Vitrac, and Desnos were being excluded from the ranks through Breton's autocratic actions. In addition to my analysis, a Freudian or archetypal explanation of the scenarios is always possible. However, we should remember that Fondane reproached Surrealism for traveling through dreams and the unconscious with Freud's work as a Baedecker.

In “Paupières mûres,” “l'amour fou” leads the protagonist to death. A young man works in a bar, where he, as well as five customers, is smitten by a woman. He follows her, as do the other men, into the street. Although he is in Paris, he pursues her by gondola, arriving at Notre Dame. From the balustrade, he sees “une femme” (shot 10), who may or may not be the object of his desire (“la femme”). Nevertheless, he gives her his love (perhaps because he cannot see from so high up, perhaps because he is fickle). We find him literally with his heart in his hand (129) and with an edelweiss in his heart (128). In the woman's hand, he turns into a monkey, phonograph, begonia blossom, and a glass jar with red fish. Eventually, he becomes a snake which she has to kill. The young man, in anguish, once again is on the balustrade of Notre Dame. He falls off, dies, and is surrounded by billiard balls from the bar where he worked (cf. Picabia's interest in the motion of billiard balls). Someone takes out a wallet from his limp body, throws away the photo of the woman and tears up a letter (a love letter from her?). The stranger slides the wallet into the pocket of a passer-by whom he asks for a cigarette. In the last shot, we are treated to a close-up of the “fantastic head” of the author, done by Man Ray. Illuminated by a cigarette lighter, he may or may not be one of the men in the final scene.

It appears as if Fondane is presiding over the loss of love. Not only does the young man lose the woman, but, in addition, the two documents of this love are destroyed as well. Perhaps the person who destroys them is a robber who finds no money upon the dead man. This motif would link him to the opening shots of the film, where an animate street lamp witnessed a brawl, which may have been an attempted robbery, for the scene ends with the hand of a person rummaging through another's pocket. The lack of causation for many actions allows the reader to mentally project a film for himself/herself in which images will fill in some, but not all, of these gaps.

There are many playful Dadaist incongruities in “Paupières mûres,” more so than in the other two scenarios. Included are images of a woman's knee with an eye in it (25), neon lights announcing a ball (cf. Man Ray's “Chaque soir à Magic City” and the flashing lights in Emak Bakia) (28), and an applauding mannequin (22). There are trick shots of the young man looking at himself in a bar window and seeing the woman's legs on his body; the woman's detachable head, which forms a still-life with a half-empty glass, saucer, and tip; the woman's head made out of wood; and men marching while dressed in their tables. In the bar, at one point, the woman appears as a drowned person, and later her face is placed in superimposition on the woman in the street whom the man sees from Notre Dame. Colliding balls, a ballet of Browning rifles, and the use of Notre Dame as an observation point, all suggest that the reader will take cues from the scenario to fashion his own creative film. Elaborate, beautiful, and arty descriptions of movement and images are avoided.

The scenario's title is suggestive, but has no fixed significance. The words “Paupières mûres” do not recur after the title. Should we imagine the women and mannequins with these ripe eyelids, indicating the desirability of the female body? On the other hand, is the young man's eye ripe for loving? Or are our eyes ripe for watching this film about desire? Each suggestion seems possible.

Although pacing is left to each reader, the abbreviated style of rendering the images suggests that these images should be connected by a chain of rapid movement. Here are the transformations the man undergoes for the woman:

136	she puts him in her hand, looks at him: he becomes by turns
137	a marmoset
138	which she caresses
139	a phonograph
140	whose crank she turns
141	a begonia blossom
142	which she puts into her buttonhole
143	the young man looks at her, smiles with happiness
144	he becomes a glass jar in which red fish are swimming
145	the begonia blossom becomes a mouse

(E 28)

All of the man's transformations to please the woman turn out to be futile. She treats him like a pet when he is a marmoset. He becomes an object of manipulation when he is a phonograph. As a begonia, he serves as an object to adorn her. Later (156) when he becomes a serpent, she disembowels him, showing herself to be more dangerous than he. The man's face expresses anguish (153), but there is no indication that he is capable of having a real relationship with the woman.

When the hero drops to his death from Notre Dame, the shot is followed by that of a billiard ball falling to earth (162), thus recalling the initial encounter of the man and the woman. We are also given a shot (164) of a bas-relief of those who go to hell among the devils, taken from the façade of Notre Dame. The torment of the dead man has also taken him to a kind of hell. Maurice Nadeau points out that for the Surrealists, the true revolution was the victory of desire.⁷ As an essayist, Fondane went on to criticize Surrealism as a movement which led men to madness, chaos, and suicide, while offering few compensations.⁸ In “Paupières mûres” this later position is anticipated.

In “Barre fixe” the protagonist's torment is more metaphysical and less personal. A young man in a wall poster steps down and becomes a real person. He suddenly shoots the only customer in the store which he has entered (30). Here Breton's statement about firing into a crowd as a Surrealist act is used, acted out, and shown to lead nowhere. A price of 100,000 francs is put on the protagonist's head, and he tries to commit suicide three times, but fails in every instance. At the Jardin des Plantes, he shoots a monkey. Then he becomes upset when he sees a woman walking nearby. He chases her into a cage with a whip and gives her a long kiss. He follows her home to bed, but a fiasco results. Again in the street, he meets a bald man and follows him. He ends up in front of the poster he had left, and he has to decide whether to become a part of it again or to continue to flee from arrest in the everyday world. He flips a coin and decides to live, taking up a job in some office or factory in which there is a time punch. The last shots read:

165	seen from the back he has his ticket punched by a time clock
166	he kisses a hand for a long time
167	it is the hairy hand, then the arm, the black robe of the parish priest
168	on the steps of a church
169	the young man with the statue of Voltaire
170	with the statue of Voltaire dressed as a bride

(E 38)

Fondane's hero is tricked by the rhetoric of the French Revolution. In the opening shot there is a wall on which we see the slogan, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” The words play on the wall (1), and it is when the young man, still in the poster on the wall, sees a worker reading the word “Liberté” in a newspaper, that he takes up living. Unfortunately, there are limits to liberty, and he ultimately seeks to be part of a collective, symbolized by the shot of an anthill (162). He does not have to resist the world of business firms—“la Glé d'Assurances Générales, The Insurance, L'Assiguratrice Italiana, Winterthur, Yorkshire, Graham” (164).

The term “barre fixe” has two connotations. As a bar (gymnastic apparatus) it is the locus of feats of strength, agility, and balance, as well as a place which can be privileged as “spectacle.” The hero is unsuccessful in mastering the “barre fixe” of life. Forced to perform against his will, he tries to throw himself off the bar. “Barre fixe” as a fixed barrier also suggests a no-exit situation, a variation of the “huis clos” later made famous by Sartre. The barrier is the idea of liberty, in three conflated forms—a deep seated-human desire, the promise of the French Revolution, and the anarchic ideal of Breton.

In “Barre fixe” it may appear as if the man is looking for death. He throws himself into the Seine, shoots himself, and jumps off the Eiffel Tower. Yet the specific situation involving the poster indicates that re-entering it is the real death (not the traditional forms of suicide), and that is what he ultimately flees. His decision to remain alive is, however, a choice for minimal existence. Both religion and philosophy are in cahoots to engineer his resignation from seeking freedom.

In “Barre fixe” Fondane does not suggest that society should stop repressing man's natural desires. No image of a possible authentic life is held up to be admired. The killing of the customer in the store is not condemned for being immoral. It is put on display as a useless act, leading the protagonist in despair to the opposite point of the spectrum—the desire for respectability as the bride of Voltaire. The scenario's ending is pessimistic, but satirical, rather than conservative. Voltaire is a villain because Voltaire believed in knowledge. For Fondane, knowledge usually bars the way between man and existence, and the Surrealists, in his view, also offered up this barrier of knowledge.

“Mtasipol” (dedicated to Georges Ribemont-Desaignes, who alone may have known the significance of the strange title, perhaps an anagram) resembles both “Paupières mûres” and “Barre fixe” in that it contains elements of an unhappy love story. Just as love and anarchic revolt are shown in the other scenarios to be inadequate forms of behavior, here we see that the dream state is not a privileged one. Instead it is a nightmare. In the dream which opens “Mtasipol” a man is dancing with a woman at a bar in a cafe. She shows him a calling card of Dr. Ixe. The man fires a pistol in the air to attract her attention, but she falls down wounded. A black musician starts to hit him with one of her shoes. Then we find that he is in bed, where his own arm is swinging at an alarm clock. Awake, he realizes that one arm is twice as long as the other, and he goes to see Dr. Ixe, where his arm grows twice as long again. It eventually has seven fingers and is put in a jar of alcohol. Suddenly, the scene shifts to the man's office, where a female client comes up to him and becomes more and more beautiful. She slaps him, and he chases her into the street. However, he becomes older and older, and four women come between them, one at a time. Finally, all five women appear before him on the order of the brothel madam, who has the black man's head. The first woman is the dancer, who brings the jar with the seven-fingered hand in it. Once again the scene changes. The man, now old, uses his revolver to force a younger passer-by to take his beard, skull, and umbrella. Then he looks at a mirror and finds that he himself has the black man's head. He fires at the mirror and falls. Thus the premonitory nature of the dream leads not to a better life, but to either death or symbolic death. The last shot shows us some roosters on some night tables, symbols of defeated desire which cast doubt on the value of the Surrealists' worship of love.

Although the scenario is basically the story of a man's pursuit of a woman and then of his attempt to catch up with the various women he encounters in the street, we do not see the love interest resolved. When the dancer gives him the jar with the seven-fingered hand, they embrace, but immediately the protagonist is out on a deserted street. Perhaps he finds that the romantic affair cannot work because he is too old and life has passed him by:

163	the old man in a deserted street
164	he is on the lookout at the corner of the road revolver pointed
165	a young man passes
166	at gunpoint he raises his arms
167	the old man hands him his beard his skull his umbrella orders him to leave
168	head of the old man on the body of the man who leaves
169	the old man begins to run into the night (blurred)
170	he stops in front of a mirror
171	in the mirror the head of the black man winking an eye
172	he takes out a revolver from his pocket and fires at the mirror
173	in the mirror we see him fall
174	several roosters—in lap dissolve—on several night tables

(E 46-47)

The scenario shows a man who awakens from one nightmare by clutching an alarm clock, only to face a nightmarish life which leads to death. The dream is connected to “reality” by means of the accidentally wounded (murdered?) dancer and by the doctor's calling card. The doctor had written “life in jeopardy” (48) as his diagnosis when he saw the seven fingers. Thus it is not surprising that once the seven fingers show up again, death follows soon after. The dancer has her revenge. Wounded in the dream, she comes back to lead him to his death.

The women in the scenario are associated with Medusa (81, 108, 139). But unlike the Medusa of myth, they do not turn men to stone, but, in pursuing them, the man loses his youth. All of the women seem to reflect the man's castration anxiety. At the brothel, the first two women show him his first two younger heads in a mirror. The third, almost like Salome, carries his head in on a platter. The man appears to be powerless because he projects his own emotions onto the women. That is why he is constantly confronted with a mirror, in this case, a symbol of narcissism. If he symbolically dies by shooting at the mirror rather than at himself, the scenario suggests that by losing the image of his identity, he can no longer function. The mirror here suggests a visible wholeness which is only an illusion, a concept which the psychic splitting in the dream reinforces. On the other hand, if the man actually dies because he shoots at the mirror, the scenario is more in line with the death of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. Thus we have a fantastic tale in which man's essence is located outside of himself. The dream is useless in providing literary inspiration, or even avoiding death, for it blends so wholly with “daily” experience, infected with the kind of absurdity it is. With life itself separated from reason, dream has no privileged status.

The uniqueness of Fondane's scenarios can best be seen by looking at them with reference to Dada film, Surrealist film, other unfilmed Surrealist screenplays, and the avant-garde narrative cinema in France. Fondane knew the two major Dada films, Entr'acte and Emak Bakia. There is no reference in his essays on film, however, to either Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma or Léger's Ballet mécanique. Fondane wrote a review of Clair's film for Integral in 1925, and he refers to Emak Bakia in his essay “2 × 2.”

Did Fondane know of the Surrealist films of 1927-1928 when he wrote his scenarios? “Paupières mûres” suggests that he might have been in contact with Man Ray (creator of two illustrations for Trois Scenarii), who was filming L'Etoile de mer. It is a matter of speculation whether Fondane saw Artaud's La Coquille et le clergyman either in late 1927 or early 1928. Obviously, Trois Scenarii antedates the Buñuel/Dalí films.

Fondane's first essay on the cinema was apparently his review of Entr'acte. He praises it as a film in which the camera plays the hero. It is a work which puts to shame the consciously artful and artificial film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. However, Fondane also believes that the liberty suggested by Clair's approach to film must add up to something. He declares:

I hope that René Clair may become the Rimbaud of the cinema, but on one condition—that he learn in time that technique is not only liberty without shame but also a well understood servitude. A new technique doesn't yet make a beautiful film, a new subject matter even less. What is needed is a technique put at the service of a subject matter, which does not give up language. We need neither novelty nor technique, but the work.

(E 53)

Fondane's screenplays recall Entr'acte through their use of playful images and sudden transitions. Although Entr'acte was less startlingly scandalous than some other Dada creations, as Mimi White shows, the film questions typical narrative structures and asks whether they are natural or necessary. After all, she writes, “why … should one expect a film to proceed according to an a priori notion of logic and continuity when it is, after all, merely a construction, an assembly of images?”⁹ Despite the fact that Fondane's three scenarios also violate typical expectations of continuity, in 1928 (four years later) his techniques could no longer have had the same effect. Fondane's interest is not directed toward issues of film vision and representation. In each scenario, he has a protagonist who comes to an unhappy end. His goal is to say something about man's existence in the world.

It is through his protagonists that Fondane makes his strongest links to the interior dramas of L'Etoile de mer and La Coquille et le clergyman. Despite its starfish, “Paupières mûres” does not depict woman as an embodiment of violent force. It shows “l'amour fou” leading to the protagonist's death, not to the metaphorical violation of the woman as in Man Ray's film. In L'Etoile de mer the woman manifests a far greater eroticism. She is beautiful like flowers of glass, flesh, and fire. At various times she holds a knife and a spear. She is actually having a relationship with the hero and initially seems ready for a sexual encounter. L'Etoile de mer clearly presents the starfish and the woman as enigmas to be understood. In “Paupières mûres” the woman is not having an affair with the protagonist. She is noticed in the bar/restaurant by him and five other men. She gives all the men the cold shoulder, and she forcefully discourages the men who try to pick her up. Whereas Man Ray shows us the violence and ambiguities that permeate most relationships, Fondane presents us with an obsession which leads to a pathetic ending—death by falling.

La Coquille et le clergyman is closer in spirit to “Paupières mûres,” since the woman in Artaud's film scenario is not a femme fatale. The clergyman needs to reach a state of inner unity before he has any hope of winning her love. She continually eludes him, as happens with the corresponding characters in “Paupières mûres.” Nevertheless, Artaud, unlike Fondane, does not suggest that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of the woman in itself. If the officer/priest is really another side of the clergyman's personality, then we can assume that the woman is someone he really knows. We have enough published information to interpret Artaud's film scenario autobiographically (e.g., his love for Génica Athanasiou), but so far we can not do so with Fondane's scenario.

Fondane championed the Buñuel/Dalí films which appeared after his own scenarios. He even presented Un Chien andalou to Vittoria Ocampo's friends in Argentina in 1929. However, his essays on the cinema contain only the most fleeting references to these famous collaborative efforts. Since the Buñuel/Dalí films defend the primacy of desire, we must suspect that Fondane's enthusiasm for them is to be found elsewhere, probably in three areas: (a) in the appreciation of absurdity and employment of absurd chronological frameworks, (b) in the attack on the bourgeois world and its attendant hypocrisies, and (c) in the satires on Christianity.

Since Fondane's three scenarios were not filmed, it may be possible that he was influenced by some other unfilmed Surrealist scenarios. Two of the most important of these are Robert Desnos's “Minuit à quatorze heures,” which appeared in the special issue of Cahiers du mois in 1925, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes' “The Eighth Day of the Week,” published in English in Nos. 19-20 of transition in 1930. I have found no references to these screenplays in Fondane's writings, but Desnos's scenario was readily available in print, and Fondane carried on a correspondence with Ribemont-Dessaignes, to whom he dedicated “Mtasipol.” If Desnos and Ribemont-Dessaignes published their screenplays with no thoughts of having them filmed, they would be more closely associated with Fondane's work in this genre.

“Minuit à quatorze heures” is a notable scenario because it uses filmic possibilities to suggest mental states. A woman betrays her lover with a younger man while her lover is out fishing. He falls from a parapet and dies. Although the woman and her new boyfriend are not responsible for the lover's death, they have guilty feelings because of the way they betrayed him. Their life together is destroyed by a huge, mysterious ball which terrorizes their house. Eventually house, inhabitants, and ball are swallowed up and replaced by a funnel. All signs of death, adultery, and guilt are gone. Desnos uses numbered shots (a system which Delluc also used) as a frame for his actions. This is the same method Fondane employs, and his scenario is about the same length as Desnos's.

It is the images, rather than the system of shot breakdowns, which connect “The Eighth Day of the Week” to Fondane's scenarios. The visit to the doctor's office, female mannequins, a woman lying on a billiard table, and a man who shoots himself in a mirror are all closely related to images in Fondane's work. Ribemont-Dessaignes' scenario tells the adventure of Sadie, a femme fatale who has several admirers. In the end, she is murdered by a hunchback who crushes her head. The use of the femme fatale and the violent ending recall L'Etoile de mer more than “Paupières mûres.”

The reader of Richard Abel's French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 has a chance to compare Fondane's scenarios with many seldom-shown films of the period—particularly experimental narrative films not in the Dada/Surrealist orbit. One such film, not mentioned by Fondane, is Ivan Mosjoukine's Le Brasier ardent (1923). Abel finds the film an outrageous parody of “l'amour fou.”¹⁰ A woman has a nightmare about a demonic and powerful Detective Z, which is a type of compensation for an unsatisfactory relationship with her husband. Although in the end, Detective Z turns out to be a timid man devoted to his mother, the woman becomes paired with him, offering a maternal form of love, while her husband happily goes off to his new-found freedom. Fondane's “Mtasipol” also begins with a nightmare in which the dreamer wakes up in an agitated position representing a graphic match with the dream action. In each case, the nightmare is an obvious sexual fantasy which introduces the themes of the non-dream action. In “Mtasipol” the hero meets up with Dr. Ixe (cf. Detective Z), who cannot cure him of “causeless maladies” (human existence in general). The woman lost to the hero in the dream is also lost in daily life. Despite the similarities in the treatment of the nightmare, it is obvious that Mosjoukine's film arrives at a happy ending, whereas Fondane's scenario ends in either death or symbolic death. Since Fondane had close connections with Russian émigrés both through Leon Shestov and the Cahiers de l'Etoile circle, it would not be surprising if he had seen Le Brasier ardent and other Albatros films.

Fondane arrived in Paris in 1923, the year of Mosjoukine's film. According to Michel Carassou he soon got to know fellow Roumanians Tzara and Veronca.¹¹ They put him in touch with former Dadaists rather than with the members of Breton's Surrealist group, which was then being organized. During the next five years, until the Trois Scenarii, Fondane wrote very little and seems to have abandoned creative writing (poetry and plays). Thus the questioning of film itself in the scenarios is not surprising for a person reassessing the function of art in his own life after a period of crisis. Here the Dadaist connection overlaps with his own tentative rededication to a life of artistic endeavor.

The unfilmable scenarios were written to create a provisory state of the spirit which memory would consume with the act of reading, as Fondane says in “2 × 2” (E 21). Here we see him trying to overcome the problem pointed out by Thomas Elsaesser, namely, that “the fixed nature of film texts and production circumstances seems to be at odds with the Dada emphasis on performance and active provocation.”¹² Fondane rejects the fixed nature of film texts. He writes:

One no longer writes in order to keep oneself in countenance. One publishes nothing except to question the audience and throw doubt before as many men as possible without hope of finding the rest of mankind.

(E 20)

Thus Fondane's scenarios should be seen in the Dadaist tradition of returning to a zero state and beginning anew. Entr'acte and Emak Bakia raised the issues of logic/continuity and vision/representation, respectively. Trois Scenarii makes a fitting close to the Dada era of metaphysical questioning. Even the film is gone.

In five short articles published in Integral in 1927-1928, we can trace Fondane's attitudes towards Surrealism, as it was reaching an internal crisis. In “Louis Aragon ou le Paysan de Paris,” he declares that Surrealism created an aesthetic doctrine which was only that of second-degree Dada (FT 126). After Dada had brought man back to the beginning (“fait table rase”) and used Cartesian doubt to conceive of only nothing (“le néant”), Surrealism posited the dream as a category which allows for the existence of a nebula in distant space, that is, a hope for the doubters (FT 126). Fondane is suspicious of this consolation. His sympathies are with those who do not need such hopes.

Fondane's very brief appreciation of Paul Eluard's Capitale de la douleur (March 1927) does not criticize Surrealism, but one month later in “Les Surréalistes et la Révolution” he points out that Surrealism and Communism are movements logically at odds with one another, an issue which Breton was hedging on. He stresses his distaste of Communism, a totalizing system of order, and advocates the irrational in life, which might ultimately crush Surrealism.

In the June-July 1927 issue, Fondane underlines his desire to accelerate conditions devouring the century. For him it is not the time to create masterpieces. This is the essay of the Integral group closest in tone to “2 × 2.” “Pierre Reverdy” (April 1928), perhaps contemporaneous with the writing of Trois Scenarii, praises poetry as a postulate of the identity of the poet with the universe (FT 144) and finds it preferable to the poem, or art object. This idea can be linked to the valorization of the film unspooling in a person's mind while reading the written scenario.

Also in 1928, Fondane participated in the Discontinuité group with Arthur Adamov and Claude Sernet. He was friendly with René Daumal and Roger Victor Leconte, members of Le Grand Jeu. In 1930 Fondane was so hostile to Breton that they ended up in a physical scuffle. Two years later he refused to sign the petition on behalf of Aragon in the wake of the controversy surrounding Aragon's “Front rouge.”

With the publication of two essays on Leon Shestov (some of whose work he had already read in Roumania) in 1929, Fondane turned more and more to a form of existentialism to confront the agony of individual human existence. He also returned to the writing of poetry at about the same time. He continued on these two courses until his death in a concentration camp in 1944, in his forty-sixth year.

It is too simple to say that Fondane left Dada and Surrealism behind him, for his poetry and his lost film,Tararira, are indebted to these movements. However, in 1938 in the Faux Traité d'Esthétique he expressed his most revealing criticism of Surrealism. It contains the following passage:

It's starting with the Surrealists that poetry makes an effort to be a type of knowledge, makes sacrifices to morality and politics, in short, wishes to be something. It's among the Surrealists that for the first time poetry tries to establish its structures; puts a stop to the transcendant and an embargo on dreams; sets up connections with the social, moral, and political spheres; determines what it considers sin; and promulgates a system of immediate sanctions against “intellectual bloodstains.” Poetry finally becomes something.

(FT 46-47)

Having become “something,” poetry then can be put to the service of the revolution and then to the service of the proletarian revolution. The liberty postulated by the movement turns out to be a mirage, a conclusion already apparent in “Barre fixe,” an unfilmable film, a resistance to the notion of poetry becoming “something.”

Notes

1. Benjamin Fondane, Ecrits pour le cinéma: le muet et le parlant, ed. Michel Carssou (Paris: Plasma, 1984). All subsequent references to Fondane's essays and scenarios in this edition are marked by E in the essay.

2. John Kenneth Hyde, Benjamin Fondane: A Presentation of His Life and Work (Geneva: Droz, 1971).

3. Michel Carassou, “Préface: Benjamin Fondane et le cinéma.” In Benjamin Fondane, Ecrits sur le cinéma, pp. 7-11. See p. 10.

4. Benjamin Fondane, “Brancusi,” Cahiers de l'Etoile 2 (1929): 708-25. See p. 710.

5. Benjamin Fondane, “Réflexions sur le spectacle,” Cahiers de l'Etoile 2 (1929): 256-67. See p. 260.

6. Benjamin Fondane, “Review of Marc Ickovicz's La Littérature à la lumière du matérialisme historique,” Cahiers de l'Etoile 2 (1929): 616-21. See p. 618.

7. Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

8. Benjamin Fondane, Faux Traité d'esthétique: Essai sur la crise de réalité (Paris: Plasma, 1980), p. 74.

9. Mimi White, “Two French Dada Films: Entr'acte and Emak Bakia,” Dada/Surrealism 13 (1984): 37-47. See p. 42.

10. Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 367-73.

11. Michel Carassou, Radio Program on France-Culture, February 1986.

12. White, p. 37.