‘Deaf, dumb and blind cinema’

In 1933, in Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution , Luis Buñuel published a proposal for an implausible object: a giant wooden giraffe. 1 The giraffe’s spots were to consist of either a hinged door to be opened by the spectator, a hole carved through the animal or a hollow containing specified objects. On opening or examining a spot, the viewer could be presented with an animated scene: Buñuel’s mother, dressed as a laundress, weeping beside a stream; a decrepit house from which an old labourer might emerge; a cow’s eye in orbit. Alternatively the viewer could be offered an object, often one inviting touch – a lump of fresh pliable dough, for example, maliciously embedded with razor blades. While many of the motifs of this project – cow’s eyes, razor blades, peasants, giraffes – are familiar from the historiography of surrealist film, it is the intersection of the cinematic visual field and the sculptural project of the surrealist object that calls for closer examination.