Bad Movies

There are a number of reasons to consider bad movies. The most obvious is that tastes change; that many, if not most of the films we admire were once dismissed as inconsequential trash; and that trash itself is not without its socioaesthetic charms. Then too, bad movies have a pedagogic use value, even though the evolution of film form has largely been based on mistakes. A third reason is that movies, to a certain degree, have a life of their own. They mix the documentary with the fictional, and the worst intentions aspect of one can overwhelm the worst intentions of the other. In other words, it is possible for a movie to succeed because it has failed.

With their pen erse, pioneering affection for the detritus of industrial civilization, the Surrealists were the first to cultivate an appreciation forbad movies. "The best and most exciting films [arc] the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema," advises Ado Kyrou in Le Surréalisme au Cinéma. "Learn to go see the 'worst' films; they are sometimes sublime." This taste for Elixir of Potboiler-junky spectacles, cheap horror flicks, anonymous pornography, juvenile swashbucklers, movies "scorned by critics, charged with cretinism or infantilism by the old defenders of rationality"-was based on the innate capacity of such films to produce (if only in random moments) that "crux of Surrealism," le merveilleux.

The Surrealists courted disorientation: A film had a dreamlike latent content-andithis could be precipitated by deranging or bypassing the manifest content of its storyline. During World War I, the young André Breton used to wander from movie-house to moviehouse, entering mid-film, leaving for the next once the plot became apparent. By the time Breton became Surrealism's Black Pope, this practice had been elevated and refined into the principle of synthetic criticism. The ideal Surrealist spectator habitually broke open a film's continuity to liberate individual images from the prison of the narrative. Thus the American para-Surrealist Joseph Cornell created his 1937 masterpiece Rose Hobart by distilling a studio adventure film. East of Borneo (Columbia, 1931), into twenty-four non-linear minutes and projecting it at silent speed through a piece of blue glass to the accompaniment of the song "Holiday in Brazil."

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