This chapter considers the fiction of Rikki Ducornet from an ecocritical perspective. Focusing in particular on the novels The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Jade Cabinet (1993), and Phosphor in Dreamland (1995), this chapter argues that Ducornet’s writings engage occult knowledge systems in order to present an ecological and non-anthropocentric worldview in which nature and different lifeforms are deeply interconnected. Positioning Ducornet’s narratives in the context of surrealism’s ecological imperative, this chapter urges us, through Ducornet, to turn our careful attention to the interplay and language of humans, animals, and nature in a broader sense.

Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930) are often considered to be both the beginning and the end of surrealist cinema. But such hasty contentions obscure a rich tradition of surrealist filmmaking. This chapter discusses the defining characteristics of Buñuel and Dalí’s pioneering films, before proceeding to demonstrate that while the broader surrealist film tradition is notably indebted to these early experiments, it is also marked by an astounding heterogeneity. Surrealist filmmakers in France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia have employed a range of formats, including documentary, feature film, and animation, from the 1930s up to the present. Providing an overview of surrealist film in a wider context, the chapter looks at how Michel Zimbacca’s documentary films interrogate notions of Western supremacy, Nelly Kaplan’s feature films depict anarchic revolts against patriarchy, and Jan Švankmajer’s films use animation to give life to inert matter in inventive ways.

The early surrealist writings on film have secured their place in film history and the history of film theory, but the surrealist movement’s presence in post-war film culture remains a blind spot in film studies. The Introduction describes how surrealists turned to film criticism and film-making with renewed vigour following World War II, before discussing the methodological challenges involved in expanding the study of surrealist film to the post-World War II period. It argues that surrealist cinema and its widespread impact cannot be fully understood unless its drastically understudied post-war history is consistently acknowledged and charted. Discussing the post-war reception of surrealism, its political pursuits, and its widened interests generally, the Introduction sets out specific examples of how the history of surrealist film intersects with the movement’s broader history and outlook.

Following World War II, surrealism turned to myth and magic in its pursuit of new ways of changing the world, but its activities were also shaped by an overriding conviction that anthropocentrism and notions of human exceptionalism were responsible for the catastrophic state of the world. This chapter examines how the filmmakers Nelly Kaplan and Jan Švankmajer have furthered this surrealist critique. In Kaplan’s La Fiancée du pirate (1969) and Néa (1976), the female protagonists form alliances with their cat and goat companions against a repressive world, as Kaplan draws on surrealism’s critique of Western modernity to imagine possibilities of interspecies revolt. In several of his films, Švankmajer animates animal body parts into new energetic patterns of behaviour, and so enables them to revolt against human domination. Švankmajer’s outlook may appear bleaker than Kaplan’s, but their films converge in a shared pursuit of alternatives to a civilisation predicated on the exploitation of other animals. Much as André Breton turned to occultism for new ways of conceiving of the world, Kaplan and Švankmajer draw on magic in order to imagine alternatives to the Anthropocene, and to create new myths in which humanity is displaced from its privileged position.