Leicester celebrates century of surrealism this October

Leicester will mark the centenary of the publication of the Surrealist Manifesto and celebrate the highly influential surrealist art movement.

Pheonix Cinema has joined forces with University of Leicester’s Dr Madeleine Chalmers to host a Surrealist Soirée on Saturday, 12 October as part of its Surrealism Season.

Surrealism is an art movement that is inspired by dreams and the unconscious that emerged after the First World War. Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo and Max Ernst are some of the most renowned artists of the surrealist movement.

The Surrealist Manifesto was published in Paris in October 1924 and is celebrated as launching the surrealist movement which continues to have immense influence on visual culture across the globe, including film and television.

The Surrealist Soirée will start with The Surrealist Café where guests can try their hand at surrealist writing techniques and party games. Guests will also be able to sample special themed cocktails and mocktails as a tribute to the collaborative café culture at the heart of surrealist meetings.

Dr Madeleine Chalmers (Lecturer in French Studies at University of Leicester) will then deliver a lecture tracing the history of surrealism and exploring how surrealist ideas and aesthetics have been taken up globally.

The lecture will include rare full screenings of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933, 41mins), Jan Švankmajer’s The Flat (1968, 13mins), plus excerpts from celebrated artist films.

Dr Chalmers said: “In October 1924, a young French doctor-turned-poet, André Breton, published a manifesto that he and his friends thought would change the world. They called themselves ‘surrealists’. Surrealism emerged in Paris at a time when writers, thinkers, and artists were challenging our understanding of ourselves and society. In the wake of the destruction of the First World War, amid the flourishing of psychoanalysis, the surrealists sought to unlock the potential for creative renewal that lies in our imaginations. In dreams, our minds recombine the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday lives in startling combinations that obey their own (il)logic. For the surrealists, that inner world is not something to be dismissed as ‘just a dream’ – far from it! Those are the moments when we are seeing the world in true Technicolour, rather than the monochrome of social convention and rationality.

“In their writing, painting, sculpture, and cinema, they sought to bring out the extraordinary that lies hidden in the everyday by creating paradoxical images and shocking juxtapositions, not without a touch of humour. Their legacy is visible in much of our media today, from Monty Python to memes. However, surrealism was never about kitsch – it was about freedom, in language and in politics, in its most radical forms.

“As the political landscape in Europe became increasingly fraught in the 1930s, and European empires sought to hold onto their colonies, surrealism offered a visual and philosophical vocabulary to antifascist and anticolonial movements. From Egypt to the Caribbean, on every continent, surrealist ideas and aesthetics were taken up by artists and thinkers and reinterpreted in local idioms to express political dissent or articulate hybrid postcolonial identities. Long after the ‘original’ Parisian surrealists had lost their radical edge, surrealism flourished. It continues to be remixed and reinvigorated in Afro-Surrealism, inviting us to reimagine our world as a more open and plural space. This is the story which this event seeks to share”.

The Surrealist Soirée will take place on Saturday, 12 October at Pheonix Cinema, Leicester from 6PM. Further information about the Surrealist Soirée, including tickets, can be found here.