Comparing Eraserhead and Nightmare on Elm Street IV

Comparing Eraserhead and Nightmare on Elm Street IV

essay iam going to be looking at two films in particular. Eraserhead, a successful surreal film by D. Lunch, and Nightmare on Elm Street iv. These are films that distort the real.

he contributions of surrealism to twentieth century art and literature are widely recognised. It would be almost impossible to write a survey of modern art or a history of modern literature or literary theory without the inclusion of surrealism. The aesthetics of the surrealists, and their impact on later artistic styles and movements in Europe, America, and elsewhere, are the subject of a growing body of work. Contemporary film, photography, and even advertising have been said to owe a debt to surrealism; and the name and work of Salvador Dali, if not of Aragon or Breton.

Andre Breton talked of surrealism as "the prehensile tail" of romanticism, (in the shadow and its shadows). The objections that we often have in reality, as soon as we are talking of surrealism in film/cinema, we find that these objections are lost. We seem to enter a world where the unconscious ans conscious do not meet. You are in a "conscious hallucination" argues Jean Goudal.

"Life in the street outside no longer exists. Our problems evaporate, our neighbours disappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of contemporary depersonalisation which takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but two eyes revited to ten square meters of white sheet." (pg:86-87)

According to Breton, "language has been given to man so that he may make surrealist use of it" (proclaimed in his First Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924, pg 35 language of revolt:dada and surrealist literature and film).

For Freud there was...

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...rious dream, and "supported by the sumptuous visual conception: the swirling composition of the sets and the camera movement, the often heady transition of shots." (pg:396: vera Dika 'From Dracula-With Love':In the Dread of Difference). She adds that images seem to superimpose one on the other, understanding the screen as a pictorial plane rather than as a lived scene and images dissolve into others based on visual similarities and meanings. (give example)

The film is fragmented interms of story, decentred when are talking of the characters within it, and artificial/fake when it comes to sets and acting. According to Dika,, surrealism can often be cited in the films tendency for combustive combinations and for disruption of its internal continuity. In Eraserhead the films narrative transitions do not have conventional Hollywood invisibility and linearity.