Film program accompanying the exhibition „IN THE VERY BOWELS OF CHANGES: SURREALISM AND ANTIFASCISM”

Film program accompanying the exhibition In the very bowels of change. Surrealism and Antifascism develops its central idea – surrealism was not merely a style or a closed avant-garde formation, but an international group of people united by solidarity, yet also by conflicts. 

From the 1920s onward, this network of connections stretched from Paris to Prague, Cairo, Martinique, and New York. Instead of a linear history, the exhibition presents a network – composed of nodes that recur at various moments of the 20th century: revolutions, wars, colonial ruptures, and political upheavals.

Each screening focuses on one such node, treating film not as an illustration of the era, but as an intense record of it. In 1920s Paris, surrealist cinema emerges from a Dadaist gesture and immediately becomes a battleground – between René Clair, Germaine Dulac, and Breton’s group – over who can control the surrealist image. In Spain and its diaspora, Surrealism is drawn into the logic of the Civil War and the Francoist trauma, where personal memory becomes a political cry. In Prague, cinematic imagination operates under conditions of both occupation and “normalization,” transforming the space of everyday life into a system of material resistance against authority.

Subsequent films extend this map beyond Europe: to Martinique and Egypt, where surrealism is rewritten in anti-colonial and post-colonial languages, merging with the négritude movement and Arab modernism. Finally, it is brought to a close by the cinema of Chris Marker, which does not reconstruct the history of the revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, but rather assembles its remnants – images that survived moments of political upheaval.

In this sense, the program does not organize surrealism but reveals its dispersion: as a practice that constantly transcends geographical, aesthetic, and ideological boundaries. Here, the films do not form a canon, but a network of tensions – between Europe and the frontiers of capitalism, between the avant-garde and politics, between imagination and historical violence. The question “what is surrealism?” is replaced by another: “where and when does it function as a form of resistance?”