Just as, following World War II, the French embraced the influx of American films, dubbing them film noir, as World War I ended American films filled the theaters and the French met Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The Tramp in a suit, the face without a smile, seemed to embody the contradictions of the time, and to exist in a liberated world. As Jacques Brunius observed, the American comedies "incite us to question logic and reason all over again." Antonin Artaud, in an essay, "Cinema and Reality" (1927), suggested that "because it works with matter itself, cinema creates situations that arise from the mere collision of objects, forms, repulsions, attractions. It does not detach itself from life but rediscovers the original order of things. The films that are most successful in this sense are those dominated by a certain kind of humor, like the early Buster Keatons or the less human Chaplins. A cinema which is studded with dreams and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humor." In 1930, Luis Buñuel presented a program of cinema comedians at the Cineclub Español, including Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd, and declared, "People are so stupid, with so many prejudices, that they think that Faust and Potemkin are superior to these lunacies which are not lunacy at all but what I would call the new poetry. The Surrealist equivalent in the cinema is to be found only in these films." With our selection of films by Chaplin (one a Mack Sennett, whose comedies where particularly beloved by the Surrealists) and Keaton, we hope to show how these two modern clowns disrupt our sense of propriety, whether fleeing alienated from society, encountering everyday objects in revolt, or literally breaking apart the established order. --Kathy Geritz