Jon Mirsalis on Piano While the Surrealists were fascinated by the similarity between dreaming and film viewing, their writings of the twenties, as Linda Williams (Figures of Desire) has shown, suggest two different ways of thinking about cinema. Some, like the poet Robert Desnos, compared cinema to dreams and their content: "From the desire to dream comes the thirst for and love of the cinema. For lack of the spontaneous adventure which our eyelids let escape on wakening, we go into the dark cinemas to find artificial dreams and perhaps the stimulus capable of peopling our empty nights" ("Dream and Cinema," 1923). Others saw the goal of Surrealist cinema to evoke in the spectator a dream-like experience-rather than reproducing a dream, to suggest the mechanisms or impact of a dream. Antonin Artaud observed "..I think the cinema is made primarily to express matters of the mind, the inner consciousness, not by a succession of images so much as by something more imponderable which restores them to us with their direct matter, with no interpositions or representations..." ("Witchcraft and Cinema," c. 1930). Some of the earliest, primitive films used the dream as a pretext for inventive, irrational sequences and tricks. Films such as Scullion's Dream, were revived at cineclubs in Paris, where the Surrealists admired their poetic freedom. Jacques Brunius has observed that "until the war of 1914 Freud's work had remained almost unknown in France except among specialists" and that in the post-war years, psychoanalysis was "one of the avant-garde's sources of inspiration." This can be observed in Hans Richter's experimental Filmstudie, which Richter characterized as Surrealistic, and Twopence Magic, both of which attempt to evoke the feel of a dream. On the opening of The Seashell and the Clergyman at the Ciné-Club de France on 25 October 1927, it was announced as "Dream of Antonin Artaud, Visual Composition by Germaine Dulac." Although the facts are unclear, a number of Surrealists interrupted the screening of the film. Artaud declared that his scenario "can resemble, can be related to the mechanism of a dream without actually being a dream itself. (It) seeks to restore the pure power of thought." Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has analyzed the disagreement between Artaud and Dulac and suggested that "the riot over the screening...can...be read in terms of a conflict between the expressive euphoria which Dulac found in the moving visual image and the psychic directness which Artaud sought in the cinematic text." Buster Keaton, whose Surrealist-appreciated Sherlock Jr. depicts a dream which is equated to the cinematic process, has been described as producing a comic "disorder of nightmarish or hallucinatory proportions" (Robert Aron, "Films of Revolt," 1929). --Kathy Geritz