ABSTRACT
Despite Surrealist leader Andre Breton's well-documented disapproval of music, a significant proportion of filmmakers associated with Dada and Surrealism during the late 1920s and early 1930s followed the commonplace practice of using pre-existing music for their films, as either live accompaniment or recorded soundtrack. This chapter introduces the idea of readymade soundtracks, one element of the wider, neglected field of Dada and Surrealist audio-visuals. Bolstered by Breton's stance, studies of Dada and Surrealist films have traditionally focused on their visual and narrative elements. Critics have argued that the cinematic use of pre-existing music opens up the interpretative field and inevitably destabilises meaning. For Dada and Surrealist cinema, however, such outcomes would be desirable. L’Age d'Or certainly exploited the mood-music associations of the well-known pieces comprising its compilation score. Pre-existing music played an important role in Dada and Surrealist filmmaking.
