ABSTRACT
This chapter arises from work I did on city films in the context of a recent book project on the European avant-garde (Webber 2004: 103-66). The methodology for the project as a whole was based on a dialogue of tensions between political and psychoanalytic modes of critique, between Marx and Freud. The chapter on city cinema aimed to draw out the contradictory economies of much early avant-garde filmmaking by finding psychoanalytic purchase in revolutionary films and political tensions in those with a more psychical agenda. The bifocal logic of the psycho-political methodology in the avant-garde project meant looking for trespass into or spilling out of the interior in the politically driven films of early Soviet Russia and for the reaching of the more psychically driven films of surrealism or expressionism into more external, social-political spaces. Un Chien Andalou (1928), by Buñuel and Dalí, was a focal example of the latter, and what is proposed here is an amplification of the psychoanalytically disposed reading of that film’s politics through close – perhaps fetishistic – analysis of a particular feature: its preoccupation with lace and lacemaking.
