1928 - THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN, aka La Coquille et le Clergyman

 This surrealistic (avant guarde?) film runs only forty minutes and to paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) " a great piece of art but nobody ever wished it a minute longer."  This early film is one of those mystifying things that show up with artists with pretensions get their hands on a canvas or in this case a movie camera.

The appears to have something to do with a clergyman who is attempting to stop maybe a love affair between maybe his wife and maybe an army general.  There is much running around and the symbolism is apparently rampant. Glass is broken, the clergyman drags himself down the street, the maybe wife ends up having to expose herself and the army general runs around for no particular reason.   

 

The author of The Seashell and the Clergyman Antonin Artaud claimed it was an attempt to photograph a dream and one has to give the director Germaine Dulac credit.  For an old movie she was certainly inventive when it came to weird camera angles and lighting effects.

 

This is the film where some British critic coined the phrase, that the film was "so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable".  The Seashell and the Clergyman is practically a companion piece to Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou another short film that is an obscure piece of confusing surrealism.  As another critic said "it's gotta be art because it sure as hell isn't entertainment."  If you so desire the film is on YouTube in a good copy