Under the Dictation of the Image: Film, Economy, and the Avant-Garde

This dissertation explores a genealogy of late dissident/ethnographic surrealist production in avant-garde film, literature, and theory from an international perspective. Taking as its starting point the critical works of the artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001), understood through his (concealed) reception in film theory via the philosophers Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze, this project weaves into this history a set of later examples through the specific cases of the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Mexican artist, theater director, and filmmaker Juan José Gurrola. Both artists, I argue, are crucial for re-imagining the reception of the critical works of Klossowski, his colleague Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, and the larger dissident surrealist group associated with the Collège de Sociologie and the journal and secret society of Acéphale. In this study, I confine my approach to a set of problems posed by each of these figures: Klossowski (and Bataille) via Lyotard, Pasolini, and Gurrola. I propose an alternative film theoretical discourse in distinction to the now classical arguments of psychoanalytic film theory, as well as both realist and formalist notions of film economy. My methodology combines a close reading of cinema and theoretical texts. As well, I offer an extension of this work by means of archival research on the films of Juan José Gurrola, featuring an in-depth consideration of his landmark experimental film-action Robarte el Arte (1972), whose answer to the question regarding the articulation of an original film language is, I argue, crucial for our understanding of the medium, as well as for the historical periods under question and the contemporaneous debates on film semiotics