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SURREALISM AND FILM BY J. H. MATTHEWS The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1971; hardcover, $8.50; 224 pages, illustrations, index.
As a historical study, Surrealism and Film is an admirable reconstruction, from primary materials, ot the surrealists' continuing infatuation with film over the past fifty years. Because of the lack of "any extended statement codifying surrealist opinion on the movies, comparable with Breton's essays on surrealism and painting," Matthews chronologically examines a host of surrealist documents, movie reviews, and film scripts, as well as surrealist films and commercial films admired by surrealists for their tinges of involuntary surrealism, in order to define the values surrealists have continued to bring to their enchantment with the medium and to describe the ends they have hoped to achieve through it. Much to his credit, Matthews is able to deduce from this wealth of scattered...