The Apoplectic Walrus

Joanna wanted a film on the collages of Max Ernst, and I wanted to make a tribute to the two men who most influenced my film work at the beginning: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Bunuel (surrealism in cinema). I had written a book of about one-hundred pages in the surrealist tradition of “automatic writing,” which I called the “Cloud Journal.” I thought I could marry some of the text of the journal with the collages of Ernst’s UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE, along with bits of my own animation. So I shot the film on day one of the Ernst collage novel (example: lion), and used the first sixteen pages of my journal. I enlisted my friend and collaborator, Leroy Clark, to narrate and engineer the sound. We finished up digitally, then on 16mm film (the original format). I have nothing esoteric to say about this film, except to explain the title: it is a tribute to Luis Bunuel. There is no walrus in the film, as there is no dog in UN CHIEN ANDALOU.