See P. XX: Films of the Dreamhounds

See P. XX

A column on roleplaying

by Robin D. Laws

 

The surrealist films your player characters help to create as the Dreamhounds of Paris one day wind up on YouTube. The ones fit for human observation, at any rate.

In 1928, expat American photographer and painter Man Ray and French poet Robert Desnos collaborate on the film L’Étoile de mer, or Starfish. They film portions of it in the Dreamlands, thereby initiating its lead actress, Ray’s lover, as a dreamer. Getting camera equipment there means going in waking form, not as dreamers. That requires the filmmakers to haul it through Paris’ portal to the Dreamlands, the Catacombs. Fortunately Desnos is on good terms with the ghouls who dwell there and guard the gateway. He and the former human alchemist Nicolas Flamel go way back. Although our veiled senses want to assume that the entity shown in the film is an ordinary starfish in an aquarium, true seers immediately grasp that it is a multi-tentacled avatar of the Old Ones. The creature also manifests the dreamstuff of cabaret singer Yvonne George, for whom Desnos suffers terrible pangs of unrequited love. But that’s a long story, best described in the pages of Dreamhounds of Paris

Five years prior, Ray’s first short film, Retour A La Raison (Return to Reason) debuts in circumstances that for decades eclipse its innovation as a purely abstract piece of cinema. André Breton, the surrealist movement’s oddly doctrinaire leader, is feuding with Tristan Tzara, self-proclaimed impresario of Dada. Tzara stages a night of avant garde performances, including a screening of Retour A La Raison. Breton has no beef with Ray, but considers various other program items, including the participation of surrealist arch-nemesis Jean Cocteau, outrageous. So midway through he leaps onto the stage and breaks the arm of a writer named Pierre de Massot with his cane. In the ensuing mayhem, the innovations of Retour a la Raison go by the wayside.

 

 

In 1926 Ray makes Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone), a longer exercise in abstraction, including stop motion animated sequences and another glimpse of the glamorous Kiki. Breton dislikes this one, too, because it also features the poet Jacques Rigaut, who he has excommunicated from the group. Through a true dreamer’s eyes the elements of filmed sculpture, the departure from narrative, can only be seen as a filmed incantation. The English title gives it away: just what entity is the filmmaker trying to keep at bay? After talking about it for years, Rigaut shoots himself in the heart on November 9, 1929, measuring with a ruler to make sure he hits the organ squarely. Does Ray’s filmed conjuration backfire on Rigaut? Or is his suicide its final, necessary component?

 

 

Cinema history does not look kindly on Ray’s last film, 1929’s Les Mystères du Château du Dé, which is hard to regard as anything other than him filming his rich friends and patrons farting around at a manor. However, since the main rich friend is surrealist patron Charles de Noailles, this gives you a great visual of what your characters might see when invited to hobnob with the well-heeled at a villa outside town. However, it can’t entirely be a coincidence that it prominently features d6s, the patron die of GUMSHOE.

More about de Noailles in a moment.

 

 

The most notorious surrealist film of all remains Un Chien Andalou, a collaboration between longtime friends Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, both at the very beginning of their long careers. Its central image of a razor slicing across an eyeball freaks out film students even today. On the night of its 1929 debut, a nervous Buñuel hides in the wings, his pockets full of rocks. He expects to have to hurl them at angry audience members when they attack him. Instead, the film receives a stunned but rapturous welcome from Paris’ avant garde. It exerts enough power to convert a resistant Breton, who declares them true surrealists. In Dalí’s case, this is an embrace he’ll later come to regret. What they don’t tell him is that they saw many of its key images while exploring the Dreamlands. If you play either Dalí or Buñuel, you may see the eye slicing image again, in the early moments of the introductory scenario.

 

 

The Buñuel-Dalí collaboration hits the rocks—rocks populated by skeletal priests—as they try to follow it up with L’Âge d’or. Dalí wants to further emphasize imagery from their Dreamlands explorations. Buñuel, drunk on the works of the Marquis de Sade, prefers an anti-clerical theme. They clash further when Dalí becomes obsessed with Gala, voracious wife of the poet Paul Éluard, who Buñuel can’t stand and at one point nearly strangles to death. When they show the finished film in Paris in 1930, scandal erupts. The city’s rightist police chief demands that all copies of the blasphemous film be destroyed. Its funder, aristocrat Charles de Noailles, has to distance himself from the surrealists, or face social ostracism. But he does squirrel away the negative, allowing for its rediscovery in 1971.

During their waking adventures, the surrealists discover links between rightist forces and the Parisian occult underground. What magic were they trying to stop by ordering the destruction of L’Âge d’or?

 

 

Ray, Desnos, Kiki, Tzara, Buñuel and Dalí all appear as playable PCs in Dreamhounds.