Germain Dulac's landmark of the avant-garde and the only film to have been based on one of Artaud 's own scenarii. More than once, he reminds his audience that the film, preceding Le chien Andalou by a year, was the first work of surrealist cinema .
But even here the reference is more abstract than it might otherwise appear. Artaud entertained deeply mixed feelings about Dulac's film: though he praised it in print, he had been effectively banned from the set and he seems to have harbored serious reservations about the production (Artaud may well have been among those who, violently reacting to the film, were thrown out of its premier). Thus, even when Artaud speaks about 'the Seashell and the Clergyman, he gestures beyond the film itself——not merely to his own scenario but to the virtual and (as yet) obscure potentialities of the medium. The Seashell and the Clergyman constitutes "an attempt or an idea" that not even the film itself was capable of cashing out. "I like any kind of film." Artaud once told an interviewer, only to admit that "the kinds of films [I like] have yet to be created." Given this state of affairs, the discussion to follow returns to Artaud 's criticism in order to stage a kind of prolepsis. Believing in the possibility of film equal to "Film", Artaud envisions a cinema to come, composed of "purely visual situations whose drama would come from a shock designed for the eyes, a shock drawn, so to speak, from the very substance of our vision."
—————— Gregory Flaxman, This is Your Brain on Cinema
