Pierre Batcheff, the Surrealist Star

Abstract

Pierre Batcheff was one of the foremost jeunes premiers of 1920s cinema. Unlike his fellow stars, he despised the commercial films he made, and engaged with the surrealists and their sympathizers, leading to his role as the Man in Un chien andalou in 1929. In this article, we argue that Batcheff's performance style, which more often than not involved distancing himself from the action and from his female screen partners, and his star persona as the exotic other, contributed to make him what might seem like a contradiction in terms: a surrealist star. We show how the ideological preoccupations of the surrealists at the end of the 1920s, whether in relation to literature (Breton), painting (Dalí), or cinema (Artaud), intersected with those of Batcheff, making him an exemplary uncanny object, as defined by Hal Foster's work on surrealism.

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