The Seashell and the Clergyman (La Coquille et le Clergyman)

France, 1928

Directed by: Germaine Dulac

Script: Antonin Artaud

Genre: Surrealism, silent films

Plot

A man pours a dark liquid into bottles, using a conch shell. He is indignantly spied by a highly decorated military man, who carries a long, gleaming saber.

The bottles, once filled with liquid, are dropped to the ground by the character who fills them. We see that he is a priest, as he wears a cassock with a collar. He is very concentrated in his work, but he looks nervous. The bottles are shattering at his side.

The soldier approaches him at a slow pace, taking the conch shell from him and breaking it with his saber.

Afterwards, the priest walks on all fours through the city; until he sees an attractive woman in a horse-drawn carriage. It is the wife of the soldier, and he sits down next to her. A short time later, in a church, the clergyman eavesdrops that the woman is going to confession, and that the one hearing the confession is her own husband. Enraged, the priest intervenes to strangle the soldier…

Comment

A year before Buñuel and Dalí made their famous “An Andalusian Dog” (1929), this film was also shot in France (which, being about 40 minutes long, can be considered a medium-length film). The film that concerns us today is therefore a precursor and pioneer of the avant-garde genre of surrealism on the big screen. The film has a clearly dreamlike atmosphere. The screenwriter was none other than Antonin Artaud, a French playwright known for being the father of the so-called “theater of cruelty”, and whose aesthetics and stylistic positions are very close to the surrealist current that Breton, Dalí and Buñuel, among other artists, cultivated in France in the 1920s. Artaud, very interested in esoteric and psychonautic themes (he experimented in Mexico with peyote) would also be one of the inspirers of the “panic movement” that several decades later would be developed by Jodorowsky, Arrabal and Topor. Artaud, who among many other works published a book about the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, wrote several movie scripts, when the seventh art was still in its infancy.

Among these scripts, the best known is that of “The Conch and the Clergyman”. Apparently, Artaud was not satisfied with the final result of the film and considered that the director Germaine Dulac had adulterated the intentionality that he tried to capture in his script.

It should be noted that many were the scripts written in the 1920s by surrealists, but few were taken to the big screen. For expressing in images the wanderings and digressions of the mind was still too complicated.

Be that as it may, the film gives the viewer the impression of living a kind of hypnotic dream, to which contribute (in addition to a story beyond all logic) the shots (many of them chopped, and from unlikely perspectives), as well as the soundtrack (which at times seems to incite drowsiness and at others has a polyphonic and somewhat chaotic chords, as in the strangulation scene). Also present in the film is an obvious occult symbolism, such as the checkerboard floor (in the ballroom).

Of the actors, the one with the longest career (I am referring to his film career) is the one who plays the general, Lucien Bataille, who participated in 80 titles between 1910 and 1945. Alex Aillin (the priest) and Genica Athanasiou (the girl), who came from Romania, only appeared in a dozen films (mostly silent).

Particularly interesting is the musical accompaniment, added much later, which enhances in an enveloping way the dreamlike atmosphere of the film.