Leveling the world: Metaphor and deshumanización in the cinematic dissolve

Abstract

Abstract José Ortega y Gasset’s essay “La deshumanización del arte” (1924) describes the distinct mode of perception that he attributed to the modern artist. According to Ortega, the avant-garde artist views all entities—from inanimate objects to human beings—strictly from the outside, perceiving only the “lights, shadows and chromatic values” that constitute an entity’s visible surface. This form of seeing engenders a leveled vision of the world in which the presence or absence of inner experience is irrelevant, and subjects and objects are thus rendered equivalent. Ortega and likeminded avant-garde poets considered metaphor to embody this mode of vision because it posits similarity among patently disparate beings and things; through metaphor, the differences in category that separate two compared entities are shown to be less significant than their shared esthetic qualities. This article investigates the relevance of the cinematic technique of dissolve—in which two images are briefly superimposed so that one appears to change smoothly into the other—to Ortega’s concept of dehumanized metaphor. I examine the role of the dissolve in Un chien andalou (1929) in order to demonstrate the function that it served for Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and other filmmakers inclined toward Orteguian dehumanization. By joining together and implicitly equalizing human beings and things on the basis of their visual likeness, the dissolve employed the same strategy as verbal metaphor but was able to convey more vividly the lack of differentiation between subjects and objects.