The Oneiric Poetics of the Surrealist 'Film' "Ljuskari na prsima" (1930) by Aleksandar Vuco

Abstract

Aleksandar Vučo’s text “Ljuskari na prsima” (“Crustaceans on the Chest”) was published in the surrealist almanac “Nemoguće” (“The Impossible,” 1930) accompanied by thirteen unsigned black-and-white drawings, whose authorship was attributed to Marko Ristić by Miodrag B. Protić. This article discusses the differing contemporary interpretations of Vučo’s work in the studies of Milanka Todić, Radovan Vučković, and Božidar Zečević. Scholars who have written about this surrealist screenplay emphasize the “absence of a logical narrative flow,” “alogical structure and discontinuity,” and the “imitation of a dream.” The study considers the nature of the dream in the screenplay, the moment at which the dream begins and ends, and the interrelationship between the dream in Vučo’s text and Ristić’s drawing-collages. Vučo’s reflections on dreams from the questionnaire “The Jaws of Dialectics” published in the “Nemoguće” almanac, as well as oneiric fragments from his novel “The Root of Vision” (1928), are cited to emphasize the importance of dreams in the author’s earlier works. The analysis closely follows the images, characters, and motifs of “Ljuskari na prsima” and their transformations, seeking interpretive grounding in psychoanalysis, the poetics of surrealist dream imitation, and the use of defamiliarization (“ostranie”) and the grotesque.

Original title in Serbian: "Поетика ониризма надреалистичког 'филма' "Љускари на прсима" (1930) Александра Вуча."