Chapter 17 - Surrealism and Mass-Observation

Summary

This chapter considers the complex relationship between the amateur British ethnographic movement, Mass-Observation, officially inaugurated in 1937, and surrealist methods, ideas, and images. Surrealism influenced Mass-Observation protagonists such as Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, David Gascoyne, and Julian Trevelyan, although their formal connections with the surrealist movement in poetry and art and their associations with Mass-Observation overlap only partially. After considering these biographical connections, the chapter goes on to discuss the Mass-Observation–surrealism connection through two complementary but distinct lenses of scholarly discussion: cultural and social science scholars who discern surrealist inspiration in Mass- Observation’s methodological approach to everyday phenomena; and literary and art-historical scholars who trace the intertwining of Surrealism with other 1930s artistic and literary trends, such as British documentary film and I. A. Richards’s critical meditations on science and poetry, in the work of Jennings, Madge, and other Mass-Observation principal figures.