Jump Cuts : Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics

In this volume comprising 13 essays, Mark Polizzotti, award-winning translator, cultural critic and biographer of André Breton, brings fresh readings to topics both mainstream and esoteric. The essays include "Profound Occultation," an elegant and incisive reevaluation of Surrealism's legacy; "Love and Theft," a dry-eyed look at Bob Dylan's freewheeling use of uncredited sources; "Lives Behind Lives," on the moments when a biographer's life merges with the subject's; "Surrealism's Children," which explores the limits of offense in art and society; as well as sharply written commentaries on the life of Alfred Jarry, the myth of Robert Johnson, the anguish of Laure (Colette Peignot), the hubris of Francis Picabia, the dyspepsia of Flaubert, the mind-twisting wordplay of Raymond Roussel, and the enduring power of films such as Vertigo, Orpheus and Last Year at Marienbad.

Drawing on three decades of critical writings, Jump Cuts ranges across a broad swath of subjects—film, music, literature, translation, the pitfalls of biography, the current dilemma of the humanities—to map the creative act as it strains to fulfill our eternal, unrequited yearning for transcendence.