Europe After the Rain

As an idiosyncratic anthology of Dadaist and Surrealist artifacts and attitudes, Gold's film for the Arts Council is fine. A chock-full collage of texts, reproduced artworks, actual footage and dramatised reconstructions, it constantly unearths delights, both visual and aural (some strictly tangential, such as Joan Bakewell interviewing Marcel Duchamp). But as an analysis of the movements' aesthetic ideas, aims and achievements, it flounders: by reducing the 20th century historical and cultural context to two world wars, plus the thought of Freud and Trotsky; and by crucially failing to make adequate distinction between 'authentic' surrealism and its latter-day manifestations in, for instance, cigarette advertising and TV comedy.