Surrealist Transhumanism: Jean Rostand and Nicole Vedrès’s Aux frontières de l’homme (1952)

This opening section is dominated by images of embryological processes, often filmed in extreme close-up, sometimes using micro-photography. For a lay spectator, it is not always obvious what we are looking at, but most images are full of movement, and the descriptions of cytoplasmic processes are relatively easy to follow. Some processes are rendered in time-lapse photography, enabling the spectator to closely follow what Rostand excitedly describes. Many images of plants, animals, and their cells look as if they have been lifted from a surrealist journal such as Documents (Fig. 1).⁵ The speculative leap is highlighted through the editing of the film: a spaceship suddenly appears (which in all likelihood comes from a contemporary science-fiction film); and when the idea of a matriarchal society is mentioned, the film cuts to a close-up of a woman’s face, which is also lifted from a film. The woman slowly turns her head while she looks off into the distance, the background is blurred. The music comes to a halt, the editing leaving Rostand plenty of space to introduce the idea of a world increasingly without men, only 47 years away in the future.

The second section of Aux frontières de l’homme explores similar territory. Here, Rostand offers an account of how recent manipulations of chromosomes can help to generate new and bigger plants. He also explains how the eggs of different animals, such as salamanders, may be split with a very fine thread, thereby artificially producing twins. We watch this procedure, and Rostand evokes the ways in which biologists – using poisons and x-ray exposure – manipulate animal eggs to trigger ‘anomalies’ and ‘monstrosities’, such as frogs with up to twenty toes. The scientific justification for these experiments is to understand and prevent any anomalies found outside the laboratories. Having recognised the ‘troubling’ aspects of this research, Rostand performs his second speculative leap: “Maybe one day, by using who knows what on a human embryo, we will be able to improve our brains? This is all it will take to radically alter the destiny of our species. What will these superior monsters be like? Will they be more intelligent? More capable of genius?”

Visually, this leap to “the invention of a new human being” is even more spectacular than that of “the coming of the matriarchy.” When Rostand speaks of boosting intelligence, we watch–close-up–a model of the brain. As with the close-up of the woman, the brain gently turns around, with light projected its surface. Next, we cut to a semi-transparent model of a torso (no doubt used in medical schools, for pedagogical purposes): its blood vessels, intestines and thorax are visible. The film then offers an x-ray shot of the arms and hands of a ring-bearing musician, playing an old-fashioned string instrument (Fig. 2). It is tempting to think of this musician as performing a “danse macabre,” but in line with the future-oriented drift of the film we may also be reminded of the breakdancing skeleton in the video for Herbie Hancock’s hit Rockit (1983).⁶ The scene is remarkable–it brings together transhumanist speculations on enhanced humanity, x-ray photography and baroque music; it also folds the soundtrack into the film, moving it from a non-diegetic to a diegetic register, thereby rendering the relationship between sound and image tracks unstable. It is difficult for the spectator to master this mix of audio-visual exuberance and wild speculation about a coming, “monstrous” super-race.

The next leap to “the dream of immortality” then comes at the end of a section about the many ways in which sexuality can be manipulated through hormone treatment. Experiments have been particularly successful with salamanders, where embryonic hormone treatment has turned male salamander eggs into female salamanders, which have then reproduced, creating male baby salamanders who are, in Rostand’s formulation, “the sons of two fathers.” This research has proven helpful in the struggle to cure prostate cancer, and provided insights into the lifespan of cells. This sets up the third leap: will research into sexuality help us realise the “old dream of human immortality?” Just as Rostand’s diction emphasises the word “l’immortalité,” the film presents time-lapse photography of marble statues (undoubtedly of “immortal men”) standing by pillars, with shadows moving hastily over them.

The idea of “intergalactic panspermia” ends the film. First, Rostand develops his account of research into (plant and animal) immortality, and the ways in which this relates to cancer research. He explains how we can cultivate and multiply organisms, grow bones and eyes in our laboratories, and graft artificial organisms onto frozen organisms, which can then be brought back to life. In this manner, he arrives at the subject of low temperature. Earlier sections of the film had already touched upon this topic, making passing references to the freezing of organisms, showing Rostand approaching a refrigerator in the corner of his library. Now the film shows icy landscapes, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (1823/24), as Rostand speaks of the ways in which ice can disrupt expectations of what comes next both temporally and spatially. For instance, the film shows the French biologist Paul Becquérel (Fig. 7) receiving frozen organisms from colleagues in faraway countries, preparing them for experiments in his Parisian lab. As Rostand explains in his book Aux frontières du surhumain (1962), you can freeze sperm, transport it, and use it to inseminate a female animal far from the male. This is possible with human beings too, and it poses–notes Rostand–a problem for the old judicial principle that if a husband could prove that he had been travelling when his wife became pregnant, he could not be held accountable for this child. To freeze therefore allows us to escape conventional spatial logics. And it similarly allows for a reworking of temporal logics. Taking the same example, frozen sperm can create a generational mess: the sperm of a male salamander can be used to inseminate his “granddaughter”, thereby making the roles of “partner” and “grandfather” coincide–“granddaughter” and “partner.”

Rostand pushes these disruptions very far, eventually speculating about time and space travel. He argues that frozen organisms escape the death-life dichotomy, and enlighten us about life in the polar regions (where life is paused as winter approaches, and resumes when spring arrives). He then imagines that if we freeze down human microorganisms, and send them to the farthest corners of our galaxy, they may eventually populate faraway stars. This is his “intergalactic panspermia,” the colonisation of space.⁷ The film accompanies these speculations with images that anticipate Ray and Charles Eames’s more famous Powers of Ten (1968 [1977]): first we watch the movements of some particles, possibly in a Petri dish; next, through a kind of visual rhyme, we drift–in a point of view-sequence–through a pattern that resembles the molecular landscape, but is in fact a visualisation of outer space. We travel through the stars, into darkness, until the word “Fin” appears. This ending not only takes us beyond the “frontières de l’homme,” it also recalls the opening p.o.v.-shot through the tree-lined countryside road, as we were on our way to meet Rostand. The symmetry nicely communicates that we have gone from sunny, bucolic landscapes, via obscure laboratories, to a galaxy far away.

A key element in surrealist poetics was the montage, and in particular those forms of montage that produce clashes between incongruous elements (resulting in what Peter Bürger termed the “non-organic” work of art).¹⁰ One expression of this tendency was found in Breton’s fascination with Lautréamont’s “chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” a sentence which eventually became something like an emblem of surrealist poetics. The “cadavre exquis” was another expression of this desire to open up the world (and our minds) through chance encounters. In its literary form, this game involves a player who writes a line (or several lines), folds the paper to hide what they have written, before passing it to another player, who continues the passage (the name “exquisite corpse” was produced in this manner). In its visual form, the game is perhaps better known, most children having tried drawing a head, folding the paper, passing it on to friends, who then draw a torso, legs and feet.

Aux frontières de l’homme does not aim to produce incongruous encounters all the way through, but the discourse of Rostand, with its sudden speculative leaps, does display a cadavre exquis logic that is strongly reinforced by the images of Vedrès and Resnais.¹¹ In this manner, biological processes are brought together with musical skeletons, spaceships, and Greek statues, amongst other things. Rostand’s fascination with cryogenics similarly fits in here, the cold allowing the scientist to interrupt what we may otherwise consider a natural order, generating unexpected encounters, disturbing expectations about what comes next.

The key point is that Rostand naturalises surrealism, suggesting that biology operates in line with the surrealist idea of productive chance encounters. When the film turns to sexual reproduction, for instance, Rostand adopts Lautréamont’s famous sentence and speaks about: “the chance meeting of two generative cells.” In Aux frontières du surhumain, he explains that animals who receive and successfully integrate organs (such as thyroids) from other living creatures are known as “mosaic beings.”¹² The film then shows examples of such beings: a frog onto which a third eye has been grafted, a salamander with an extra front leg. These creatures appear as living embodiments of surrealist “cadavres exquis.”¹³ In the same text, he also writes:

It would be easy to draw parallels between these strange productions of the laboratory and certain fantasies of modern art. When an artist like Klee writes that “the world in its current form is perhaps not the only possible world”, is he not expressing hesitantly what science asserts more strongly every day?¹⁴

Shortly thereafter he notes that “the big question” is whether man’s “‘surrealisation’ of nature” will also eventually lead to man’s “‘surrealisation’ of  himself.”¹⁵ For Breton and his allies, surrealism was never an artistic movement, it was always a way of (changing) life; nevertheless, Rostand’s surrealist biology operates in a manner more material, more literal than any surrealist might have imagined.

These comparisons between literary, cinematic and biological principles of composition can be associated with the kind of thinking that Roger Caillois termed “diagonal.” “Diagonal science” is an important notion in Caillois’s late work (but the logic he describes was already at play in his interwar writings). In “After Six Years of a Doubtful Combat,” Caillois first explains that in the sciences, analogies generally have a bad reputation; they are seen as superficial, purely formal, often leading the scientist astray. Next, he concedes that analogies – in particular visual analogies – can result in miscategorisations and bad science: “despite its appearance, the whale is not a fish, nor is the bat a bird.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, true to his surrealist background, Caillois pushes back against disciplinary gate-keepers and the “tacit interdiction against bringing together phenomena which belong to different domains.”¹⁷ For example, although some scientists insist that organic and inorganic matter are radically different fields, Caillois finds good scientific reasons to study the regenerative activity of organic bodies alongside processes of crystallisation. More generally, “the pathways of science always were and should be centrifugal,” and “it would be rash to affirm that [phenomena such as] the radial symmetry of sea urchins, of starfish and of flowers […] signify nothing and are capable of gratifying only daydreams without being able to inspire rigorous research.”¹⁸ Caillois concludes that “it is time to try the luck of the ‘diagonal sciences’,” those that cut across disciplinary boundaries.¹⁹

Rostand and Vedrès are clearly already doing so. Rostand’s writings are therefore steeped in literary and artistic references, undermining the dichotomy examined in C.P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures” (about the mutual lack of understanding between scientists and “literary intellectuals”, i.e. scholars in the arts and humanities).²⁰ Rostand and Vedrès present us with a world full of movement, where logics of kinship are radically different from what we expect. The universe is malleable, surprising patterns emerge, a “cell is like a cosmos” and the properties of both will be changed if the temperature is lowered. Vedrès’s images show numerous dynamic processes, bringing incongruous elements together through discontinuity editing, finding surprising patterns and formal ressemblances, inviting us to see the world as we haven’t yet seen it.

That Aux frontières de l’homme experiments with montage and chance encounters is hardly surprising. As is well known, Vedrès’s earlier film, Paris 1900, was exactly what the French call ‘un film de montage’, a found footage film. It was composed with excerpts from approximately 700 newsreels, documentary and fiction films, to which were added a number of still photographs (Aux frontières de l’homme similarly shows photographic portraits of some of the scientists mentioned). When Vedrès speaks about Paris 1900, she emphasises that a found footage film is less about “reconstructing the real” than it is about the production and creation of the real.²¹ And for Vedrès, creation (creativity) is a matter of montage. Placing filmmaking in relation to the art of writing (she would soon cease to make films, and instead concentrate on writing), she explains that “the operation known in cinema as ‘montage’ is ultimately what most resembles the work of a writer.”²² Filmmaking is about ‘selecting’ and ‘combining’, it is about forming a puzzle and less about offering a narrative.

Paris 1900 was Vedrès’s project, but the 24-year-old Alain Resnais was her key collaborator and assistant director. Working on Paris 1900 and Aux frontières de l’homme he picked up the idea of filmmaking as an art of the mosaic, an art of the assemblage, with each individual film clip considered a building block (Godard called Resnais the greatest film editor since Eisenstein). Twenty-eight years later, this approach is still visible in My American Uncle (1980) – Resnais’s other biology film, “about the central nervous system,” presenting the research of the biologist Henri Laborit.²³ Resnais briefly considered making this feature as a found footage film, but the prospect of spending months in the archives dissuaded him. Still, the finished film begins and ends with mosaics and puzzles. These figures function self-referentially, highlighting that cinema is an art of building from discrete elements, while also pointing to the view of subjectivity the film constructs: our subjectivity is a puzzle that we assemble and reassemble as we go along. Paris 1900 and Aux frontières de l’homme were clearly foundational experiences for Resnais.²⁴

It is tempting to push this reading so hard that all ambiguity disappears. In other words, one might contend that Vedrès and Resnais undermine the transhumanist speculations of Rostand, bringing us back on ethically safe ground and allowing us to examine from a distance the popular scientist’s flirtation with eugenics. However, such a reassuring reading is difficult to uphold. This was the second time that Vedrès and Rostand collaborated: would Vedrès renew this collaboration to criticise Rostand? If so, would she share the credits with him? It is also worth noting that in the various interviews in which Resnais looked back on the film, he did so with fondness, never expressing any desire to distance himself from Rostand or the film. Perhaps this is unsurprising: Rostand was far from a marginal figure in French intellectual life. He may not have been a leading scientist, but he was a highly educated science journalist with a platform like almost no other in France. This suggests something about how relatively mainstream a discourse with a eugenicist flavour could be even after World War Two. But of course, transhumanist discourses continue to exist today, both in biological and in technological versions.³⁵

Aux frontières de l’homme thereby occupies a position that is unlikely to appeal to most contemporary viewers. On the one hand, those of us who are sympathetic to the criticism of anthropocentricity will be disturbed by the presence of transhumanist tendencies: the fascination with superintelligence, and the ambiguous self-sacrificial logic which Rostand’s texts present as a moral obligation. Although it is true that Rostand describes some of the biological innovations as “troubling”, his excitement makes it difficult for the viewer to get a clear sense of what to embrace and what to reject.³⁶ It is, of course, possible to be clearer. For instance, Painlevé and Rostand offer markedly different responses to the Nobel-prize winning physiologist Alexis Carrel’s promotion of eugenics during the interwar period: Painlevé wrote a scathing critique of Carrel’s bestseller L’homme cet inconnu at the time of its publication (1935), whereas Rostand continued to cite Carrel (including twice in Aux frontières de l’homme) without ever distancing himself from his eugenics.³⁷ On the other hand, contemporary transhumanists are likely to find the presence of surrealist tendencies (such as the emphasis on “chance encounters”) obtrusive and entirely inappropriate. Indeed, for Kurzweil (2024), the problem with biological evolution lies precisely in the role it gives to chance. As he provocatively writes: “Biological life is suboptimal because evolution is a collection of random processes optimized by natural selection. […] By contrast, applying intelligence (human or artificial) to biology will allow us to systematically explore the full range of genetic possibilities in search of those traits that are optimal.”³⁸

Rather than the reassuring idea of a film “undermining” the biological discourse, it therefore seems appropriate to say that Vedrès and Resnais are riding the contradictions of Rostand’s transhumanist surrealism. The film charms and worries, but it does not condemn. Viewers wishing for clearer distinctions between transhumanism and surrealist non-anthropocentricity will prefer Painlevé’s work, but precisely because of its ambiguities, in particular those that blur the lines between surrealism, non-anthropocentricy and transhumanism, these viewers may still find that Aux frontières de l’homme constitues a rich resource for thinking about the plasticity of life in all its complexities.

Nikolaj Lübecker is Professor of French and Film Studies at the University of Oxford. His publications include The Feel-Bad Film (2015) and Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé (2022). With Daniele Rugo, he edited James Benning’s Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration (2017), and they are now co-writing a book, provisionally entitled Images of Unrest: Documentary Film and Political Violence.

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