Surrealism as a Method of Survival

Surrealism as a Method of Survival

(Revised through The Dance of the Rabbits (2015))

I grew up in a place where reality was never singular.It was layered, fragmented, and unstable. Seeing one layer was safe. Seeing all of them at once was dangerous.Very early, I learned that survival depended on separation. One thing had to be said publicly. Another had to be understood privately. A third often the most truthful had to be actively avoided. This was not philosophical. It was practical. What was visible could be defended. What stayed hidden remained intact. And what could not be seen at all, if suddenly exposed, had the power to collapse law, morality, and logic at the same time.This condition did not produce confusion.It produced discipline.Surrealism, in this context, was not an artistic choice. It was a consequence. A method forced into existence by a reality where direct language was unsafe and linear explanations were unreliable. I did not turn to surrealism to escape the world or to decorate it with symbols. I turned to it because it was the only structure capable of holding truth without triggering immediate violence.Surrealism, for me, is not about dreams.It is about pressure.In The Dance of the Rabbits, danger does not emerge from an extraordinary act. It emerges from an ordinary object. A piece of candy. Something harmless, familiar, almost childish. Once removed from its “safe” context and placed inside a system governed by honor, possession, and fear, it becomes lethal. Not because of what is done but because of what is seen.The threat is not the act itself.The threat is perception.Violence in such a system is always preloaded. The knife exists long before it is drawn. The image only activates what is already waiting. In this world, objects do not symbolize danger; they trigger it.Time, under these conditions, cannot behave linearly. Memory does not move forward. It folds back, overlaps, interrupts. The past does not explain the present it ambushes it. Causes do not lead to resolution. They lead to repetition.The most disturbing moment in the film is not the confrontation itself. It is what comes after. The moment when the truth is briefly seen and then actively forgotten. Faced with an image that threatens to dismantle his identity, morality, and social role, the mind produces a safer narrative. Fatigue. Imagination. A dream. Not forgiveness suppression.This is not reconciliation.It is repair.The system survives by convincing itself that nothing happened.This is where surrealism becomes essential. Not as chaos, but as control. As a disciplined refusal to resolve what should not be resolved. As a way to show how reality protects itself by erasing what it cannot afford to acknowledge.Surrealism, in this sense, is not expressive.It is defensive.It allows the truth to appear without being fully absorbed. To exist without being named. To remain visible just long enough to expose the mechanism of denial. The surreal image does not liberate the characters it reveals the cost of their survival.This work is not about what I understand.It is about what I spent years learning not to see.About internal censorship that outlives any external force. About how societies do not collapse when they commit violence but when they are forced to confront it honestly.For me, surrealism is not a style.It is not a genre.It is not a dream.It is the moment when a lie can no longer hold and reality chooses, once again, to survive by forgetting.

Mobarez Javanmard