Antonin Artaud "La Nouvelle Revue Française"; they were rejected, but the editor, Jacques Rivière, wrote back seeking to understand him, and a relationship via letters developed. Their compilation into an epistolary work, "Correspondance avec Jacques Rivière", was Artaud's first major publication. Artaud cultivated a great interest in cinema as well, writing the scenario for the first surrealist film, "The Seashell and the Clergyman" (1928), directed by Germaine Dulac. This film influenced Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, two key Spanish surrealists, when they made "Un Chien Andalou" (1929). Artaud's performance as Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance's "Napoleon" (1927) used exaggerated movements to convey
The Big Swallow "makes imaginative use of an extreme close-up to create one of the seminal images of early British (and world) cinema, as effective in its way as the slashed eyeball of "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and of just as much appeal to the Surrealist movement." The film, however, "might have been still more effective if Williamson had omitted the second and third shots," in which he, "cuts to the photographer apparently disappearing into a black void, and then back to the man who retires munching him up and expressing great satisfaction, "since they detract from the logical purity of the first,