This essay analyzes the utopian world of Nelly Kaplan's films, in which the witty, subversive acts of her heroines become powerful statements in favor of women. Fascinating and horrifying at the same time, the alternatives Kaplan offers to patriarchy are not all that perfect, but her strong characters do reflect the filmmaker's determination to transform the world (Marx) and change life (Rimbaud).

**********

Stella Behar, recognizing the influence of surrealism on Nelly Kaplan's work, considers it "neo-surrealist":

I consider neo-surrealism a movement in the seventies whose influence is present in the works of very different writers and artists, such as Andre Pieyre de Mandiargue, Julien Gracq, Gerard Klein, Jacques Sternberg, Roland Topor, etc. The marvelous dreamlike quality, black humor, eroticism, supernatural, and science fiction, exploited in a subversive spirit, are traits that link the works of these artists with surrealism through a common denominator present in the revolutionary spirit of their time. (1)

Nelly Kaplan and Surrealism. The list of traits mentioned in the extract above, common to both surrealist and neo-surrealist artistic productions, testifies to the survival of surrealism in forms already defined in the 1930s and to their evolution in new directions thereafter. Some of the writers mentioned saw their works adapted to the screen, and Kaplan, who wrote novels and scenarios for the screen and television, fortunately had the chance to direct her own features. (2)

Trained in filmmaking by Abel Gance, (3) Kaplan made films that are closer to those of Luis Bunuel, with whom she shares a dislike of bourgeois values, the Catholic Church, and the traditional family. Unlike Bunuel, however, whose revolt against the rigidity of Christian civilization has its roots in a Jesuit education, Kaplan comes from a Russian Jewish family and relates her first unpleasant experiences to her feminine condition: "All I can see in flashback is a succession of rebellions assumed slowly and inexorably. Rebellion not only because of the injustices, but also against what I felt very early on to be an aberrant situation: being a woman in a South American society." (4)

Early in Kaplan's life, this revolt was associated with the different treatment her family administered to her and her brother; later, it extended to all social institutions that threatened freedom of action and thought. From the perspective of women's cinema, (5) hers is a feminine, more than a feminist, resistance, its position defined from the perspective of heterosexuality, as Chris Holmlund remarks, and the forms it takes, which is of major importance in Kaplan's work. Among the few scholars who write about her films, Holmlund analyzes the intertextual aspects of Kaplan's cinematic work in the context of her "dual fascination with sexuality and surrealism" and argues that "Kaplan's exploration of femininity and masculinity from unabashedly 'straight' perspectives are key to her mixes of porn, screwball, gangster, and thriller conventions." (6) In contrast, Behar concentrates on the "ecriture spermatique" (spermatic writing) and the theme of female sexuality in Kaplan's novels, while Beverle Houston and Diane Waldman examine the fairy...