Acknowledgements; Contents; Chapter 1 Introduction; Surrealism and Cinema After the War; For an Expanded History of Surrealist Cinema; The Search for a New Myth; Occult Transformations; Analogy and the Poetics of Cinema; Film and Experience; Outline of the Book; Chapter 2 The Artist-Magician as Filmmaker: Wilhelm Freddie's Films and the New Myth; Wilhelm Freddie and the Surrealist Short Film; Freddie's Esoteric Period: Connections and Transformations; Surrealistisk Manifestation and "Why Do I Paint?"; The World and the Senses; Occult Iconography and Perverted Poetry; The Magic Circle

The Hermetic CabalaThe Alchemical Imagination; The Tarot and the Vis Imaginativa; The Afterlife of the New Myth; Chapter 3 Initiation into the New Myth: Primitivism and Poetics in the Surrealist Documentary Film; Reconfiguring the Past; Surrealism and Documentary Film; Ethnography, Surrealism, and Cinema; Anti-colonialism, Magic, and the Exhibition of "Primitive" Art; Poetics of the Wunderkammer; The Marvellous and the New Myth; Initiation into the Marvellous; Reinventing the World; Chapter 4 Surrealism Is What Will Be: Nelly Kaplan's Myths of Revenge

Nelly Kaplan and the Crisis of French SurrealismThe Marvellous Is Popular; The Formation of the Surrealist Feature Film; Inverting the Poles; A Digression on Leonora Carrington; Witches Against Patriarchy; Investigating Sex, Becoming a Seer; Magical Transformation; Chapter 5 Magic Art and Minor Myths: Jan Švankmajer's Transmutation of Material Reality; Jan Švankmajer and Surrealist Animation; Czech-Slovak Surrealism; Concrete Irrationality; Personal Mythology; The Fetish Against Western Civilization; Magic Animation; A New Myth of Dethroned Humanity; Experiments in Tactility

Analogy and InterpretationThe Imagination of Touch; Minor Myths of Matter; Initiation: The World as a Cabinet of Curiosities; Chapter 6 Concluding Remarks; Innervation and Initiation; Bibliography; Index.