surrealist cinema

André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris in 1924, calling for art built on "psychic automatism ... in the absence of any control exercised by reason." Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí took that literally: a razor opens a woman's eye in the first minute of Un Chien Andalou, made in 1929, and a dead horse gets dragged across a piano soon after, with no edit softening the jump between one image and the next and no explanation offered. Their next film, L'Âge d'Or, provoked a right-wing riot at its Paris premiere in December 1930, and the police banned it days later. Breton's circle broke apart within two years, but the method it had written down kept working after the group did not. Buñuel spent the rest of his career on it: in The Exterminating Angel, dinner guests retreat to the host's music room and find they cannot leave it, and in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, six people sit down to a meal that something always stops them from eating. David Lynch ran the same logic through a delivery room: in Eraserhead, new father Henry Spencer is left alone with an industrial city, an angry girlfriend, and a newborn that is not fully human. None of it explains itself, and you stop asking what happens next fairly early on.

Distinguish from Avant-Garde Cinema encompasses a broader range of experimental approaches — structural film, found footage, expanded cinema — where surrealism specifically pursues dream logic and the unconscious. German Expressionism externalizes psychology through visual distortion but maintains narrative coherence that surrealism deliberately abandons.