Surrealist Cinema: Five Essential Films That Shaped the Movement

Key facts

• An Andalusian Dog (1929) was directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí and featured a notorious scene of an eyeball cut with a razor.
• The Golden Age (1930), also by Buñuel and Dalí, was a thematic sequel to An Andalusian Dog.
• A December 1930 screening of The Golden Age at the Studio 28 theater in Paris was attacked by a pro-fascist mob called The League of Patriots, who poured ink on the screen and slashed paintings by Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí.
• Fernand Léger's Mechanical Ballet (1923–24) is considered a precursor to Surrealist film and features only Kiki de Montparnasse as a living performer.
• Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1932) included Lee Miller in her only film role; she later became a war photographer and filmed the liberation of Dachau in April 1945.
• Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926) was credited to his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.
• Simone Mareuil, star of An Andalusian Dog, died by self-immolation in 1954 in Périgueux, France; her co-star Pierre Batcheff had died by suicide earlier.
• David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) is cited as a modern heir to Surrealist film, and Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things also bends logical and temporal narratives.