Surrealist cinema and the avant-gardes

A razor slices an eye on screen in 1929, and the Paris audience discovers that a film may refuse all logic: Buñuel and Dalí built Un chien andalou by systematically discarding whatever might have made sense. Around them, the twenties invented cinema as a laboratory: Clair filmed a funeral that turns into a chase, Dulac told a middle-class woman's boredom through superimpositions, Cocteau sent a poet through a mirror. Vigo mixed that vocabulary into narrative aboard a barge on the Seine.

works 4

• CinemaThe Smiling Madame BeudetLa Souriante Madame BeudetGermaine Dulac · 1923A wife stifled by a narrow-minded husband dreams of another life, to the point of loading a revolver.Cinema
• CinemaEntr'acteRené Clair · 1924Avant-garde artists string together absurd images, for the interval of a ballet.Cinema
• CinemaUn chien andalouLuis Buñuel · 1929A razor, an eye, ants in a hand: dream images, with no story to follow.Cinema
• CinemaThe Blood of a PoetLe Sang d'un poèteJean Cocteau · 1930A poet passes through a mirror and enters a world of visions, in four dream episodes.Cinema