Surrealist cinema

Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to filmmaking, theory, and criticism that first arose in Paris during the 1920s. Works in this category transfer the techniques of the art world's surrealism movement to film; shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery is combined with dreamlike Freudian symbolism to challenge the traditional view that the function of art is to represent reality. It is related to Dadaism and is similarly characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and frequent use of shocking imagery.

Philippe Soupault and André Breton's book Les Champs magnétiques (1920) is often regarded as the first Surrealist work of fiction, but Surrealism is not considered to have been truly born until the publication of Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924), in which he wrote that Surrealism is "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought [...] dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern".

Surrealist cinema boomed in the 1920s, with notable films including Entr'acte, Ballet Mécanique, The Whirlpool of Fate, Anemic Cinema, both the French and American adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Seashell and the Clergyman, in addition to Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'Or, both of which were directed by Luis Buñuel, who co-wrote both screenplays with Salvador Dalí.

It rose to prominence as mainstream and art cinema starting in the 1970s, most notably David Lynch, known for his films including Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, as well as his television series Twin Peaks.

Theory

Surrealism draws upon irrational imagery and the subconscious mind. Surrealists are sometimes mistaken as whimsical or incapable of logical thought.

Michael Richardson defined Surrealism in his book Surrealism and Cinema (2006) as "a shifting point of magnetism around which the collective activity of the surrealists revolves" instead of a fixed aesthetic, and argued that Surrealist works cannot be defined by style or form, but rather as results of the practice of Surrealism itself. He wrote:

Within popular conceptions, surrealism is misunderstood in many different ways, some of which contradict others, but all of these misunderstandings are founded in the fact that they seek to reduce surrealism to a style or a thing in itself rather than being prepared to see it as an activity with broadening horizons.