10 Essential Films to Watch to Understand Surrealist Cinema

Surrealism is an art movement dating back to the 1920s. It focuses on exploring what is outside of the boundaries of reality. A permutation of Dada and heavily inspired by psychoanalysis theory, Surrealist artists were interested in the subconscious, the irrational, and dreams; they sought to challenge the very structure of rational reality. But what is surrealist cinema really like? Read on to find out.

Cinema, as an artistic language defined by a distortion of perception and fabrication of reality, was a natural attraction for the avant-garde art of the 20th century. Inspired by early Dada experimental films and the feverish works of German Expressionism, film allowed the surrealists to create pure, tangible dreams. Though there aren’t that many de facto surrealist films, surrealism was formative to cinema history when the medium was still quite young. Denying logic, narrative, and even meaning, surrealist cinema opened pathways as to what a movie could be and pushed the audiovisual language to its farther boundaries. We’re going to look at a few of these bold surrealist films, as well as some movies that were influenced by surrealism over the last one hundred years.

10. The Seashell and The Clergyman – 1928, dir. Germaine Dulac

Groundbreaking director Germaine Dulac’s adaptation of the original text by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman is considered the first surrealist film ever made. It is a twisting, unreliable descent into the psyche of a priest constantly lusting over a woman of his church, who is married. Upon its release, the film was censored in Britain, with the apt (if somewhat mythical) claim that “it is so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.” Surrealist themes of eroticism, the tortured subconscious, shame, desire, criticism of the church, and even a proto-feminist upending of objectification of women were presented by Dulac in an unreliable manner that hadn’t been seen before. No clear definition of narrative or differentiation between reality and unreality presents itself, in a surrealist semiotic that predated Luis Buñuel’s famous Un Chien Andalou.

Luís Buñuel is a name practically synonymous with surrealist cinema. Anyone interested in surrealist films will encounter Buñuel’s work time and again. His early films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930) established the paradigm of surrealist films, and still consist of some of the most shocking images ever put on screen.

Fifty years after those, Buñuel was still turning out gems. The 1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie sees Buñuel’s surrealism at a more mature, and accessible place, but no less biting. Critiques of inequality, the church and the bourgeois institutions are present here as they were in Buñuel’s whole career. In beautiful color and superbly acted and edited, Discreet Charm follows a group of bourgeois people attempting to have dinner, except they are constantly interrupted, by things like the attendants’ own dreams, which in turn mesh back in with their reality.

8. Rose Hobart – 1936, dir. Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was one of the most prominent American Surrealists, well known for his shadow box sculptures and his love for starlets. Rose Hobart is a film Cornell made in 1936, by painstakingly cutting and re-editing the adventure flick East of Borneo to mostly actress Rose Hobart’s parts. This is one of the earliest versions, perhaps, of a fan video.

Rose Hobart shaves the Hollywood blockbuster down to character shots, intercut with a documentary solar eclipse. By focusing on the character’s reactions instead of the narrative action and reordering footage made for entirely different purposes, Cornell completely deconstructs the narrative of the original, inverting the entire logic of mainstream movies and making a work of surrealist, sensory, and affective automation out of an entertainment product.

The first installment of Jean Cocteau’s classic Orpheus trilogy, The Blood of a Poet explores the labyrinths of the inner mind. Not just any mind, but the mind of an artist. With a higher production value than most early surrealist films, Cocteau’s film feels like a quasi-fantasy. The artist enters other worlds through looking glasses, encounters stranger and stranger creatures and places, mostly his own creations, destroys them, himself, reaches far corners, and travels into the unknown. He is taken inside himself through his art as Alice is taken by the story to Wonderland. Seeking to tap not into the unconscious, but into the in-between spaces of consciousness, irrationality, and instinct, The Blood of a Poet is the visual translation of the inwards of an artistic process, the inverse of creativity.

6. Meshes of the Afternoon – 1943, dir. Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon doesn’t simply explore dreams; it is a moving picture nightmare. A young woman, played by director and writer Maya Deren, comes home after seeing a figure in the street. She falls asleep on the couch and dreams of hooded figures, keys, flowers, knives, mirrors, and mirror faces. Death, self, and angst are evoked by the oneiric, circular pace of the film. Meshes of the Afternoon was an impactful film to the experimental cinema of post-war America and it has been linked to Film Noir as well as to Surrealism. It was written and filmed with Deren’s then-husband Alexandr Hackenschmied, and in 1959 it was especially scored by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito.

Věra Chytilová’s surrealist, provocative, comedic extravaganza Daisies is a foundational film of the Czechoslovakian New Wave. The film follows two girls, Marie I and Marie II who decide that “if the world is spoiled, they will be too.” Foregoing morality and rational living, the Maries engage in hedonistic, glutinous, and nonsensical desires. They drink, party, scam men and play pranks, eat and fight with food, dance on tables, and destroy phallic-looking ingredients. There is a lot of food in this work, so much so, that the film was censored by the Soviet government for promoting wastefulness.

Daisies is stylistically and narratively submerged in the sensual and the sensory. The audience is taken on a journey into pure ego, a cinematographic feast that fills you up until you feel sick. The film can, and has, been read in a number of, sometimes contradictory, ways. It has been seen as a criticism of excess, consumerism, authoritarianism, war, institutional values, patriarchy, and the objectification and infantilization of women in art.

4. Limite – 1931, dir. Mário Peixoto

Limite is a 1931 movie whose myth is almost as spellbinding as the film itself. The only feature poet Mário Peixoto ever completed, it was a commercial bust in 1931 but won over passionate (and famous) fans, such as writer Vinicius de Moraes. With prints heavily degraded by 1959, the only known copy of the film was taken to be restored, then confiscated by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 60s, then restored once again. Part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, it is now also part of the Criterion Collection, with still one scene lost forever.

The film follows a man and two women, stranded on a boat. As they drift off at sea, not even attempting a rescue, their backstories are visited through flashbacks. Limite, aptly named, works in the hazy limits of physicality and intangibility, memory, and fantasy. The flashbacks of each unnamed character bleed into each other and are pulled in and out of the present like the tide.

Spellbound is not a surrealist movie; it can’t even be called a post-surrealist film like Daisies or Mulholland Drive. It is, however, a movie that works almost as a meta-commentary on Surrealism, and the perfect example of how Hollywood absorbed bits of Surrealism into its mainstream films. Spellbound is a thriller/romance starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman as psychologists working in a mental clinic.

Spellbound deals directly with the early-century fascination with psychoanalysis and the theories that influenced Surrealism (which includes a great deal of psychobabble). It deals with themes such as amour fou, insanity, amnesia, guilt complex, dreams, identity, and the subconscious even within a standard narrative. Like many Hollywood films did at the time, particularly film noirs, it features a fully surrealist dream sequence, this one painted by Salvador Dalí.

2. Mulholland Drive – 2001, dir. David Lynch

David Lynch’s work can safely be categorized, perhaps more than any other contemporary director, as post-surrealist. The 2001 Mulholland Drive is considered one of his masterpieces. The film follows aspiring actress Betty Elms and Rita, a woman suffering amnesia after surviving a car crash as they attempt to piece together what happened to her.

Similar to his famous series Twin Peaks, Lynch inverts the genres of mystery and crime thriller through surrealist horror in Mulholland Dr. The investigation and mystery are twisted around into something that evades logic and explanation. Similar to Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon, Mulholland Dr. has a nightmarish quality and a cyclical, oneiric approach wherein reality melts into the mysteries of the subconscious.

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad is a twisting tour inside the labyrinths of time, mind, memory, and self-delusion. In a luxury hotel, a man approaches a woman claiming they had an affair in a similar location a year before. The woman denies knowing him at all, and the two of them, alongside a third man who might or might not be her husband, explore what the nature of their relationship really is.

Last Year at Marienbad blurs the lines between memory, fiction, and reality, between time and place, and between the physical location and the mind, much in the same way Limite does. Marienbad has a quality of meditative, nearly oppressive silence. In a cyclical narrative, memories contradict and over-impose on each other as the camera tracks the opulent halls of the hotel. Marienbad was inspired by psychological dramas of the silent era. This is reflected in the direction, makeup, and dramatic, unrealistic shadows. The clothing in the film was designed by Chanel, and combined with the singular direction, this helped make the film the most elegant of all surrealist movies.