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Surrealist
see all genres ›The original Surrealists of the 1920s loved film. They loved its populism, vulgarity and potential for anarchic expression. As an experimental cinema developed, surrealism remained a dominant spice on its menu, from the abstract psychodramas of Maya Deren to the animated nightmares of Jan Svankmajer and beyond.
Discover Surrealist Films
Genres / Avant-garde / Surrealist
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Acid Redux
When commissioned to make a Futurist-inspired film for the New York Biennial, George Kuchar responded in his characteristic way with this madcap vignette. Knocked out in a weekend (filmed Friday and edited Saturday), ACID REDUX was shot with his Electrographic Sinema class at the San Francisco Art Institute and features his...Start your free trial to watch
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L'age d'or
In 1930, following their short film triumph UN CHIEN ANDALOU, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí created an hour-long avant-garde tour de force that's both an aesthetic avalanche of boldness and a withering attack on a society that elevates pious morality over sexual freedom. As scorpions battle, partisans (led by famed surrealist...Start your free trial to watch
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At Land
AT LAND begins at sea. In the film’s stunning opening sequence, a woman (played by filmmaker Maya Deren) emerges on shore, climbs up a pile of driftwood... and finds herself in the middle of a formal banquet. She then moves from lush, verdant jungles to seaweed-strewn beaches, stealing chess pieces from other characters....Start your free trial to watch
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Johann Sebastian Bach
The rare film to enter into deep conversation with a piece of music, in this case Bach’s “Fantasia in G Minor,” Czech animator Jan Svankmajer orchestrates walls, doors and windows as Bach does the different registers of the organ. In its luminous attention to surface texture, the film resembles an abstract...Start your free trial to watch
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Black Night
Oscar, a conservator at the Natural Sciences Museum, passes the days indulging his passion for studying insects; if only there were still days. As long as people can remember, the sun only releases a few pathetic rays for fifteen seconds before noon. The rest of the time, the world is plunged into a night without end, a...Start your free trial to watch
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The Breathers-In
Ben Russell’s early short pushes silent film narration into uncharted territory. Two women in Victorian dress land in a new country by sea and wander its emptied industrial landscape. They call each other sister and learn to make money. One is diagnosed with scurvy by a monomaniacal butcher. Her hermetic...Start your free trial to watch
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Chateau/Poyet
The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen. Many are constructed out of one of Lawrence Jordan's favorite engravings illustrators: Louis Poyet. Duels occur on a tight rope. Heavier-than-air machines fly (and sometimes crash). Below, guns spear exploding spheres. The...Start your free trial to watch
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Un chien andalou
Made in 1929, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (AN ANDALUSIAN DOG) is regarded as the first film produced purely from within the Surrealist movement, and a landmark in the history of cinema. Based on an exchange of dreams between Salvador Dali and acclaimed director Luis Buñuel, this tale of unfulfilled desire opens...Start your free trial to watch
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Circus Savage
If there is such an old-fashioned thing as "stream of consciousness" in cinema, I suppose this is it. It certainly felt like a flowing stream or river while I was editing day after day, fitting found-sound to found (out-take) footage accumulated over almost sixty years of filmmaking. All the images and sounds buried on reels...Start your free trial to watch
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Club of the Discarded
A warehouse full of disfigured mannequins springs to life as a streetcar rumbles by. They’re creatures of habit but the daily routine is overturned by the arrival of a new crate of punkish statues. Czech animator Jiří Barta's brilliant choreography holds a cracked mirror up to our own learned behaviors....Start your free trial to watch
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The Comb
THE COMB opens in the shadowy bedroom of a sleeping beauty and seems to enter her mind and burrow into her dreams. Based on a fragment of text by the Austrian writer Robert Walser, THE COMB is an exploration of the subconscious visualized as a labyrinthine playhouse haunted by a doll-like explorer. A mesmerizing and resonant...Start your free trial to watch
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Darkness Light Darkness
A corporeal and Kafkaesque claymation from Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer. Two hands find each other in a room and begin molding themselves into a human figure. Different body parts come knocking, some more insistently than others, until the small space is stuffed with the finished man. Whether viewed as...Start your free trial to watch
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Dear Phone
In these thirteen accounts about the uses and misuses of the telephone, Peter Greenaway attempts to thwart and distort the philosophical notion of a “writers cinema” into what is pure Greenaway: teasing, eccentric and delightfully surreal. Featuring the quintessentially English red phone booth in an iconic performance and an...Start your free trial to watch
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The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a gun motif and a visual style...Start your free trial to watch
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Destroy All Rational Thought
The great Beat Generation experiments took place in Tangier, the Moroccan city where William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and the Moroccan painter Hamri taught Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg how to live outside the law. This documentary features one of the last interviews with Burroughs and...Start your free trial to watch
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Don Juan
A story of appetite and destruction, DON JUAN has been a staple of puppet theatre for centuries. Jan Svankmajer brings this tradition to vivid and at times uncanny life in this dynamic film adaptation. When we first see Philip and Maria, the lovers who inspire Don Juan’s wrath, they appear on the flattened plane of a stage....Start your free trial to watch
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Duo Concertantes
DUO CONCERTANTES has two parts, THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION and PATRICIA GIVES BIRTH TO A DREAM BY THE DOORWAY. Both PATRICIA and HAMFAT ASAR (made the following year), the two most spectacular of Lawrence Jordan's animated works, operate against the backdrop of a fixed scene. In the former, it is a back...Start your free trial to watch