Surrealism, the Dream Team: Buuel + Dal.

Films as dreams- subversive, shocking and hilarious by young artists in Paris who
surrendered themselves to lamour fou. With the surrealist classics Un Chien Andalu
(1928) and Lage dor by Salvador Dal and Luis Buuel, films that surprise every time
you see them.
The movement of Surrealism was
inspired by the literary and visual
experimentations of Dadaism in
the 1910s/20s and expressed itself
in the visual arts, literature,
theatre, film and music, as well as
political thought and practice,
philosophy, and social theory. It
was an experimental aesthetic
school, operating mostly in Paris,
that sought unmediated contact
with the unconscious. It was
inspired by Freud's work of free
association, dream analysis, and
the unconscious. Surrealists were
busy in developing methods to
liberate imagination from false
rationality, and restrictive customs
and structures and to understand the actual functioning of thought, first through the "pure psychic
automatism" of writing, proposed by the Bureau of Surrealist Research (among the members: Andr
Breton, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud) and later on, by the juxtapositions of
some more or less distant realities within a framework.
In his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 Andr Breton said : The more the relationship between the two
juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be the greater its emotional
power and poetic reality." Surrealist artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, created strange
creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to
express itself. The surrealist films featured the element of surprise, unexpected counterpoints and
unlinear narrative. The ultimate aim was to resolve the contradictions between dream and reality.
Breton maintained: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which
are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality." (Surrealist Manifesto)
Dreams definitely were effective in providing humanity with a vision of the unconscious. However,
the most profound surrealistic state was that of the conscious hallucination. This was the true
marriage of the unconscious and the conscious states.
Luis Buuel, Salvador Dal: Un Chien Andalou (1928) 16 .
The film, generally considered to be the masterpiece of surrealist cinema, was made by the painter
Salvador Dali and his college friend Luis Buuel (19001983). By 1927, the influence of surrealism
was apparent in Dali's painting, although he was not officially a member of the movement. Buuel
had worked in the film industry through bit parts, odd jobs, and film criticism and was looking to
become a director. The idea for the film came from an encounter between two of their dreams.