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Anyone out there a fan of surrealist films? After going to the "Salvador Dali" museum I've had an interest. I have "Un Chien Andalou" on Netflix and I was wondering if anyone knew any movies or had any suggestions. It's a rather obscure branch of film so I don't know...

Anywho worth an ask, right....

Ok who invited the swot ...... lol...

F x

Check out the Hitchcock film 'Suspicion' with Cary Grant. Ok, it's not a surrealist film but it does have an amazing dream sequence designed by Dali.

Also you must see 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari'. Strictly speaking it's expressionistic and not surrealistic but it's definitely one of the strangest and most unsettling films ever made.

Hmm... I'm off to the party now to find some girls who really dig the german expressionistic movement and arty, goatee beards... (are there any??)

Ian the Mental-Ian wrote:After going to the "Salvador Dali" museum I've had an interest.

Been there, done that! Bit too close to Clearwater for comfort, though!

I'm quite keen on surrealism in realist films, which is rather tricky to bring about, but the tunnel sequence in Made In Britain shows that it's possible.

Ahem.

Ian the Mental-Ian wrote:Anyone out there a fan of surrealist films? After going to the "Salvador Dali" museum I've had an interest. I have "Un Chien Andalou" on Netflix and I was wondering if anyone knew any movies or had any suggestions. It's a rather obscure branch of film so I don't know...

Anywho worth an ask, right....

The eye slicing scene in "Un Chien Andalou" is the only thing I remember about the film. It's truly horrific. The only other Bunel I've seen is "L'Age d'Or". Equally unwachable and yet strangely "good", if that makes any sense. Dali and someone else (probably Max Ernst) make cameos as a pair of nuns being sucked into the floor. Or does that happen in "Un Chien"?

Either way, they're VERY difficult to watch.

The Saragossa Manuscript isn't quite surrealism, but it hits on many of the same themes whilst still being very watchable.

It's a Polish film set in Spain, based on a French novel, and the structure is that everything that happens is a story within a story - often a character will tell a story, and one of his characters tells another story, which concludes. The focus is back onto the first storyteller, who's story then finishes and the focus moves to whoever was telling a story involving that storyteller.

Thematically it's very dark and lovely, with a mysterious and magical undercurrent, skulls, incest, decaying corpses and so forth.

When it was released over here it was in a 90 minute formatm in the states it was 120 minutes. Nowadays you can grab the full 180 minutes on DVD - thanks to Jerry Garcia mainly. Francis Ford Coppola and Lars von Trier (woo!) have both said it's their favorite film