Surrealist Film
An unconventional style of film that grew out of the French literary movement and crossed over into an avant-garde style of filmmaking in the 1920s. Opposed to conventional bourgeois forms of narrative and realistic storytelling, the surrealists sought to shock the subconscious through the juxtaposition of random non-sequential images dealing with death, sexual desire, cruelty and violence. While the style violates and openly rejects traditional, linear narrative and psychological logic, it nonetheless creates its own dreamlike meaning. The initial artists who based their films in this controversial style were Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (Un Chien Andalou); Buñuel would continue much of his career in this vein with films like L'Age d'or, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire, among others. Though the actual movement died out towards the end of the '20s, surrealism had a profound effect on all of cinema, basically because of film's dreamy use of images. The style remains alive today through the work of contemporary directors such as Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books, A Zed & Two Noughts), Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Conspirators of Pleasure, the Coen Brothers (Barton Fink), and, especially, David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). Despite the surrealist touch present in the films of such comedians as Buster Keaton, The Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields and Jerry Lewis, their works are not surrealist films proper and fit more appropriately into other categories.
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