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 * Surrealism & Film**

Surrealism was more than purely an artistic movement. It consisted of a revolutionary attitude towards life and was also influenced in part by the psychoanalytical experiments of Feud, which emphasized the importance of the unconscious and desire instead of reason and logic. Luis Buñuel is by far one of the movement’s most influential film makers. Often collaborating with fellow Surrealist and film maker Salvador Dalí, the two created scenes in which chickens populate nightmares, women grow beards, and aspiring saints are desired by luscious women. Buñuel is best known for his film Un Chien andalou in which a woman has her eye sliced open with a razor blade. Buñuel’s work grappled with issues that “were and are to do with how to live one’s life in the face of pressures that, in his view, seek to deny life.” (A Companion To Luis Buñuel, Gwynne Edwards) One of Buñuels later films, Cet obscur objet du désir, tells the story of an aging Frenchman who falls in love with a young woman who repeatedly frustrates his romantic and sexual desires. This film was made toward the end of his career in what Linda Williams, Figures of desire: a theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film, calls “the contemporary evolution of Surrealist film. She goes on say, “If Buñuel’s late period Surrealist films have a slick prettiness, a sunny glamour and an apparent story teller delight his [other] films do not have, it is because these qualities have the rhetorical function of reassuring the spectator at the very sight of his or her unease. The slicker and sunnier the films appear on the surface, the more complex and troubling they can often be underneath. “

Just like a bad dream you try to forget but it stays with you all day, Buñuels films have a way of sticking in your head. Rooted in dreams and founded on a revolution, Surrealism pretends to refuse all convictions and makes man express that which generally he does not: the unconscious. Surrealism presents a fragmented and false reality.

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