20 Amazing Surrealist Movies

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After the invention of cinema in the late 19th century, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, directors who emerged from French Impressionist Cinema, German Expressionist Cinema, Soviet Montage, Dada Cinema, Surrealist Cinema and Japanese Humanism Cinema all tried to explore the possibility of this new-born art form, and cinema reached its first golden age in history.

Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to film theory, criticism, and production with origins in Paris in the 1920s. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery. Surrealism was the first literary and artistic movement to become seriously associated with cinema,though it has also been a movement largely neglected by film critics and historians.

Film surrealist like Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jan Svankmajer and David Lynch broke all the rules and cinema conventions, they made divided movies that both challenge and entertain us. In order to keep a balance, we only selected at most 2 movies from each of these greatest surrealists.

Some of the movies on the list are not strictly surrealist cinema, you can argue they belong to the genre of sci-fi or fantasy, but the line is thin and they surely have some surrealist element in them, that’s the reason they got chosen. If you are looking for a list full of strange movies, then this is it.