Surrealism

Surrealism is a movement that became very popular between the 1920s and 1960s, especially in France. Surrealists were intrigued with the subconscious and the endless possibilities that the imagination could portray through art. They valued Sigmund Freud’s work with the subconscious and dream analysis as a way to “liberate the imagination.” Surrealism presented a way of escaping the everyday mundane parts of life and exploring the endless possibilities of the imagination.

Similar to the way a video editors in today’s day and age would juxtapose two contrasting images to create meaning, surrealists believed that combining two elements not normally found together could create “startling effects.”  In 1918 a poet by the name of Pierre Reverdy stated, “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."

            Surrealism still has its impact in movies to this day. When I think of surrealism, I think of the “Magical World of Disney.” Everything about Disney is surreal and fantastical. They create these dream-like or fantastical worlds, which pull the audience out of the mundane reality of everyday life and into the surreal. In “Alice in Wonderland”, Alice goes into a surreal world after falling through a rabbit hole. Tim Burton is notorious for creating surreal settings and characters in his films. Newer examples of movies like “Avatar” contain parts of surrealism where the protagonist enters a completely different world by falling asleep in a “chamber.”  All these movies would not be considered “Surrealist’ movies but contain elements of “Surrealism” in them.

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a movie that was on a list of more recent films in the category of “Surrealist.” In this movie, a lady named Clementine falls for a guy named Joel. They fall in love, but after a nasty fight, Clementine decides to have all her memories of Joel erased.  The most recent (and in my opinion the best) movie with surrealistic elements is the movie “Inception,” which dives into the concept of the sub-conscious and distinguishing between dreams and reality.  In this movie, the dreams are created through imagination of the individual’s sub-conscious. There is a girl in the movie, who is recruited to build the dream levels, and when she is first learning how, she experiments with the laws of physics and learns about weird paradoxes that separate the dreams between being surreal and reality. Eventually the dreams become so realistic, the individuals had to bring something with them into the dream so they know they are in a dream and not reality.