Despite what some people might say, surrealism isn't just a descriptive term encompassing anything remotely odd, or avant-garde. Surrealist films aren't just films that attempt to use mind-bending visuals to come across as surreal or hallucinatory; they're films that wholeheartedly adopt Surrealist aesthetics, often being directly influenced by the surrealist movement of the 1920s itself. It was in 1928 that the filmmaker Germaine Dulac directed the very first Surrealist film: The Seashell And The Clergyman. Since then, the movement has developed and expanded, evolving from a small group of Frenchman into a diverse, multitalented community of artists and filmmakers. In short, surrealist films are films that attempt to capture the random, illogic, and often downright disturbing imaginings of our dreams. They achieve what they do in multiple ways: some utilise editing techniques that create a sense of disorientation; some rely on unpredictable and seemingly nonsensical narratives; some films revolve around irregular characters, while some rely instead on terrifying, repulsive imagery to shock their audiences. Most of these films will scare you, and some will leave you feeling downright repulsed, but theyll stick with you long after youve seen them. Fair warning: they have a tendency to mess with a persons head.
