Bunuel & Dali: Surrealism

Surrealism (developed in the 20th-century as a literary and artistic movement) gained its popularity in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism emphasis supposedly was not on negation but on positive expression.

"The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the "rationalism" that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I."

The French poet André Breton published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924 and states that Surrealism "was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."

Drawing heavily on Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the inspiration for imagination. He says it could be attained by all artists, even creative writing majors. This movement continues to rear its head in various forms even today.

Salvador Dali

Here's a few of his paintings & photographs of the artist.

Luis Bunuel

The father of cinematic Surrealism and the father of surrealist film, Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education (which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both religion and subversive behavior), and subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca.

We will screen Bunuel & Dali's surrealist film: Un Chien Andalou

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