The artistic approach that severed ties with traditional artistic and aesthetic values, opposing itself to the hypocritical bourgeois culture, found the expression of surrealism in cinema as well. Surrealism in film not merely extends the boundaries of reality; it completely undermines them, provoking the viewer to contemplate the nature of dreams and the absurdity of life itself. André Breton begins his 1924 "Manifesto of Surrealism" with the words, “So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life — real life, I mean — that in the end this belief is lost.”
“If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand; the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lustreless fate.
Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas generous or far-reaching. In his mind’s eye, events real or imagined will be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his salvation.
Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.”
Surrealism, as a genre, explores the uncharted realms of human consciousness, transporting the viewer into a world of dreams and fantasies. Films in this genre often feature unexpected plot twists, absurd scenes, and symbolic imagery designed to evoke emotional and cognitive responses from the audience. Classic works of surrealist cinema, such as Fernand Léger's "Ballet Mécanique" (1924), Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" (1929) and "The Exterminating Angel" (1962), Jean Cocteau's "The Blood of a Poet" (1932), and later films by David Lynch and Jan Švankmajer towards the late 20th and early 21st centuries, serve as vivid examples of cinematic experimentation where the boundaries between reality and fantasy are blurred. These films introduce the viewer to a world where the rational and the irrational intertwine.
Surrealists assert that thoughts can be unconscious, "irrational," and can be captured if one somehow disengages the control of consciousness governed by the dictates of rationality. However, within the human psyche, there exists a dimension that is not subject to the rationality and pragmatism that have prevailed in the contemporary bourgeois world. The aim of surrealism is to liberate this dimension, to rehabilitate the irrational, the inexplicable, the useless, or, as the surrealists would later term it, the "marvellous," making these elements an integral part not only of art but of everyday life. That is, to recreate a certain wholeness of human existence, where fantasy and reality seamlessly flow into each other, forming, to borrow the title of one of Breton's books, "communicating vessels." In this regard, surrealism represents a life-building project, one that is not confined to purely artistic forms but seeks to encompass other spheres of experience. Let us turn to André Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism":
“There remains madness, “the madness that one locks up,” as it has aptly been described. That madness or another... We all know, in fact, that the insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them not to pay attention to certain rules – outside of which the species feels threatened – which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination, that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations, illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages of Taine’s L’Intelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.”