In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the background of Surrealism’s origins, its key expressive techniques, and the fundamental ways in which Freud’s psychoanalysis influenced this artistic movement.
What Is Surrealism?
As defined as “an artistic movement that sought to transcend reality by expressing the irrational emotions, the subconscious, fantasies, and daydreams inherent in the human unconscious through new expressive techniques,” Surrealism was an artistic movement that aimed to go beyond reality through the expression of the unconscious, fantasies, and irrational emotions.
Surrealism was an avant-garde literary and artistic movement that began around 1919 and unfolded primarily in France for about 20 years, lasting until shortly after the outbreak of World War II. It emerged alongside other early 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Futurism, and it spread widely and sparked much controversy, particularly during the war.
World War I left deep psychological scars on Europeans, placing people in a mindset that sought to explore worlds beyond reality. Rather than simply rejecting reality, the Surrealists turned their attention to the world of dreams illuminated by Freud’s psychoanalysis. They strove to transcend the boundaries of experience and sought to approach a kind of transcendent reality by combining dreams and instinctual experiences with reality, thereby expanding the scope of our perception.
The expressive technique chosen by Surrealism was “defamiliarization.” By removing familiar everyday objects from their usual contexts to make them seem strange, they produced irrational and fantastical effects. They created situations—such as in Magritte’s works—where it was difficult to distinguish whether a figure was a person or a fish, or employed “deformation” to intentionally distort forms.
Another technique involved combining seemingly unrelated elements—such as in collage and montage—to create bewildering and shocking images. These images aimed to do more than simply depict dreams; they sought to provide new opportunities for perception to those who had become so accustomed to daily life that their existence had become conceptualized.
Surrealism valued fantasy and illusion—that is, an emotional and irrational world—unbound by the dominance of reason. Therefore, while it may appear on the surface to be in opposition to Realism or Abstract Art, it was not exclusively at odds with other artistic traditions.
Looking at its roots, Surrealism was greatly influenced by Dadaism. Dadaism was a movement that emerged after World War I to destroy established traditions and order; it glorified irrationality, sometimes even adopting immoral attitudes, and embraced new techniques such as collage and the use of found objects. Surrealism’s erotic tendencies are also linked to Dadaism’s immoral stance.
Meanwhile, going further back, Cubism’s conception of space also indirectly influenced Surrealism. The innovative sense of space presented by Cubism contributed to the construction of Surrealism’s imaginative and unreal spaces, and Surrealism often created unreal scenes in ways that disrupted real-world space.
Surrealism shifted its focus to the realm of the unconscious—the opposite of reason—and as a result, art no longer aimed solely at the fusion of reason and emotion as it had in the past. Although its popularity gradually waned after the 1930s, it did not disappear entirely and continued on a small scale even after World War II. The value of Surrealism in 20th-century aesthetics lies in its revival and presentation of surprising and exotic elements that had previously been overlooked.
Freud’s Psychoanalysis
The unconscious, as described by Freud, is largely composed of primal desires, wishes, and impulses rooted in physical instincts. These unconscious elements seek immediate gratification and do not readily surface at the conscious level, which prioritizes adaptation to reality and the avoidance of external dangers. Sexual desire is a prime example of such unconscious impulses.
Freud viewed dreams as the result of the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. He even interpreted Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ as an expression of Leonardo’s unconscious sexual desire. Specifically, his analysis suggests that since Leonardo spent his early childhood exclusively with his mother, he did not experience the Oedipus complex through his father, and thus his desire for his mother remained uninhibited.
The Oedipus complex is a concept named after the fate of King Oedipus in Greek mythology. It posits that, particularly in the case of boys, around the ages of 3 to 5, they experience sexual desires characterized by both competitive hostility toward their father and affection for their mother. This desire is repressed due to the prohibition against incest and is overcome through castration anxiety—the fear of being punished by the father—thereby transitioning into the latent stage. It is explained that when this desire resurfaces during puberty, it is transferred to a member of the opposite sex and thereby resolved.
The question is how to access the unconscious. Freud argued that while we cannot see the unconscious directly, we can indirectly infer its contents through expressed phenomena such as dreams and behavior. To this end, he proposed the method of psychoanalysis, which became an important theoretical and clinical tool for understanding and treating mental disorders.
Although psychoanalysis was initially devised for the treatment of patients, it later proved to be of great help in understanding the mental world of the general public as well. Freud likened psychoanalysis to a telescope or microscope, explaining that it allows us to peer into the realm of the unconscious, which is invisible to the naked eye.
The basic concepts of psychoanalysis include the distinction between the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious; the sexual drives and unconscious motives existing within the unconscious; and the origins of these drives and the physical and psychological phenomena through which they manifest. Surrealists sought to artistically liberate the world of the unconscious and instincts revealed by Freud in order to create new forms of expression.
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel was a director born in Spain in 1900 who worked across France, the United States, and Mexico, bringing his long cinematic journey to a close in France in 1983. While he generally made commercial films to earn a living, he was a unique figure who consistently produced works that challenged and shocked the mainstream culture of his time, serving as “scandals.”
Buñuel himself clearly defined his cinematic worldview as Surrealism. He repeatedly sought to demonstrate how futile it is to attempt to suppress human instincts and irrationality through institutions, civilization, religion, and social norms; as a result, his films are permeated with attacks on the Catholic Church—the setting of his upbringing—as well as mockery and contempt for the European bourgeoisie, and explorations of the unconscious and sexuality.
These characteristics of Buñuel are clearly evident in his early works. From his debut film, ‘Un chien andalou’ (1928), through to his later works, instinct, repression, conflict, and destruction are recurring themes.
In particular, his second feature film, ‘L’Age d’or’ (1930), concisely illustrates the core nature of Buñuel’s cinema. Composed of scenes so fragmented and shocking that it is difficult to simply summarize the plot, the film begins like a documentary, listing bizarre situations, and centers on a narrative in which bandits, priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats appear in succession, while the love of a young couple is constantly thwarted by the bourgeoisie.
Surprisingly, the film’s final segment unfolds into an episode reminiscent of a scene from the Marquis de Sade’s ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’, with one of the characters even appearing in the guise of Jesus. The final image of ‘The Golden Age’ is a cross abandoned in the desert; this staging reveals a clear attack on religion, morality, and bourgeois values.
The absurd and grotesque fragments of bourgeois life interspersed throughout the narrative, along with the use of subtitles, dialogue, and music, leave no doubt as to the film’s intended target. While Buñuel’s film is, on the surface, shocking and at times obscure, it contains a consistent critique of reason, institutions, and morality, as well as an exploration of unconscious impulses.
Initial Reactions and Scandals
‘Un Chien Andalou’, the first film created by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, received enthusiastic acclaim from Paris’s bourgeois cultural circles—contrary to the filmmakers’ intentions. Although they claimed to have made the film to attack the art-for-art’s-sake avant-garde cinema that was in vogue at the time, audiences and some critics embraced it as a new pinnacle of “art cinema.”
Thanks to this success, Buñuel was able to make his next film, ‘The Golden Age’, but it elicited a reaction diametrically opposed to that of ‘Un Chien Andalou’. In particular, the depiction of Jesus as a character straight out of Sade’s novels was perceived as blasphemy, provoking fierce outrage from nearly everyone except a few left-wing intellectuals.
Far-right groups stormed theaters where the film was being screened and tore the projection screen; despite the damage, screenings continued for several days. As public opinion and pressure from the Catholic Church intensified, the Paris municipal authorities banned the film and confiscated the print. Because of this incident, Buñuel was labeled “the director of that infamous film” until his return to European cinema in 1950 with ‘The Forgotten Ones’.
The original negative of ‘The Golden Age’ was not restored to its original form until 1993; in the meantime, while ‘Un Chien Andalou’ was gaining recognition as a classic, ‘The Golden Age’ remained a symbol of scandal.
‘Un Chien Andalou’: Scenes and Expression
The most famous scene is one in which a man, after sharpening a razor blade, cuts out a woman’s eye with the sharp blade. Beginning with this shocking image, the film plunges the audience into a succession of jarring images without any consistent causal relationship.
A donkey’s head on a piano, a man attacking a woman, and two men and a woman on a beach with their lower bodies buried in the sand are intercut in rapid montage without any connecting explanation. The film does not explain causality or directly convey a message. The audience must find the reasons between the scenes on their own, and the Surrealists relished this “strangeness” and mocked critical commentary.
Film is a medium particularly well-suited to surrealist humor. It allows for the free and fantastical flow of the mind, and ‘Un Chien Andalou’ is brimming with such humor. By severing causal relationships and contextual connections, the film shatters the everyday appearance of existence and reveals a new reality, delivering even greater shock and confusion to the audience.
The Context of Avant-Garde Cinema
The 1920s and 1930s were the periods when avant-garde experimentation in the arts was at its peak. Dadaism and Surrealism emerged from the cynicism and nihilism that followed World War I, and it was from these movements that avant-garde cinema was born.
The term “avant-garde cinema” refers to the earliest experimental films that emerged in Europe during the 1920s. While modern criticism often applies this term more broadly to any film that demonstrates new and original techniques and experimental approaches in the process of expressing cinematic ideas, the earliest avant-garde films were works that employed techniques directly linked to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements.
At the time, Paris was the hub of these experimental films. While commercial cinema remained stuck in clichéd romantic stories between men and women, avant-garde cinema sought to capture the inner workings of human consciousness on film. Critics also bestowed the title “avant-garde” to signify that it was “ahead of the mainstream.”
Dadaism and Surrealism stemmed from a rejection of “civilization.” They challenged civilization itself—which had led to war—despised conventions and refined tastes, and destroyed traditional values and idols through humor, irrationalism, and exotic atmospheres. A tendency to celebrate individualism, hedonism, and anarchism is also characteristic of these movements.
Robert Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1919) is considered the pioneer of avant-garde cinema. Its theatrical setting, eerie atmosphere, and surreal lighting and color palette influenced many subsequent experimental films. Inspired by this, Dalí and Buñuel released their 17-minute collaborative work, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929).
Scenes in ‘Un Chien Andalou’—such as the donkey on the piano and the eye being slit open by a razor blade—are considered the highlights of avant-garde cinema, reflecting the surrealist movement. Avant-garde films explore dreams, the unconscious, and the unreal, and they also boldly addressed issues of sexuality that had previously been restricted by censorship.
Films in this genre sometimes depicted sexual acts such as homosexuality, masturbation, masochism, and voyeurism in an explicit manner, and directors constructed narratives based on spontaneous inspiration rather than scripts. A series of experiments subverting traditional techniques followed, such as drawing or scratching directly on the film to create images, or projecting images by attaching butterflies, flowers, sand, and stones to the film.
This experimental tradition of avant-garde cinema later influenced American underground filmmakers in the 1950s, becoming one of the foundations of 1960s hippie culture and underground art.
Luis Buñuel’s Masterpieces
1. ‘Un chien andalou’ (1929)
2. ‘L’Age d’or’ (1930)
3. ‘Las Hurges’ (1932)
4. ‘The Forgotten Ones (Los Olvidados)’ (1950)
5. ‘Viridiana’ (1961)
6. ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d’une femme de chambre)’ (1963)
7. ‘Simon of the Desert (Simon del desierto)’ (1965)
8. ‘Tristana’ (1970)
9. ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ (1973)
10. ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ (1977)
Conclusion
‘Un Chien Andalou’ is a collaborative work between the controversial Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, one of the most famous names in the history of modern art; it is a work that experimented with the spirit of the Surrealist movement through the medium of film.
Images as jarring and shocking as a donkey’s head bleeding on a piano can be considered cinematic expressions of Surrealist techniques. Attempting to find “hidden meanings” in this work is no easy task, and trying to identify the use of free association or automatic writing only leads to further confusion.
While ‘Un Chien Andalou’ is undoubtedly recognized as a classic in film history, treating it merely as a required entry on a list of essential films for general film literacy is not appropriate. Beyond mere nostalgic appreciation, this film provides an opportunity to challenge the stereotypes around us through Buñuel’s sharp criticism and satire, prompting us to engage in more intense reflection.
Even Alfred Hitchcock once said, “The greatest director in the world is Luis Buñuel,” and to this day, this film and Buñuel’s body of work continue to inspire us to contemplate the possibilities of cinematic imagination and expression.
