Channing Pollock makes a dramatic entrance in Georges Franju’s Judex (1963) 

(via)

Simone Mareuil in Un Chien Andalou (1929, dir. Luis Buñuel)

“While spending Christmas with Salvador Dali in Figueras, I suggested to him that we do a film together. He said: ‘Last night I dreamt with ants swarming in my hand.’ And I said: ‘Oh! Man! I dreamt about a cloud cutting the moon and me cutting someone’s eye with a razor.’

We wrote the script in six days. We identified with each other so much that there was no discussion.”

-Buñuel, via

Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, and (sister) Ana Maria Dali, circa 1929 (via)

“As a young man, [Salvador Dali] was totally asexual, and forever making fun of friends who fell in love or ran after women - until the day he lost his virginity to Gala & wrote me a 6-page letter detailing, in his own inimitable way, the pleasures of carnal love.

(Gala’s the only woman he ever really made love to. Of course, he’s seduced many, particularly American heiresses; but those seductions usually entailed stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman’s shoulders, and, without a word, showing them to the door.)”

-excerpted from Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh

Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, dir. Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid)

(via)

“This sickness, to express oneself. What is it?”

-Jean Cocteau (The Paris Review, 1964)

Photo by Philippe Halsman.

The Seahorse (1934), one of Jean Painlevé’s “scientific-poetic” sea documentaries 

“In the early 1930s, when Painlevé set out to make one of the first films ever to use footage shot underwater, he chose as its subject the seahorse—a species with unusual, and to Painlevé, commendable sex roles: whereas it is the female seahorse who produces the eggs, it is the male who gives birth to them. ‘The seahorse,’ he would later write, ‘was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female.”

-excerpted from Maverick Filmmaker Jean Painlevé (via)

Jean Painlevé with his underwater camera (1935, via)

“Without free thinking, no progress is possible. Governments may be able to fabricate statistics about agricultural or industrial production, but they cannot invent art, literature, or science.”

Salvador Dali - Study for the Scenario for The Surrealist Mystery of New York (1935) 

“Outside his window, an anthropomorphic skyscraper is used for breeding hysterical mediums. One of these mediums escapes from the glacier and enters the head’s room and rushes towards him threateningly. 

He prudently flees, but in her fury, the medium shuts the door, ripping off his hand. The medium is terrified to discover the horrible hole at the centre of the hand through which thousands of ants begin to emerge.

The hand writhes in agony and now becomes a horrible ball crawling with ants and a swarm of bees that have also come out of the hole.” 

-excerpt from the prologue of Salvador Dali’s unrealized film script for The Surrealist Mystery of New York

(via)

Salvador Dali’s proposed poster design for his unrealized film project, The Surrealist Mystery of New York (1935) ^[1] 

“Dali adopted the violence, sexuality and criminality of popular gangster movies for his project, although - like so many of his scenarios - it remains fragmentary in nature. Scenes [are] located across the city…including Fifth Avenue, Radio City, and the Museum of Natural History, but begin in Harlem, possibly as a deliberate evocation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1930).

Brief numbered and titled scenes then follow, including The Adorers of the New Fear, The Aging of New York, in which a Surrealist monument to the end of prohibition is erected, & The Cannibalism of American Films, in which a ‘severed arm pursues its cannibalistic desires.’” ^[2]

Marguerite Gance in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. Jean Epstein) (via) Full film online at Internet Archive.  

“Yes, I hear it, and have heard it. We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! 

And now—the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?’—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—’I tell you that she now stands without the door!’

The huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher.”

-Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Un Chien Andalou (1929, dir. Luis Buñuel)

“The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.”

-André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber)

(via)

Jabberwocky (1971, dir. Jan Švankmajer), a surrealistic short film loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky.

Long Live Death (1971, dir. Fernando Arrabal)

(via)