Surrealism in cinema traces its roots back to the beginning of the art movement itself in the 1920s, with artists like Salvador Dalí and Rene Magritte crossing over from the painting medium into early attempts at filmmaking. Luis Buñuel, who collaborated with Dalí on some of these early experiments in film, is often credited as the filmmaker who brought the genre out of the silent movie era and into full-length feature fruition. Buñuel’s influence on this film genre is everlasting, and greatly inspired Federico Fellini, himself possibly the most influential filmmaker of the 20th Century.

Despite its early origins, the genre is still prevalent in today’s films, and has heavily influenced many mainstream directors who use this visual language to subvert the touchstones of traditional storytelling in order to convey a sense of the uncanny in audiences. Surrealism has the ability to free filmmakers from the traditional constraints of narrative and the suspension of disbelief and can also be used as a plot device in-and-of-itself. Look no further than the rise in popularity of the multiverse in today’s films, a concept that roots itself as much in surrealism as it does in theoretical physics and cosmology. Innovative filmmaking has always been about breaking the rules, and no film genre does more rule-breaking than surrealism. Here are some of the surrealist films that have influenced subsequent generations of filmmakers.

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