Presented by Sarah Childress, PhD
André Breton saw the darkened cinema as the ideal surrealist space. We sit in the dark, surrender our bodies, and receive whatever arrives. Breton believed that the unguarded state was akin to the unconscious, freed from reason and convention.
Offered in conjunction with the exhibition International Surrealism from Tate: Fifty Years of Dreams, “Breaking Out, Breaking In” pairs two landmark films to showcase how the surrealists and those influenced by their ideas used film as an instrument of liberation. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) is brazen, confrontational—a deliberate assault on social and sexual convention. Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) burrows inward, a patiently relentless descent into a confining psychic architecture, to find the way out. One lunges outward, the other sinks inward; both are trying to break free.
Un Chien Andalou: 17 min. | Meshes of the Afternoon: 14 min.
Promotional support provided by Nashville Film Festival
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