FR 62m Dir: Luis Buñuel
After their surrealist short An Andalusian Dog Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel were given the money to make a feature film. Dali left the film fairly early on so it's unclear how much of this is his contribution.
The film is broadly episodic. It opens with a documentary on scorpions and then goes into a sequence where there is some sort of religious ceremony on a rocky landscape which is interrupted by a man and woman loudly making love. The man is dragged away but manages to kick a dog and suddenly is dragged through some streets where he pushes a blind man over. Suddenly we are at a middle class party where the man and the woman are guests and try to talk to each and make love but are constantly interrupted. Oh, a man shoots a child for a minor prank but no-one seems particularly bothered. The final part is an adaption of part of the novel 120 Days of Sodom where the characters emerge from their long orgy looking exhausted.
The intelligent interpretation of the film seems to be that it's about the sexual mores of the bourgeois or in even more simple terms: posh people are very prude. But this is my problem with surrealism. If you want to make a film about that subject, why not just make one? This is basically just nonsense. There's brief moments of exposition where things look normal and it feels to me like they went "we need to put something mental in here now" and next thing you know there's a cow sat on a bed.
This is sometimes listed as one of the greatest films of all time which I think people do just to make themselves look clever. I've seen a handful of surrealist films and I didn't particularly like any of them but this is just utter nonsense with only a couple of memorable images.
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