Surrealism
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Surrealism (from French surréalisme) was a cultural movement developed in Europe after World War I, largely influenced by Dadaism. describes it as "an artistic and literary movement that tries to surpass the real by promoting the irrational and dreamlike through the automatic expression of thought or the subconscious".
The movement is known for its visual arts and writing mixed with unusual imagination. Artists painted bewildering and illogical images, often with photographic precision, creating bizarre creatures out of everyday objects and developing pictorial techniques that revealed the subconscious. The goal was, according to André Breton, to "turn the contradictions of dreams into and reality in an absolute reality, a super reality".
Surrealist works contain elements and their other unexpected and non sequitur positions; however, many surrealist artists and writers describe their work first as an expression of the philosophical movement and, more importantly, conceived as an artifact. Breton affirmed that surrealism was a revolutionary movement, being associated with political causes such as communism and anarchism.
The term "surrealism" was first coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not established until October 15, 1924, when the French poet and critic André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris. This city would be the headquarters of the movement. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread throughout the world, influencing the visual arts, literature, film, and music of multiple countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
Origin of the term
The term comes from the French: surréalisme; sur ['on or above'] plus réalisme ['realism']. It was coined by the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. In the handbook he wrote for the musical Parade (May 1917) he states that his authors have achieved:
An alliance between painting and dance, between plastic and mimetic arts, which is the herald of a wider art still to come. (...) This new alliance (...) has led, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which considered the starting point for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is being felt today and will undoubtedly attract our best minds. We can hope that it will bring profound changes in our arts and customs through universal joy, for it is simply natural, after all, that these will take the same step as scientific and industrial progress.
The word surrealist already appears in June 1917, in the subtitle of Tiresias's Breasts (surrealist drama), to refer to the creative reproduction of an object, that transforms and enriches it. As Apollinaire writes in the preface to the drama:
When the man wanted to imitate the action of walking, he created the wheel, which does not look like a leg. Similarly, it has unconsciously created “surrealism”... After all, the stage does not look like life that represents more than a wheel to a leg.
Precedents
The surrealists pointed to several thinkers and artists as precedents for the surrealist enterprise, such as the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier, among others. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories on dreams and the subconscious were undoubtedly one of the pillars in the creation of surrealist thought.
As for the arts, surrealist poetry draws on dialectic and finds precursors in Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry or Lautréamont. In painting, the oldest precedent is that of Hieronymus Bosch "El Bosco", who in the 15th and 16th centuries created works such as The Garden of Earthly Delights or The hay wagon; as well as, at the end of the 19th century, the most notable is Giorgio de Chirico and his metaphysical painting. Surrealism takes up these elements and offers a systematic formulation of them. However, its most immediate precedent is Dadaism, a current from which it takes up different aspects.
First Steps
The first historical date of the movement is 1916, the year in which André Breton, precursor, leader and great thinker of the movement, discovered the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Jarry, as well as meeting Jacques Vaché and Guillaume Apollinaire. During the following years there is a confusing encounter with Dadaism, an artistic movement preceded by Tristan Tzara, in which the ideas of both movements are decanted. These, one inclined towards nihilistic destruction (dada) and the other towards romantic construction (surrealism) served as catalysts between them during their development.
In 1924 Breton wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto and it included the following:
It indicates very bad faith to discuss the right to use the word Surrealismin the particular sense that we give him, since no one can doubt that this word had no fortune, before we served her. I will define it once and for all:Surrealism: "substantive, masculine. Pure psychic Automation, by which means it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or in any other way, the actual functioning of thought. It is a dictation of thought, without the regulatory intervention of reason, alien to any aesthetic or moral concern. "
Philosophy: "Surrealism is based on the belief of a superior reality of certain forms of association devoid to the appearance of it, and on the free exercise of thought. It tends to definitively destroy all the remaining psychic mechanisms, and replace them with the resolution of the main problems of life.
They have made profession of faith Absolute Surrealism, the following gentlemen: Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gerard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Peret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac. "
Such was the definition of the term given by Breton and Soupault themselves in the first Surrealist Manifesto dated 1924. It therefore arose as a poetic movement, in which painting and sculpture are conceived as consequences plastic poetry.
In Surrealism and Painting, from 1928, Breton exposed surrealist psychology: the unconscious is the region of the intellect where the human being does not objectify reality but forms a whole with it. Art, in this sphere, is not representation but direct vital communication of the individual with the whole. This connection is expressed in a privileged way in significant coincidences (objective chance), in which the individual's desire and the future of another converge unpredictably, and in dreams, where the most disparate elements are revealed to be united by secret relationships. Surrealism proposes to transfer these images to the world of art through a free mental association, without the censoring interference of conscience. Hence, he chooses automatism as his method, picking up to a large extent the baton of spiritualist mediumistic practices, although radically changing his interpretation: what speaks through the medium are not the spirits, but the unconscious..
During feverish sessions of automatism, Breton and Soupault wrote Magnetic Fields, the first example of the possibilities of automatic writing, which they published in 1921. Breton later published Soluble fish. He says this at the end of the seventh tale:
"Behold, in the corridors of the palace where all are asleep. Is the green of sadness and rust not the song of the mermaids?"
Surrealism at the service of the revolution
Since 1925, following the outbreak of the Rif War, surrealism became politicized; The first contacts with the communists then take place, which would culminate that same year with Breton's adhesion to the Communist Party.
Between 1925 and 1930, a new newspaper titled Surrealism at the service of the Revolution appeared in whose first issue Louis Aragón, Buñuel, Dalí, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Tristan Tzara, among others declare themselves supporters of Breton. For their part, Jean Arp and Miró, although they did not share the political decision made by Breton, continued to participate with interest in Surrealist exhibitions. Shortly after, Magritte (1930), Masson (1931), Giacometti and Brauner joined in 1933, as well as Matta (who met Breton in 1937 through Dalí) and Lam; The movement became international with Surrealist groups appearing in the United States, Denmark, London, Czechoslovakia, and Japan. From this moment, a dispute will open, often bitter, between those surrealists who conceive of surrealism as a purely artistic movement, rejecting the subservience to communism, and those who accompany Breton in his turn to the left.
In 1929 Breton published the Second Surrealist Manifesto, in which he condemned, among other intellectuals, the artists Masson and Francis Picabia. In 1936 he expelled Dalí for wanting to remain neutral in the face of the politicization of the movement and not condemning German Nazism, and Paul Éluard. In 1938, Breton signed the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art together with León Trotski and Diego Rivera in Mexico.
Despite this split, there are numerous artists and works of art who are identified and classified as surrealists, without their works being politically biased. The most important element within surrealism continues to be augmented, distorted or reinterpreted reality based on dreamlike and subconscious elements.
Surrealist techniques
Surrealism borrowed from Dada some photography and cinematography techniques as well as the manufacture of objects. They extended the principle of collage (the "found object") to the assemblage of incongruous objects, as in the visible poems of Max Ernst. The latter invented frottage (drawings made by rubbing rough surfaces against paper or canvas) and applied it in great works such as Natural History, painted in Paris in 1926.
They created the exquisite corpse, in which various artists drew the different parts of a figure or a text without seeing what the previous one had done by passing the folded paper. The resulting creatures could serve as inspiration for Miró.
Other techniques used in surrealism were calligramming, Objet Trouvé, cubomania, soufflage, the paranoid critical method, smoking, decalcomania, frottage, among others. All these techniques were based on chance and improvisation, following the philosophy of the Surrealist movement.
In the literary field, surrealism was a great revolution in language and the contribution of new composition techniques. As he did not assume any cultural tradition, neither from the thematic nor formal point of view, he dispensed with metrics and adopted the type of poetic expression called verse: a verse of indefinite length without rhyme that is sustained only by the internal cohesion of its rhythm.. Likewise, since the consecrated theme was not assumed, he went to search for the sources of psychological (dreams, sexuality) and social repression, with which the lyric was rehumanized after the intellectualized isms of the Vanguards dehumanized it, with the exception of of Expressionism. For this they used the resources of dream transcription and automatic writing, and engendered new metaphorical procedures such as the visionary image. The language was also renewed from the point of view of the lexicon, making room for new semantic fields, and rhetoric was enriched with new expressive procedures.
Surrealist painting
Masson quickly adopted the techniques of automatism, around 1923-1924, shortly after meeting Breton. Around 1929 he abandoned them to return to a cubist style. For his part, Dalí used more the fixation of images taken from dreams, according to Breton, "...abusing them and endangering the credibility of surrealism..."; He invented what he himself called the paranoid-critical method, a mixture of Leonardo da Vinci's observation technique, by means of which, observing a wall, one could see how forms and techniques of frottage emerged.; The result of this technique are the works in which two images are seen in a single configuration. Óscar Domínguez invented the decalcomanía (applying black gouache on a paper which is placed on top of another sheet on which a slight pressure is exerted, then they are removed before they dry). In addition to the aforementioned techniques of decalcomania and frottage, the surrealists developed other procedures that also included chance: scraping, fumage and the distribution of sand on the surface. glued canvas.
Miró was for Breton the most surrealist of all, due to his pure psychic automatism. His surrealism unfolds between the first works where he explores his childhood dreams and fantasies (The Plowed Field), the works where automatism is predominant (Birth of the World) and the works in which he develops his language of signs and biomorphic forms (Character throwing a stone). Arp combines the techniques of automatism and oneiric techniques in the same work, developing an iconography of organic forms that has come to be called biomorphic sculpture, in which an attempt is made to represent the organic as a formative principle of reality..
René Magritte endowed surrealism with a conceptual charge based on the game of ambiguous images and their meaning denoted through words, questioning the relationship between a painted object and the real one. Paul Delvaux charges his works with a thick eroticism based on his estrangement character in the spaces of Giorgio de Chirico.
Surrealism penetrated the activity of many European and American artists at different times. Pablo Picasso allied himself with the Surrealist movement in 1925; Breton declared this approach by Picasso, qualifying it as «...surreal within cubism...». The works of the Dinard period (1928-1930), in which Picasso combines the monstrous and the sublime in the composition of figures that are half machines, half monsters with a gigantic and sometimes terrifying appearance, are considered surreal. This surreal monumentality of Picasso can be paralleled with that of Henry Moore and in poetry and theater with that of Fernando Arrabal.
Other pictorial movements were born of surrealism or prefigured it, such as Art brut.
The rise and fall of surrealism
In 1938, the International Surrealism Exhibition took place in Paris, marking the apogee of this movement before the war. Among others, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Dalí, Max Ernst, Masson, Man Ray, Óscar Domínguez and Meret Oppenheim participated. Above all, the exhibition offered the public an excellent sample of what Surrealism had produced in the manufacture of objects.
With the outbreak of World War II, the surrealists dispersed, some of them (Dalí, Breton, Ernst, Masson) leaving Paris and moving to the United States, where they planted the seeds for future postwar American movements (abstract expressionism and Pop Art).
Surrealism in Spain and Latin America
Surrealism in Spanish and Latin American painting
In Spain, surrealism appeared around the 1920s, not in its purely avant-garde aspect, but mixed with accents of symbolism and popular painting. In addition to Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, Spanish surrealism is made up of Maruja Mallo, Gregorio Prieto, José Moreno Villa, Benjamín Palencia and José Caballero, as well as the neo-cubists who turned to surrealism (Alberto Sánchez, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz and Ángel Ferrant).
There was an important Surrealist nucleus in the Canary Islands, grouped around the Gaceta de Arte by Eduardo Westerdahl, from which a group of poets invited André Bretón to come in 1935; there he composed this poem Le chateau etoilé and other works. The greatest representatives of surrealist painting in the archipelago were Óscar Domínguez, Juan Ismael and Westerdahl himself.
In Latin America, in addition to the aforementioned Roberto Matta (Chile) and Lam, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington (both European immigrants later nationalized as Mexicans) are considered surrealists.
What is considered the first surrealist exhibition in Latin America was held in Lima, Peru in 1935 at the initiative of the Peruvian surrealist poets and painters César Moro and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. Later in Mexico, in January 1940, César Moro himself with André Breton and Wolfgang Paalen managed to present a selection of forty works at the Galería de Arte Mexicano, both by representatives of the Surrealist movement and by Americans whose work had an affinity with the movement.[citation required]. There is a debate about whether the work of Frida Kahlo belongs to the surrealist current. Breton considered Mexico the essence of surrealism and interpreted her works as surreal, although Kahlo herself clearly said "I don't paint dreams... I paint my reality".
It is worth highlighting the contribution to the movement made from Buenos Aires, Argentina, by artists and writers such as Aldo Pellegrini, Planas Casas and Batlle Planas.
Surrealism in Hispanic Literature
Surrealism was followed with interest by Spanish intellectuals in the 1930s. There was the precedent of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who used some formulas linked to surrealism, such as greguería.
Several poets of the generation of '27 were interested in the expressive possibilities of surrealism. The first to adopt his methods was José María Hinojosa, author of La flor de Californía (1928), a pioneering book of narrative and dreamlike prose. His imprint is also evident in books such as the third section of Sobre los ángeles and Sermones y moradas by Rafael Alberti; in Poeta en Nueva York by Federico García Lorca and Un río, un amor and Los placeres prohibidos by Luis Cernuda. Vicente Aleixandre defined himself as & # 34; a superrealist poet & # 34;, although qualifying that his poetry was in no way a direct product of automatic writing. Miguel Hernández suffered an ephemeral surrealist stage and during the postwar period the surrealist imprint is perceived in the poets of Postismo and in Juan Eduardo Cirlot, and at present there is a certain postsurrealism in the work of some poets such as Blanca Andreu.
But it can be said that it was only in the Canary Islands where the surrealist adventure had, in the first minute of the movement, authentic expression, that is, declared connection to the movement but without settling in Paris: the Surrealist Faction of Tenerife, as described by Domingo Pérez Minik later. All its components, led by Agustín Espinosa and linked to Paris by the Tenerife painter Óscar Domínguez, came from the experience of the insular avant-garde with the magazine La Rosa de los Vientos, which appeared in 1926, and they would continue working on the artistic and literary renovation of the islands in Gaceta de Arte, one of the most important magazines of the Hispanic avant-garde, with diverse international avant-garde content and with non-surrealist collaborators such as Domingo Pérez Minik and Eduardo Westerdahl. Apart from Espinosa, Pedro García Cabrera, Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo, Domingo López Torres and José María de la Rosa complete the list of surrealist writers c with works such as Crime (1934) -considered by some to be the best surrealist prose in the Spanish language -, Romanticism and new account (1933), Enigma del invitado (1936), Dock with alarm clocks (1936), The unexpected (1937) and Vértice de sombra (1936). Juan Ismael would join Óscar Domínguez in plastic, but developing his activity on the islands. As in the other cases, the Spanish civil war ended the group and the lives of some of them, such as López Torres -drown by the nationals- or Espinosa, who died shortly after the coup; García Cabrera, for his part, would be arrested and would flee, joining the Republican troops. However, the activity had reached its culmination with the visit of André Breton and Benjamin Péret to Tenerife in 1935, organizing a painting exhibition, signing the Second International Bulletin of Surrealism, trying to project The Golden Age of Luis Buñuel -banned by the government of the island- and leaving Breton a memory that will constitute the content of chapter V of his L'amour fou (1937).
Although he cannot be considered a strict surrealist, the poet and thinker Juan Larrea experienced firsthand the emergence of the movement in Paris and later reflected on its value and significance in works such as Surrealism Between Old and New World (1944). At present there is a current of neosurrealism in the poetry of Blanca Andreu. The Spanish Fernando Arrabal had a daily attendance at the "surrealist coffee" La Promenade de Vénus from 1960 to 1963. André Breton published his theater, his & # 34; Stone of Folly & # 34; and some of his pictures.
In Latin America, surrealism enjoyed the enthusiastic support of poets such as the Chilean Braulio Arenas and the Peruvians César Moro, Xavier Abril and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, as well as influencing the work of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and the Chilean poets Pablo Neruda, Gonzalo Rojas and the Peruvian César Vallejo. In Argentina, despite the disdain of Jorge Luis Borges, surrealism still seduced the young Julio Cortázar and produced a late fruit in the work of Alejandra Pizarnik. The Mexican poet and thinker Octavio Paz occupies a particular place in the history of the movement: a personal friend of Breton's, he dedicated several illuminating essays to surrealism.
In Catalan - Balearic literature we have the poetic surrealism of the Mallorcan Llorenç Vidal, especially in his works "El cant de la balalaika" and "5 existential meditations".
Surrealism in history
In literature
Surrealism was preceded by the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, and the Dada movement founded in Zurich in 1916 by T. Tzara, H. Ball and H. Arp. Animated by the same spirit of provocation, André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault founded the magazine Littérature (1919) in Paris, while in the US Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia manifested similar attitudes. and in Germany, Max Ernst and Hugo Ball.
This phase was followed by a more methodical attitude of investigation of the unconscious, undertaken by Breton, together with Aragon, Paul Éluard, Soupault, Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, etc. The first work of this trend, which can be described as the first surrealist literary work, was Los campos magnéticos (1921), written jointly by Breton and Soupault. After the break with Tzara, Antonin Artaud, André Masson and Pierre Naville joined the movement.
Breton wrote the first definition of the movement in his Surrealism Manifesto (1924), a text that gave cohesion to the postulates and purposes of the movement. Among the authors he cited as precursors of the movement are Freud, Lautréamont, Edward Young, Matthew Lewis, Gérard de Nerval, Jonathan Swift, Marquis de Sade, François-René de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Mallarme and Jarry. In the same year, the Bureau de recherches surréalistes and the magazine La Révolution Surréaliste were founded, which replaced Littérature, directed by Breton himself in 1925 and which it became the group's common organ of expression.
The surrealist production was characterized by an unlimited libertarian vocation and the exaltation of dream processes, corrosive humor and erotic passion, conceived as weapons of struggle against the bourgeois cultural tradition. The group's ideas were expressed through literary techniques, such as "automatic writing," pictorial provocations, and loud public position takings. The rapprochement operated at the end of the twenties with the communists produced the first quarrels and schisms in the movement.
In 1930 Breton published his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in which he excommunicated Joseph Delteil, Antonin Artaud, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos, Georges Limbour, André Masson, Roger Vitrac, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and Francis Picabia. The same year the new organ of the movement appeared, the magazine Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, which supplanted the previous one, La Révolution Surréaliste, and in parallel, Aragon (after its trip to the USSR), Éluard, Péret and Breton joined the Communist Party. At the end of 1933, Breton, Éluard and Crevel were expelled from the party. In the 1930s, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Yves Tanguy, René Char and Georges Sadoul joined the movement. Already expelled from the group by Breton, Dalí published in 1942 "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí", an autobiography that brings together many of the elements typical of surrealism and that confirms the literary virtues of a Dalí at the height of his creativity.
After the years prior to World War II, marked by Breton's active militancy, and the years of exile in New York for most of its members, during the German occupation of France, the movement continued to maintain a certain cohesion and vitality, but from 1946, when Breton returned to Paris, surrealism was already part of history.
In the plastic arts
In the beginning, surrealism was a fundamentally literary movement, and until a little later it would not produce great results in the plastic arts. A fundamental concept emerges, automatism, based on a kind of magical dictation, coming from the unconscious, thanks to which poems, essays, etc. arose, and which would later be picked up by painters and sculptors.
The first surrealist exhibition was held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925, and in it, in addition to Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst, artists such as André Masson, Picasso, Man Ray, Pierre Roy, P. Klee and Joan Miró, who later separated from the movement or remained united with it, only adopting some of its principles. They were joined by Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti.
The rebellion of surrealism against the bourgeois cultural tradition and the established moral order had its political aspect, and a sector of surrealism, which did not consider the tumults of its cultural manifestations sufficient, joined the French Communist Party. However, violent discrepancies arose within the group regarding the debate on the relationship between art and politics; contradictory manifestos followed one another and the movement tended to disintegrate. It is significant, in this regard, that the magazine "La révolution surréaliste" was renamed, from 1930, "Le surréalisme au service de la révolution". In the 1930s, the movement spread beyond the French borders. The International Surrealist Exhibition was held in 1938 in Paris.
World War II brought all activity to a standstill in Europe. This prompted Breton, like many other artists, to go to the US. There, an association of German and French surrealist painters arose that gathered around the magazine VVV. These surrealists who emigrated to the US influenced American art, particularly the development of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. By the time Breton returned to Europe in 1946 the movement was already definitely in decline.
Among plastic artists there is a duality in the interpretation of surrealism: abstract surrealists, who opt for the application of pure automatism, like André Masson or Joan Miró, and invent their own figurative universes; and the figurative surrealists, interested in the oneiric path, among them René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, or Salvador Dalí, who use meticulous realism and traditional technical means, but who depart from traditional painting due to the unusual association of objects and the monstrous deformations, as well as the dreamlike and delirious atmosphere that emerges from his works. Max Ernst is one of the few surrealists who moves between the two paths. Ernst's work has particularly influenced a late epigone of surrealism in Germany, Stefan von Reiswitz.
In music
In the 1920s, several composers were influenced by Surrealism or by individuals in the Surrealist movement. Among them were Bohuslav Martinů, André Souris, Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse, who stated that his work Arcana was conceived from a dream. Souris in particular was associated with the movement: he had a long relationship with Magritte and worked on Paul Nougé's publication Adieu Marie.
Although Breton in 1946 responded rather negatively to the issue of music with his essay Silence is Golden, later surrealists, such as Paul Garon, became interested in surrealism in jazz and blues improvisation and have found parallels. Jazz and blues musicians have reciprocated this interest. For example, the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition included performances by guitarist and singer David "Honeyboy" Edwards.
In the audiovisual media
On the cinematographic side, surrealism gave rise to various attempts framed in the cinema of the historical avant-garde, such as La Coquille et le clergyman (1926, "The Conch and the Clergyman&# 34;), by Germaine Dulac or L'étoile de mer (1928, "The Starfish"), by Man Ray and Robert Desnos, a Dadaist short film.
It can also be considered surreal Entr'acte, a 22-minute short written by René Clair and Francis Picabia, directed by Clair.
Luis Buñuel, in collaboration with Dalí, produced the most revolutionary works: An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1928) and The Golden Age (L'âge d'or, 1930).
In 1931 Jean Cocteau wrote, directed and premiered The Blood of a Poet, a 50-minute surrealist medium-length film.
In the United States, the mother of cinematographic surrealism, since 1940, was Maya Deren. Her 14-minute work Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is considered the first American Surrealist masterpiece. However, an earlier film can also be considered surreal, Rose Hobart (1936), where Joseph Cornell makes a new montage in the form of a collage from celluloid of another earlier film, East of Borneo (1931), a film prior to the entry into force of the Hays Code directed by George Melford.
Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí collaborated when the former commissioned the Catalan artist for part of the set design for Remember (Spellbound, 1945).
Since the 1960s, contemporary filmmakers such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, Jan Švankmajer, Fernando Arrabal and, in the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Julio Médem, Stephen Sayadian, or Carlos Atanes, among others, show the influence of surrealism.
Cinema written or directed by the Grupo Pánico, made up of Roland Topor, Arrabal and Jodorowsky, is also considered surrealist or post-surrealist cinema, since all three were part of the Surrealist Group led by Breton in Paris between 1960 and September 1962. Of all his films, The Holy Mountain (1973), by Jodorowsky, is considered the most refined example of symbolist and surrealist cinema.