Surrealism and German Expressionism in Film.

This essay aims to discuss the difference between Surrealism in film and German Expressionism in film with reference to Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1927) and Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
Surrealism was a revolution in traditional art and literature. Un Chien Andalou was a product of this revolution and a product of the minds of Bunuel and Dali. Surrealism focuses on the dream state and the fact “…that dreams have a meaning and that this meaning directly concerns the dreamer himself.” Un Chien Andalou is but just a dream.
In Un Chien Andalou there is a discontinuous narrative which lends itself to the fact that the mind does not follow a linear pattern and is rather quite disorganised. In Apollonian tradition people are portrayed as totally rational beings with control over their thoughts and they think in a perfect linear pattern. Surrealism subverts this concept. “(Dreams) are phenomena whose absurdity and incoherence disappear as soon as we know how...