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Rating:
It's a novelty.
1929, take me back to the start. "Evil Activities - Nobody Said it Was Easy" in stereo.
When Dadaism had an intellectual void around it, that's when Breton's Surrealism took on the guise of a first art movement, with its deep digging, in clear separation from modern thought like an original dandy, someone who goes against common taste and against trends. The surrealists threw themselves into everything you didn't like and what people considered non-culture, garbage like popular cinema. The manifesto of surrealism is the greatest intellectual revolution of the twentieth century!
While the fascists were being fascists in Italy, in Spain Franco was already established, in Germany Adolf was going mad with hatred, all the representatives of the countries abused power, seized and drugged, in Russia due to the Nep and the lack of true communism (see Marx and Engels), it had marked the end of the idea of revolution as a pure, liberating and fun act.
In these times of half-sleep, surrealism connects to psychoanalysis by abolishing the boundary between dream and wakefulness.
Images: hypnagogic.
The images that lie between sleep and wakefulness, along with impossible mad love that cannot culminate in the act, are two recurring themes, the eye assumes a culminating importance as the center of all the poetics of surrealist cinema.
The film lasts about 15 minutes and is a waking nightmare, the story, which is not narratively clear, is about two lovers, a man and a woman, trying to unite, but incredible events, people, and objects continually divide them. It seems the story happens and does not happen as if it is repeatedly occurring without time or space.
Image: the dreamlike high.
It begins with the slit of the eye with a razor blade by Bunuel himself, the greatest surrealist gesture, his slit represents the penetration beyond all the frontiers of the Soul, another dreamlike and strange image is the hand trapped in the door filled with ants, a succession of terrible images like the androgynous figure, the entire core of the work remains this violent desire by the two lovers to touch each other and conclude.
In my opinion, a masterpiece, remade today, even with a different script and set design, wouldn't have much point, they were the first to do it, this is the original.
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Other reviews
By O__O
"A real shocking sequence that gave rise to gore in cinema, which will not always take deep and reflective roots like that of this film."
"A continuous succession of macabre and distressing images, imbued with necrophiliac poetry, without an apparent reason: it feels like witnessing a neurotic extrasensory dreamlike experience."
By Talkin' Meat
The razor slicing the pupil evokes a total vision of unheard-of things, balancing brutal pain with cathartic symbolism.
The tango frames the woman’s attempted escape and the man’s continual approaches, as if the rape were moving to the rhythm of dance.
