Man Ray releases L’Étoile de mer (scenario by Robert Desnos), using optical distortions and dreamlike montage that became a key precursor and touchstone for Surrealist screen aesthetics.
Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (from Antonin Artaud’s scenario) premieres in Paris, an early landmark of film surrealism centered on erotic hallucination and symbolic imagery.
Man Ray completes Les Mystères du château du Dé, commissioned by Vicomte de Noailles and shot at the Villa Noailles—an extended Surrealist “cine-poem” blending travel, chance, and visual experiment.
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou is first screened at Paris’s Studio des Ursulines, quickly becoming a defining Surrealist film through its dream logic, shock cuts, and anti-narrative structure.
Jean Cocteau completes Le sang d’un poète, launching his Orphic Trilogy with an avant-garde, dream-inflected meditation on artistic creation and transformation (financed by Charles de Noailles).
Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or premieres in Paris at Studio 28, extending Surrealism into feature-length form with a sustained attack on bourgeois and religious conventions.
A Paris screening triggers attacks by right-wing demonstrators; the incident becomes one of Surrealist cinema’s most famous public controversies and helps cement the film’s notoriety.
Paris Prefect of Police Jean Chiappe arranges a ban on further public exhibition of L’Âge d’Or after the film is re-reviewed, underscoring the period’s political and moral pressures on avant-garde cinema.
Jean Vigo releases Zéro de conduite, a rebellious, formally inventive portrait of schoolboy revolt whose poetic disruptions and slow-motion set pieces intersect with Surrealist and avant-garde film vocabularies.
Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante appears in 1934, blending poetic realism with strikingly oneiric passages that influenced later European art cinema and remain closely associated with Surrealist-inflected film modernism.
Joseph Cornell re-edits East of Borneo (1931) into Rose Hobart, an influential American Surrealist found-footage film that reframes narrative cinema through obsessive repetition and dreamlike recomposition.
Rose Hobart is first screened in 1936 at Julien Levy’s New York gallery; accounts note Salvador Dalí’s angry reaction during the projection, highlighting tensions around authorship and Surrealist film ideas.
Surrealist Cinema and Film Projects (1928–1940)
