Surrealist cinema

Surrealist cinema is a modernist approach to filmmaking, theory, and criticism that first arose in Paris during the 1920s. Works in this category transfer the techniques of the art world's surrealism movement to film; shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery is combined with dreamlike Freudian symbolism to challenge the traditional view that the function of art is to represent reality. It is related to Dadaism and is similarly characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and frequent use of shocking imagery. Philippe Soupault and André Breton's book Les Champs magnétiques (1920) is often regarded as the first Surrealist work of fiction, but Surrealism is not considered to have been truly born until the publication of Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924), in which he wrote that Surrealism is "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought [...] dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern".