In conjunction with ‘Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams’, the Gallery’s Australian Cinémathèque presents a major survey of the surrealist sensibility in cinema. The Savage Eye: Surrealism and Cinema considers films made under the rubric of the movement alongside popular cinema highlighting the enduring fascination with surrealist tendencies, narratives and tropes. The program also charts how developments in filmmaking have been used to represent the interior world of dreams and the subconscious via cinematic manipulation and montage.
The Savage Eye charts Dada and Surrealism’s interest in, engagement with, and response to cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, and features works by artists, filmmakers and writers connected with surrealist and dada groups — and those working on the margins — such as Luis Buñuel, René Clair, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Dulac, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Jacques Prévert, Man Ray, Hans Richter and others.
The Savage Eye includes a focus on the late films of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, undoubtedly the most well-known filmmaker to emerge out of Surrealism, and who continued to underline the surrealist provenance of his films throughout his longstanding career into the 1970s.
