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Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)

July 7, 2016 By Surrealism.tv Leave a Comment

Once upon a time in 1947 a quintet of uber-famous artists got together to make a film. The result was “Dreams That Money Can Buy,” the trippy tale of a telepathic man named Joe who examines strangers’ minds for a small fee.

Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Hans Richter all took part in creating this mind-altering project. Thankfully, the hour-long film is available on YouTube, where you can watch the protagonist pick apart the unconsciousness of bankers and businessmen, set to the visuals of some very famous artistes.

What do you think? Could today’s filmmakers learn a thing or two from the Surrealists?

HuffPo

 

Watch Dreams That Money Can Buy, a Surrealist Film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter

“Everybody dreams. Everybody travels, sometimes into countries where strange beauty, wisdom, adventure, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dreamlike themselves, open 1947’s Dreams That Money Can Buy. “This is a story of dreams mixed with reality,” the narrator intones. He can say that again. Directed by Hans Richter, painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, “film-experimenter,” and energetic member of the Dada movement, the picture takes a storyline that seems mundanely realistic — impecunious poet finds apartment, then must figure out how to pay the rent — and bends it into all manner of surreal shapes. And I do, literally, mean surreal, since several of the scenes come from the minds of noted avant-garde and surrealist artists, including, besides Richter himself, painter and photographer Man Ray, conceptualist Marcel Duchamp, sculptor Alexander Calder, and painter-sculptor-filmmaker Fernand Léger.

Joe, the film’s protagonist, finds he has a sort of superpower: by looking into the eyes of another, he can see the contents of their mind. He promptly sets up a sort of consultation business where he examines the unconscious thoughts of a client: say, an unambitious banker whose wife lives “like a double-entry column: no virtues, no vices.” He then uses the abstract materials of their thoughts to come up with a self-contained, somewhat less abstract dream for them to dream: in the banker’s case, a dream called “Desire,“ which takes the form of a short film by Dadaist painter-sculptor-graphic artist-poet Max Ernst. For Joe’s other, differently neurotic customers, Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder, and Léger come up with suitable formally and aesthetically distinct dreams. While all these artists imbue Dreams That Money Can Buy with their own inimitable sensibilities (or nonsense abilities, as the case may be), I feel as though certain modern filmmakers would have the time of their lives remaking it. Michel Gondry comes to mind.

openculture.com

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Filed Under: Surrealism

Teddy Has An Operation (2013)

July 6, 2016 By Surrealism.tv Leave a Comment

Teddy Has An Operation: Best. Thing. Ever.

Teddy loved a bad boy. What did the bad boy do, Teddy? Oh Teddy, the bad boy broke Teddy’s heart’s heart.

In “Teddy Has An Operation,” a bizarre new dark-humored video by Ze Frank, a stuffed Teddy bear gets a medical procedure to remove some bad butt-filled bon-bons, his gangrene kidney crayons and other nasty things found in his meat-filled innards.

Laughingsquid.com

 

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Filed Under: Humor

Tale of Tales (2015)

July 5, 2016 By Surrealism.tv Leave a Comment

From the bitter quest of the Queen of Longtrellis, to two mysterious sisters who provoke the passion of a king, to the King of Highhills obsessed with a giant Flea, these tales are inspired by the fairytales by Giambattista Basile.

– IMDB

The film serves as Garrone’s English-language debut and will interweave three separate story strands bookended by brief bits in which Italians Alba Rohrwacher and Massimo Ceccherini will play a street circus family. In one tale Salma Hayek will play a jealous queen who forfeits her husband’s life. In another, Vincent Cassel plays a king whose passion is stoked by two mysterious sisters.

– Written by moha alomari

Filed Under: Fantasy, Horror Tagged With: Body Horror, Dark, Horror, Surrealist

The Forbidden Room (2015)

July 3, 2016 By Surrealism.tv Leave a Comment

Introduction to the Forbidden Room

A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon, and a battalion of child
soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas
on life and love.

Surrealism.tv on the Forbidden Room:

The surrealistic film “The Forbidden Room” is a non-linear surrealistic film that explores memory and submarines, bathing tutorials and lobotomies. Maddin’s “Narcoticized Fever Dream” (James Adams) uses the grammar of silent film, loose association and other surrealistic techniques all in “glorious technicolor” and will leave some viewers confused.

If you want a simple, single, easy-to-understand narrative this film is definitely not it. The film does not have a logical narrative that lends itself to understanding, rather, Maddin’s masterpiece layers multiple abstract plot lines that nest within each other like Freud + Baudrillard on drugs.

Maddin’s film is in dialogue with conceptual video art, while some critics complained that two hours was too long, the eye-candy visuals kept me entertained. I searched for an easy answer– or takeaway at the end: “What the F— was that about?!” and was glad that I didn’t get it.

The Forbidden Room may frustrate viewers looking for a linear experience, but those seeking a challenge — or already familiar with director Guy Maddin’s work — will be rewarded.

– Rotten Tomatoes

Guy Maddin delivers another of his wild and whimsical fantasies, tinged with camp and couched in the film grammar of silent cinema.

– J. R. Jones

Synopsis
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is Guy Maddin’s ultimate epic phantasmagoria. Honoring classic
cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a
prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a
desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within. Suddenly, impossibly, a lost woodsman
wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of
cave dwellers. From here, Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson take us high into the air,
around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and
murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas. Playing like some glorious meeting between
Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is
Maddin’s grand ode to lost cinema. Created with the help of master poet John Ashbery, the
film features Roy Dupius, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Mathieu Amalric, , Charlotte Rampling,
Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Jacques Nolot, Adèle Haenel, Amira Casar, Elina
Löwensohn and Udo Kier (and more!) as a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers, all joined in
the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.

Director’s Statement

We just have too much narrative in our heads, so much we feel our brains are going to explode.
With this film, we set out to create a controlled setting, an elaborate narrative network of
subterranean locks, sluice gates, chambers, trap pipes, storm sewers and spelunking
caves where all the past, present and future films in our large heads might safely blow! Where
no one will be hurt by the spectacular Two-Strip Technicolor havoc we’ll wreak on the screen,
knowing the whole thing will drain away by credit roll. Stay safe and enjoy!”
– Guy Maddin

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Filed Under: Psychedelic

The Holy Mountain (1973)

July 1, 2016 By Surrealism.tv Leave a Comment

Nothing can prepare you for The Holy Mountain. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealist masterpiece draws its symbolism and hallucinatory imagery from The Great Beyond.

 

iTunes | Amazon Video | VUDU

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The Holy Mountain (1973)

Few filmmakers have been as committed as Alejandro Jodorowsky in supplying grotesque, surreal, symbolic, and hallucinatory images. But even his most famous work, the 1970 acid Western El Topo, has nothing on The Holy Mountain, which invests meaning in sequences that might otherwise be mere fodder for midnight trippers. Granted, the trippers will be more than satisfied: After introducing a thief (Horacio Salinas) who appears like a modern-day incarnation of Christ, Jodorowsky uses the next few minutes to show him nearly crucified by naked boys with green-painted genitalia, getting rescued by a limbless dwarf, and chewing on a wax representation of himself before sending it to the heavens on colorful balloons. And then things get a little strange.

The story, such as it goes, introduces Salinas to an alchemist (Jodorowsky) who proves his mystical powers by turning the thief’s excrement into gold. From there, they embark on a spiritual journey, accompanied by seven figures from different planets who represent terrible aspects of life on this one, from a weapons manufacturer (religious and cultural symbols, like a menorah, are turned into guns) to a “cosmetics” person who specializes in prosthetic, age-masking faces. There’s also a giant sex machine that gets prodded into orgasm, an art museum with interactive living nude sculptures, and a general mood of amorousness to go along with the political and religious bomb-throwing. There are times when Jodorowsky’s surrealist impulse leads to weird-for-its-own-sake cult-movie fodder, but The Holy Mountain more often has a satirical bite, with a sinner’s contempt for the church and a rebel’s distrust of authority. Seen today, it functions as a wondrous time machine, transporting viewers back to a day when movies (and audiences) were up for anything.

— http://www.avclub.com/article/ithe-holy-mountaini-takes-viewers-on-the-freakiest-96098

iTunes | Amazon Video | VUDU

Filed Under: Experimental

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