18. THE EYES HAVE IT: Elect to watch one with an eye specific scene. See what I did there?

Luis Buñuel pretty much invented cinematic surrealism. He said that when he filmed, he knew “exactly how each scene will be shot and what the final montage will be.” From this film to The Exterminating Angel, Belle de jour and Tristana and so many more, his influence as a filmmaker is incalculable.

Just as dominant is his co-writer, Salvador Dali, whose is synonymous with surrealism. In fact, when he needed a dream sequence for Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock allowed Dali to direct it. Of course, it was cut, but that’s how well-regarded he was.

Words like dream logic weren’t used yet but this is it. It begins with a woman having her eyeball sliced open, then the screen says, “Eight years later,” just in time for a boy in a nun’s habit to crash outside her home, lose his hand and appear in her the eyeless woman’s apartment as ants walk out of a hole in his hand.

That same man watches with pleasure as a woman takes that hand before being hit by a car before trying to assault the woman, then dragging around two grand pianos, several dead donkeys and the Ten Commandments.

Time keeps changing, whether it’s around three in the morning or sixteen years ago or in spring. This is all a dream of its creators, starting with Buñuel telling Dali that he had a vision of a cloud going across the moon, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye.” Dali said, “There’s the film, let’s go and make it.”

There was one rule: Do not dwell on what required purely rational, psychological or cultural explanations. Open the way to the irrational. It was accepted only that which struck us, regardless of the meaning. Buñuel also said, “Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis.”

When this debuted at the Studio des Ursulines,  Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Georges Auric and André Breton’s Surrealist group were in the audience watching. Buñuel had rocks in his pockets in case there was a riot. He had wanted to insult the intellectuals with this, saying, “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?”

There’s an urban legend that two women miscarried while watching this. Maybe it was the eyeball — a calf’s eye — or maybe Buñuel and Dali also invented being William Castle.

You can watch this on YouTube.