Surrealism in American Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Surrealism in American Film - Essay Example The essay "Surrealism in American Film" discusses the American film and surrealism. Three American films are good examples of surrealism in the American Cinema. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) by Michel Gondry, Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch, and Spellbound (1945) by Alfred Hitchcock all draw upon the cultural movement of Surrealism in order to create their works. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) was written by Charlie Kaufman, well known for his surrealist concepts. David Lynch, who wrote and directed Blue Velvet (1986), is also a well known surrealist who has dealt at length with the theme of the illusory nature of reality. Alfred Hitchcock, whose talents for creating suspenseful films that leave the audience in wonder and shock, has long been an influence to contemporary film directors and writers for the modern interpretations of Surrealism in film. His film Spellbound (1945) is a primary example of this influence. Surrealism is a style of art that was developed to create an expressive expansion of the dreams of artists so that the internal could be expressed rather than the external repeated. For Salvador Dali, the work of the Surrealist is â€Å"based on phantasms and representations brought about by the materializations of unconscious acts†. The style utilizes what is real but puts it into an unreal framework. A good example of this type of recreation is in Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone, 1936, where a lobster has been substituted for the receiver of the telephone.