When French writer and poet Andre Breton published the First Manifesto of Surrealism in October 1924, he sparked a movement that remains alive a century later. Most recently, this became evident from the successful sale at auction of Empire of Light, a surrealist artwork by Belgian artist René Magritte, which went for a record US$121 million. In doing so, it joins the exclusive $100 million club previously reserved for the likes of Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.

While we’re aware of the strong impact that surrealism had on the visual arts, its influence on cinema hasn’t received as much attention. Yet, this is a genre of films that stands apart. An early examination of the relationship between surrealism and cinema is carried out in a paper published in the journal Criticism in 1962 by French language and art scholar J. H. Matthews, who would later publish multiple books around the same subject.

Matthews begins by quoting critic Marc Soriano, who noted that “the words ‘cinema’ and ‘surrealism’ are contradictory” in an essay in a 1946 issue of the Swiss magazine Formes et Couleurs. Determined to prove otherwise, however, Matthews highlights Breton’s claim that surrealists have always felt attracted to cinema, owing to its “pouvoir de dépaysement—its capacity to take man out of himself…”

Films, according to Matthews, are particularly suited to the surrealist genre because of their inherent similarity to dreams, where the viewer is involved yet removed from reality.

“Here is the essence of the surrealist’s interest in the cinema,” he writes,

an inevitable consequence of his desire to transcend everyday reality and his willingness to avail himself of any means which seem to offer the opportunity to do so. We readily appreciate the hypnotic attraction of the lighted screen, viewed from a darkened auditorium.

Matthews shares the example of the 1928 French film La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), which he argues is an exponent of “psychological” cinema, “which relates the development of a story, dramatic or otherwise.” The film’s lack of sequence or narrative and reliance on pure visual effects leads to a sense of detachment or dépaysement as outlined by Breton.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is another prime example of surrealist cinema owing to its “mood of rejection and iconoclasm,” directed as it was, in Buñuel’s words, “to the artistic sensibility and to the reason of the spectators.” Hence, it attracted and reviled its viewers in equal measure as a “deliberately anti-plastic, anti-artistic” work.

Based on this assessment, Matthews asserts that the medium of cinema became the “means for the total liberation of the mind and of all which resembles it.” However, he adds, with the passage of time, the form in which surrealist cinema was presented changed, largely due to a lack of funding for the experimental nature of the films.

“We find this, obviously, in the attention they [members of the surrealist group] have paid films like King Kong,” he writes, “in which Jean Levy, in Minotaure [magazine], discerned distinctly surrealist overtones, and Shanghai Gesture, which so caught their imagination that they made it the subject of one of their ‘inquiries.’”

In 1972, Spanish literary scholar Paul Ilie reviewed Matthews’s 1971 book Surrealism and Film, dismissing it as more a presentation of “Francophone surrealist criticism of films in any language, some of which are surrealist and others are not,” rather than a “study of surrealism and film.” Ilie argues that Matthews used a faulty methodology, which merely skimmed the documentation from the 1920s and ’30s, leaving major themes and techniques unclear. He further accuses the study of lacking “a critical vocabulary” and failing to “organize its major subject categories.” Matthews, Ilie claims, “is graced with the faith of French scholarly believers. This orthodox sect follows the doctrine that there is only one true surrealism, and Breton is its prophet.”

In 2006, in a paper published in the Yale French Studies Journal, Raphaëlle Moine and Pierre Taminiaux resurface the question about the boundaries and characteristics of surrealist cinema. They argue that

surrealism is not about a genre, but about an aesthetic movement, based on founding and program-like texts (the Manifestos). It is also about revolutionary and subversive ideas involving artistic creation as a way of life, and one’s relationship with the world, with oneself, with others, and ultimately with society.

Ultimately, they appear to align more closely with Matthews than Ilie, asserting that the genre includes both exclusively surrealist films such as La Coquille et le Clergyman, Un Chien Andalou , and L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age), as well as a “variety of films directly or indirectly influenced by surrealism, or read and interpreted as such, sometimes without any established affiliation…” For them, “surrealist film” becoming a “category of interpretation.” In this context, the concept of the “surrealist film” becomes a “generic operator in the field of French criticism.”

This perhaps plays to Matthews’s 1962 conclusion: almost forty years after Breton’s first attempt to define the genre, members of the surrealist movement remained active, using any means to pursue their ends.

“Surrealism would long ago have lost its vitality, as its critics claimed it would,” he writes,

if it had not persistently looked to the future rather than to the past. In the circumstances, therefore, it does not seem idle speculation to ask if surrealism’s most impressive and stimulating contribution to the medium of the cinema may not still be to come.

For Matthews, surrealist cinema—forward-looking, innovative, dependent on the future itself for inspiration—still had its best days before it.

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