What are your top favorite surrealist movies?

[verso]

One of my favorites is "Being John Malkovich", but I'd love to get to know more.

I've heard David Lynch has a ton of surrealist stuff, right? I've only watched Blue Velvet (really liked) and heard a lot of his songs, which funnily was what I first got to know him for 

As I imagine a lot of people might mention his movies, it'd be cool to get to know more directors that do surrealist themes as well lol.

[anyabooger]

you might find that my answers are pretty generic haha -- Perfect Blue (1997) and I Saw The TV Glow (2024).
I do wanna recommend something more niche, but this one is a video intended for viewing in a contemporary art context rather than a cinematic film: Ordinal SW/NE (2017) directed by Rini Yun Matea Keagy for Miljohn Ruperto. I was able to watch it here, although I did have to make an account to access it. It's free and I haven't gotten any newsletter emails from them so I think it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. runtime is about 40 minutes 

[fairyrune]

i'm seconding "i saw the tv glow". i watched it once. i don't think i can stomach watching it again, and that's a compliment; it's a horror movie and it succeeded in horrifying me. but it was also something of a wake up call. i'm doing my best to live my life to the fullest now.

i think this fits the category... one of my favourite pieces of art ever is "angel's egg". it's a collaboration between yoshitaka amano, best known for his work on the final fantasy series, and mamoru oshii, director of 1995's "ghost in the shell". if i had to describe it, it feels like a dream, and i really don't say that lightly. little of it makes sense. there's almost no dialogue. there's not even really a plot. it's almost ambivalent to the idea of an observer, i suppose. but it's beautiful, and i find it interesting to consider the meaning even if there isn't really supposed to be any.

[MrsMoe]

Oh god, surrealism is a major interest for me, especially surrealist film. I have a TON of recs for all kinds of weird movies, but I guess I'll have to narrow it down to some favs that no one's mentioned yet.

- Pink Floyd's The Wall (fav movie ever)
- Mulholland Drive
- Synechdoche, New York
- Eraserhead
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Everything Everywhere All at Once
- Beau is Afraid
- The Hourglass Sanitorium
- The Holy Mountain
- Santa Sangre
- Enter the Void

Pretty much every movie mentioned in this thread so far are some of my favorite movies of all time, ESPECIALLY Perfect Blue and Being John Malkovich. I think I could make a list rec that could go on for miles if I wanted to.

[tenkai_no_perusona]

I had some trouble narrowing my favorites down (many of my favorite movies are indirectly or directly surrealist), but here it goes. Some are short movies, these are marked with italics. Some are more conventional, some are more formalist (as in, narrative takes the backseat). Some can be disturbing, violent, triggering and/or explicit - these are marked with underline. A few shorts can be hard to buy/find, contact me if you need any help.

• Umi no uta by Keita Kurosaka (1988): This one is hard to describe. It is "animation", but very unconventional. It feels like the movie equivalent of a Roscharch test composed by abandoned boats, alleys, and fishes. A lot of fishes.
• Shizuka na ichinichi by Takashi Ito (1999): in the words of the director himself - "A Silent Day depicts a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death. This piece reflects my own unstable spiritual state at the time. Three years have passed and, as I looked at this work calmly, I came up with an idea: what if I were to make a story of a girl who is trying to make a film called `A silent day’?"
• Kataashi no kamisama by Jun Kurosawa (1994): A woman bound by 16mm film, an angel roaming the road. Closest thing to harsh noise transformed into film.
• At Land by Maya Deren (1944): extremely oneiric and beautiful. Describing it would be spoiling it too much.
• Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space by t.o.L (2002): if Samrio's mascots were part of a punk zine. This one is endearing and very weird.
• Spalovač mrtvol by Juraj Herz (1969): a surrealist dark comedy, though "comedy" here veers more towards ridiculousness, patheticity and actual horror. A cremator in Prague during the time between the first and the second world wars is obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism and the very act of cremation, and this leads him to something... Well, interesting. It's the most recent of my favorites, and it is shot and edited in a very peculiar way.
• The Black Tower by John Smith (1987): a man starts to notice a pitch black tower appearing anywhere he goes. Can't say more than that.
• Yumemiru yooni nemuritai by Kaizo Hayashi (1986): a love letter to old Japanese cinema, and an oneiric, fantastical detective movie.
• Tetsuo 1 and Tetsuo 2 by Shinya Tsukamoto (1989 and 1992): very important movies of the Japanese Cyberpunk movement (not to be confused with cyberpunk - Japanese Cyberpunk has themes and an aesthetic very different when compared to regular cyberpunk, even when compared with Japanese works that are cyberpunk). Both are versions of the same idea (and do not need to be watched in sequence): something weird happens to a run-of-the-mill salaryman, and something interesting happens to his body and to his life afterwards. I prefer the second film, but the first is great, and a classic. Both David Lynch and Shinya Tsukamoto influenced the Silent Hill franchise btw. I recommend watching Tetsuo 1 before or after watching Lynch's Eraserhead, they have a few similarities visually.
• Akekurete haru by Akira Hoshino (1992): an exploration of an abandoned school. Another one that is hard to describe.
• 964 Pinocchio by Shozik Fukui (1991): another Japanese cyberpunk one. A cyborg whose memories were wiped is found by a weird woman and chased by his creators. Surrealist as hell.
• Sedmikrásky by Věra Chytilová (1966): two prankster girls having a lot of destructive fun.
• Něco z alenky by Jan Svankmajer (1988): Švankmajer's very memorable and uncanny adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
• Zerkalo by Andrei Tarkovsky (1975): a dying man reminisces his whole life. It has something very nostalgic and gutwrenching about it. One of Tarkovsky's best films IMO.