It's easy to scoff when artists pick up movie cameras - after all, we've endured the endless, empty-headed meanderings of Andy Warhol's film output and - more recently - had to stomach the film and video scrawlings of just about every Turner Prize nominee of the past decade. Then there's all that experimental stuff from the politicised 60s and 70s - you know: two-and-a-half hours of a camera gradually zooming in on a photo of Trotsky to demonstrate the materiality of the film medium and how it relates to the workers' ongoing struggle against capitalism.
Thank God then, for Surrealism, and the two small films that painter Salvador Dali and poet and wannabe filmmaker Luis Bunuel created together during 1929 and 1930, that brief period when the dream-world of the silent era gave way to the humdrum literal-mindedness of the talkies.
Un Chien Andalou is a 17-minute exercise in narrative illogic which goes straight for Freud's sex-and-death drives. The film contains no dogs, Andalusian or otherwise, but resonates with the most famously bizarre sequences in cinema history: a cloud glides across the moon as a woman's eye is sliced with a razor; ants crawl from a hole in the palm of a hand (right); two pianos festooned with decomposing donkeys are dragged across a room. With its psychoanalytic subtexts and images of sexual frustration and death, this could have been another deadly earnest example of what can go wrong when art meets film; but, luckily for us, Bunuel and Dali relished both the slapstick antics of silent comedy and the inherently dreamlike qualities of the new medium. Un Chien Andalou was as much an attack on the aesthetics of the po-faced avant-garde as on the morals of the straitlaced bourgeoisie, a gleefully anarchic attempt to have fun by upsetting everyone.
Unexpectedly, the chattering classes of Paris actually liked the film, and it ran for eight months. Despite the two Surrealists' annoyance at such acceptance, it at least cleared the way for a sequel, and 1930 saw their second, and final, collaboration: L'Age d'Or.
If their earlier film proved that avant-garde dislocations and juxtapositions worked best when tethered to something that at least looked like a conventional film story, then their follow-up took this idea to its logical conclusion. The result was, at least in appearance, a straightforward love story in which a couple try desperately to consummate their passion only to suffer one agonising frustration after another as the forces of religion, family and state try and stop them from getting, quite literally, down and dirty. It's all shockingly hilarious - a small child is blasted with a shotgun, a blind man attacked in the street, a giraffe is thrown from a window, and a dog sent flying through the air by a well-aimed kick from our sexually frustrated hero.
Bunuel's obsessions, rather than Dali's, take centre-stage this time around. The two fell out during filming, never to work together again, but L'Age d'Or is a lasting testament to a brief, shared moment of glorious imaginative freedom.
Out now, £29.99
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