The untamed eye and the dark side of surrealism: Hitchcock, Lynch and Cronenberg

Abstract

A sliced eyeball, scorpions fighting to the death, ants crawling from a hole in a hand, delirious lovers – these images, designed to delight and shock, capture the essence of the Parisian Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The continuing influence of early or classic Surrealist filmmaking on popular, commercial filmmakers of the latter part of the twentieth century is evidenced by a different but equally disturbing set of Surrealist signature images: a severed ear lying on a country lane, a woman falling twice to her death from a bell tower, an exploding head and a man disappearing intothe parted lips of a television screen. There is no doubt that early Surrealists were in love with..