Avant-Garde Cinema
Buñuel and Dalí brought each other's dreams to the table: a cloud slicing across the moon like a razor, and ants swarming on a hand. With one rule only — nothing that could be explained by reason — they wrote the script in a few days and shot it with money from Buñuel's mother. That became Un Chien Andalou (1929). In the opening scene, an eye is sliced open; Buñuel himself said in later years that they had used a calf's eye. Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Cocteau all attended the Paris premiere. Breton's whole group was there too, and that night led the two of them into the Surrealist movement.
One person went in the opposite direction entirely. Dziga Vertov rejected both story and actors. The camera, he argued, is a mechanical eye more precise than the human one, and stringing together the fragments of reality it catches could reach a truth invisible to the naked eye — an idea he called Kino-Eye. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is made entirely of footage from a single day in a city. In 2014, the British magazine Sight & Sound polled critics and filmmakers worldwide for the greatest documentary ever made, and this film came in first. From the same band, in the same year, one person went toward dreams and another went toward reality. And the "stream of record" running along the map's left edge later picks up his way of thinking again.