What counts as a surrealist movie?

When I hear that term I can imagine obvious movies such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Mullholland Drive as obvious ones, but what about movies like La Dolce Vita, or Eyes Wide Shut?

Do those count as surrealist movies, or does the surrealism have to be more obvious?

BRAZIL
videodrome
These two are big examples of surrealist movies

Most of Bunuel's stuff really.

Oh okay. Does La Dolce Vita count as surreal?

As far as Bunuel goes, the only other movie of his I saw was Belle De Jour, but that's not surreal at all, is it?

Surreal good question.


(oh c'mon, someone had to say it)

Belle de jour is a perfect example of surrealism

But what is is about Belle De Jour that is surreal? I bought it as a story that could happen in the real world. What part was surreal therefore?

Some people say the exact same thing about ‘Mulholland Drive’. It’s relative, I guess. ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Inland Empire’ can both be seen as linear/chronological, and I remember reading that’s what Lynch himself has said about ‘Inland Empire’. Even some critics argue IE a straightforward realist story. I guess that implies Laura Dern’s character goes from being an Eastern European prostitute to a film star. I think ‘surreal’ doesn’t necessarily need to imply something couldn’t happen in the real world, it could also be about the angle, the colours, the filmmaker’s ‘vision’ etc.

IMO there are surreal elements in Welles' The Trial (1962) based on the Kafka novel.

There are purely surreal segments in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), designed by Salvador Dali. But of course they were dream sequences.

I think many Coen brothers films have a slight tinge of surrealism to them.

These films are set in a universe where tone is often gritty and realistic and yet every other character/scenario is a caricature or farce.

Well I thought that surreal meant that it took place in a different type of reality, that couldn't realistically happen in our world. Oldboy and Coriolanus (2011 adaptation), are surreal I thought for sure.

As is the case with nearly all these questions, there is not objective answer. There is no official register of what qualifies as surreal, funny, interesting, or anything else. There are just people's opinions, really. If you're just asking people for their opinions, fair enough, but the phrasing often implies that you think of this as an official designation or something.

You're not going to be able to find hard rules for any of this stuff. If you ask the question and expect definitive rules, you're going to come back at every helpful person with edge cases or exceptions that drive them nuts, because they understand they're giving you general principles and not hard rules. Which is all that can be given in response to something like this.

That said: I'm not sure Oldboy would qualify for me (or most people), because I don't think being unrealistic for our world is enough to qualify as surreal (even if that would seem to satisfy a dictionary definition). Superhero films are similarly implausible but nobody would call them surreal, because they establish rules and are effectively inserting unrealistic events into an otherwise predictable and realistic world. Surreality usually means question even the internal sense of logic.

Oh okay, but what counts as questioning the eternal sense of logic then since I found myself questioning that on Oldboy and Corolianus?

Mostly this, from the previous post:

...they establish rules and are effectively inserting unrealistic events into an otherwise predictable and realistic world...

Iron Man posits a world where a certain kind of technology is viable, but once that's established people react in reasonable ways to it. It's our world with a few facts different. Compare ttohat something like Mulholland Dr. where you never really know what the rules are or what is or isn't "realistic" even in the world of the film.

Oh okay. But it was pointed out before that Belle De Jour counts as surreal, but I felt that everything that happened in that movie could realistically happen. Unless I missed something?

She s dreaming all along...

Right. The way that Oldboy is shot makes it feel a bit surreal, yet nothing that goes on in the film is explicitly surreal.

Weird =/= surreal

But I thought only some of her sex fantasies were in her own head. Wasn't most of the story real?

Well in Oldboy, I just found it far fetched how a business can run of people being kidnapped and stored in rooms in a building in a downtown city for years or decades and no one notices. They also talk about their kidnapping business over the phone, not knowing it could be undercover police on the other end of the phone line for all they know.

Also they actually have take out food delivered right inside the building where all the kidnap victims are being held. Kidnapping 101 says you do not have take out food delivered right to the building where the kidnap victims are being held, and especially do not let the delivery person come inside. They take no precautions and somehow are never caught. Isn't that surreal when criminals are not caught even though they don't take hardly any precautions?

The villains plan also seems very surreal in that it's very complicated where if one thing goes wrong, the plan could derail, yet absolutely everything goes right. It was so perfect, it was surreal, wasn't it?

Right, but notice what Achoo said: he said "weird" and "surreal" and you said "far fetched." That phrase is not a synonym with "surreal." It means something else. "This revenge business does not have a viable business model" is correct, and it is far fetched...but it's not "surreal."

Oh okay, I thought it was so far fetched it was surreal, but I guess one cannot build into the other?