Surrealism in cinema and the movies of Man Ray

Stemming from the cultural and mental depression following World War I, dadaism and the following surrealism movements were results of modernity and modernist art movements. With the invention of the motion picture or cinema in 1896, various surrealist artists expressed themselves through the early stages of cinema. The fact that surrealism is the first modernist art movement to express itself through cinema underlines the importance of this movement in the history of film. The dadaist American photographer Man Ray travelled to the home of surrealism, Paris, and through the four films that he made in Paris, expressed his surrealist understanding through a dadaist spirit. This study aims to analyze the films of during the peak of the surrealist movement, through the characteristics of surrealist cinema.