The interior of a trolley car. A menagerie of passengers notices a foul odour, and pinpoint the source of the stench at a cheese saleswoman. The gendarmerie removes her from the trolley and drags her to the precinct.
The story is simple: Max and a pretty young lady, whom he has never met before, arrive at the same time at a luxury hotel on the Riviera, each for a little vacation by themselves. They are placed in adjoining hotel suites. Both Max and the pretty lady place their shoes outside their hotel room doors to be cleaned by staff, and the shoes fall in love.
Boireau is sleeping in his bed, floating in the air, when a fire wakes him. So he takes his gun and shoots a fish down from the sky...
A soldier impatient for his discharge from the army after the armistice ending World War I goes absent without leave and is faced with the consequences of his actions.
One of the early animation works of Benjamin Rabier, a former designer of Epinal images who produced elegant illustrated editions of La Fontaine's fables and created the trademark image of 'La Vache qui rit'.
Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most 'dada' film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agreements.
In 1924 California’s Tribune-American newspaper ran a competition for its readers to write in with their most unusual dreams and the winning entry was made into a short film. This is Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland’s dream of losing her baby, rowing across San Francisco Bay, picking up some fish, and eventually discovering her lost child in a most unusual place and in trouble with the law.
Krazy Kat is babysitting. The obnoxious whippersnapper can not be consoled and expresses his wish for Santa Claus. Krazy Kat decides to go to the North Pole to find him.
Obsessed with a general's wife, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism.
Hans Richter, noted for his abstract shorts, has everyday objects rebelling against their daily routine.
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.
Mix of surrealist images of bubbles and smoke with some documentation of the world lived by Man Ray and Lee Miller.
A woman sundered from her sweetheart sings the title song as a duet with a personified Old Man Blues, in fog-shrouded woodland.
Bimbo finds himself surrounded by a mysterious group of robed figures who invite him to become a member of their secret organisation. When he refuses, they fling him through a nightmarish sequence of terror and torture devices. Will our hapless hero make it out alive?
In a European seaside village, a maiden takes clean sheets down from the clothesline. Carrying her basket of linens home, she stops to consult a fortune teller. The cartomancienne sees love in the cards. The young woman pauses to reflect. We then see water, swirling, and into view swims a man, as if just appearing on earth. He arrives on shore - is he just in her mind's eye, or is he real? She weaves a garland for her hair. Will they meet?
Bosko and his friends are cutting down trees in a forest. He battles a burly woodsman named Pierre who has gone off and kidnapped his beloved Honey.
A camp of Russian gypsies, dancing and playing music. After an opening dance, a quartet of beer-drinkers gargles the Volga Boatman song, then another group hauling on a rope sings it (we finally see that the other end of the rope is anchored by a very small dog). A trench-coated bomber sneaks into the palace, where we see Rice-Puddin', the mad monk, cheating at a jigsaw puzzle. He spies the activity in the gypsy camp and orders a henchman to fetch the gypsy girl. The villagers revolt as a result, sending The Mad Monk scrambling on his horse; they stuff a bomb into his pants just as he turns his horse into a helicopter, and it explodes.
Utensils and food dance, sing, and play in the kitchen, until a lump of dough turns into a monster and they all unite to stop it.