A barrage of striking and irrational images, designed to provoke, are presented in a disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing, evoking a dream logic as its narrative flow.

Though conceived by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in 1929, this landmark Surrealist short has lost none of its power to shock and mesmerize. A collection of intentionally opaque symbols, “meaning” is besides the point: these images cut right to the psychological core and affirm cinema’s power.