Both the Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique videos seemed to have their own sense of logic in my opinion. There was no order to them and it was purposely made so that we could not apply any of our logic to it. What I mean by ‘our’ logic is the normal images and patterns were are used to. We could not understand the videos because they’re not what we are used to watching, usually videos have a beginning, middle and end or at least follow some sort of path. However in these videos everything is random and captured differently in order to completely throw us off. The whole idea of Surrealism and the other similar themes (Futurist, Creationist, and Dadaist) is to break away from the past and everything we hold value to. They each try to go back to a zero point hoping to break the normative and point us to what is true. In the Un Chien Andalou video, there was two parts that really stood out to me and reminded me of the futurist theme that we discussed in class. The first part was when the main male character was stripped of his past clothes and box that he had on him. He was forced to take it all off by his mirrored self and it was all thrown out the window even though he didn’t want to. This reminded me of the futurist idea of getting rid of the past and only looking towards the future. The second part that stood out to me was when the two main characters were happily strolling down the beach when they suddenly ran into these past items again. Here the futurist idea of getting rid of the past in order to look only towards the future is seen once again.

Similarly, the Ballet Mécanique video reminded me of the Dadaist themed video we saw in class together. Both videos were extremely random and the audio did not line up with the images at all. My favorite thing about this video was how it focused on capturing the machinery at work. It was all very zoomed in not allowing us to see what was being done but only allowing us to see the constant motion. This reminded me of what we discussed in class, the idea of factory workers losing themselves within the machines and that all sense of individuality was lost. The video captured just that and then sent out a hidden message to the viewer through the eyes that kept being portrayed. These eyes kept opening up and the only thing that came to my mind was “wake up.” It was as if the video was saying open your eyes by literally showing the action of opening one’s eyes. I would also like to point out the use of nature we see once again in both these videos. In the Ballet Mécanique video we see the swing in the middle of a forest, and in the Un Chien Andalou video we see not only the ants but the butterfly (could be a moth) in a couple of scenes. Bringing us back to previous readings that advised us to look into nature for freedom and to also go back to the beginning in order to restart again.