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Movies & TV

Summer of surrealism

If the thought of Twilight’s Robert “one-face” Pattinson playing Salvador Dali in Little Ashes gives you hives, Cinematheque Ontario’s new series Under The Spell: Surrealism And The Cinema is a way to set things right.

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Kicking off this evening (Friday) at Jackman Hall with the requisite double-bill of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or at 7 pm, the series – running in tandem with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new Surreal Things exhibition – features a collection of essential cinematic works from movement pioneers like Cocteau, Vigo and Man Ray, as well as peripherally related Hollywood productions like She Done Him Wrong, playing tomorrow (Saturday) at 7 pm, Hitchcock’s Spellbound, screening Sunday (May 24) at 7 pm and the Marx Brothers comedy Monkey Business, playing June 2.

Among the highlights are free screenings of shorts by Jean Painlevé on June 4 and Man Ray on June 5, and Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les Vampires, which will be shown in its entirety over three nights on June 26, 27 and 29. There’s also a rare screening of Jean Vigo’s Taris, Roi De L’Eau with Jean Cocteau’s The Blood Of A Poet on May 29, the day after Un Chien Andalou re-screens with Eisenstein’s decidedly un-surrealistic Battleship Potemkin – because of their shared interest in eye violence, apparently.

Sure, you can find most of these on DVD – the Criterion Collection just issued an excellent collection of Painlevé’s shorts, called Science Is Fiction – but wouldn’t you rather experience them on the big screen, in the dark, where everything’s good and creepy? Team Edward will never know what hit them.

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