Vidiots invites you back for more archival celluloid weirdness with a one-of-a-kind night of eye-popping, mind-bending, surreal, and hallucinatory 16mm short films culled from the incredible archives of Smokehouse Films.  From the 1920s through the 1970s, these are some of the most visually arresting films ever made including Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s seminal masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, as well as works by Hans Richter, Jan Svankmajer, Jan Lenica, Ladisla Starevich, Man Ray, and more! Trust us, your eyeballs will never be the same!

Featuring:

Un Chien Andalou (“The Andalusian Dog”, B+W, 1928)

Made in France by the brilliant Spanish director Luis Buñuel and the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. Un Chien Andalou is one of the best-known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920s. It uses dream logic that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes that attempt to shock the viewer’s inner psyche. Its opening scene is one of the most famous in cinema history.

Le Retour a la Raison (B+W, 1923)

A lush and hypnotic experimental film in which white specks and shapes gyrate over a black background, a light-striped torso, and a spinning egg crate – It consists of animated textures, rayographs and the torso of Kiki of Montparnasse. One of the first Dadaist films and the first film made by Man Ray when he relocated to Paris.

About John Cannizzaro and Smokehouse Films

John Cannizzaro is a filmmaker whose works rotate between stop-motion animation and experimental films – often with an ethnographic element to them. As an archivist, his large collection of 16mm film prints center mainly around those very topics; ethnography, experimental works and stop motion animation.