L'Âge d'Or/Un Chien Andalou15

To celebrate sixty years since Glasgow’s favourite painting – Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’ – was first displayed in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, we’re screening two surrealist classics.

Dali and then-fledgling director Luis Buñuel collaborated in 1929 to create avant-garde classic Un Chien Andalou: essentially a barrage of striking and absurd images designed to shock and provoke. A woman’s eyeball being slashed open with a razor; ants swarming around the hole in a man’s palm; a dead donkey sprawled across a piano – once seen, these images are seared on the brain.

Nonsensical, erotic, scandalous, revolutionary: the surrealist agitators’ follow-up feature L’Âge d’Or is not for those of a nervous disposition. After premiering in Paris in November 1930, the film sparked a riot and was banned by the police. Eighty-odd years on, this provocative tale of two lovers and their thwarted attempts to consummate their passion has lost none of its power to upset the Establishment. Setting his sights on the Church, the State, and the family, Buñuel crafted a visual poem/clammy nightmare of deranged imagery. An exhilarating masterpiece that argues the case for giving our unconscious, irrational desires free reign.