RetroClips

A 16-minute collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, built from dream logic rather than plot -- ants crawling from a hand, a severed hand in the street, a man dragging two grand pianos loaded with dead donkeys. None of it outlasted the opening image: a straight razor drawn across an open eye, cut together with a cloud slicing the moon so the audience's mind does the cutting for it. (The eye belonged to a calf, not the actress -- a substitution convincing enough that it's still routinely mistaken for real.) It became the founding text of surrealist cinema and one of the most analyzed sixteen minutes in film history.