From left: Buñuel banned offending article l’age D’or and “Slicin’ up eyeballs” chien’s immortal split second

In the 2007 critical anthology The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film, writers Graeme Harper and Rob Stone speak of “the chance that shadows cast on a wall might trigger allusions to our primal past.” That two-tiered allusion to Plato’s cave and Proust’s madeleine cuts to the dualistic nature of the Surrealist filmmaking project. The movement’s greatest practitioners, from André Breton on down, sought to render the waking world impossibly strange, so as to better speak (or whisper) to some larger subconscious continuity of images and experiences.

Few directors dreamed on celluloid like Luis Buñuel. His seminal 1929 collaboration with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou — a.k.a. the movie that Black Francis is shouting about in “Debaser” — screens twice throughout Cinematheque Ontario’s series Under the Spell, first as a prelude to the director’s subsequent L’Âge D’Or (1930; May 22, 7pm) and then as a companion piece to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925; May 28, 7pm).

Potemkin has been rightly canonized for its contributions to modern film language — Eisenstein not only invented montage but, arguably, perfected it — and it has also been described as a potent influence on Buñuel, who was inspired by its unchecked passion and would borrow aspects of its aesthetic (and its ocular violence) for his own work. As for L’Age D’Or, its jovial inventory of depravities —literally filthy outdoor sex, lustful clerics, Christ as a guest at an orgy — remains barbed and hilarious 80 years after it broke the brains of audiences and censors alike, resulting in a five-decade ban.

It’s amazing how Buñuel’s cinema never buckles under the weight of its provocations: L’Âge D’Or feels strangely casual, even as the wry debaser behind the camera gleefully demolishes social and religious icons. By contrast, Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood of a Poet (May 29, 8:45pm) not only evinces the strain of its creation but takes this effort as its very subject. Poet-and-opium-addict-turned-filmmaker Cocteau’s images of sentient statues, lethal snowballs and collapsing factories are organized around the notion of artist-as-protagonist, with the director’s stand-in (Enrique Rivero) in thrall to his inspiration. Cocteau would mine similar psychic terrain in the later instalments of his “Orphic trilogy,” but his debut’s comparative lack of polish gives it an even greater potency: it’s like an urgent communiqué from his cortex to yours.