Physical comedy, like overt displays of sexuality, was considered by the Surrealists to be a way of “obtaining the marvelous.” The Marx Brothers therefore became instant subjects of fetish for both Salvador Dalí and Antonin Artaud, who reportedly modeled his famous “Theatre of Cruelty” on the Marx’s raw physicality, noting “their intensity of vibration . . . the kind of powerful anxiety which their total effect ultimately projects into the mind.” Monkey Business stars all four Marx Brothers – Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo – as stowaways on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner headed to America. A phenomenal success when it was first released, the film is widely considered, along with Duck Soup and Horse Feathers, one of their greatest. The Maurice Chevalier impersonation scene alone makes the film worth seeing again and again. Minor edits to some of the sexual innuendos were made by the censorship board, allowing the film to be released in the US, though it was banned in certain countries for fear of causing riots, validating the Surrealists’ claim.

René Clair’s Entr’acte is the Dada film par excellence and begins with Francis Picabia and Eric Satie pointing then firing a canon directly at the audience. This in-your-face assault was no doubt an inspiration for the early works of Surrealist cinema. Entr’acte’s frenetic, giddy and anarchic energy, however, was resolutely Dada and its playful images and sudden transitions were less concerned with the unconscious as they were with the disruption of social order. The humorous chase scene resulting from a funeral procession is filled with visual gags and gender-bending quirks that prefigure their Surrealist kin.