Segundo de Chomón's 1908 Short Lets a Fountain Produce an Enormous Head and Armed Guards
Segundo de Chomón's 1908 short The Frog is built around a fountain that keeps producing strange objects. A man's enormous gray head appears; a carousel of women arrives with armed guards, and horses and guards keep cycling through. JSTOR Daily describes Chomón as making bizarre trick films that experimented with color and temporality, and says he influenced the surrealist work of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—making him, in many ways, the father of Spanish cinema.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The line to Buñuel and Dalí is the real payoff: it makes Chomón's bizarre trick films look like an early draft of surrealist logic.
Influence is not paternity. The Méliès comparison points to a trick-film lineage; calling Chomón the father of Spanish cinema is a much bigger claim than that.