Luis Buñuel, the father of the surrealist film …, has figuratively engendered two sons who continue to shock, revolt, and entertain in the same surrealist vein. Alexandro Jodorowsky … and Fernando Arrabal … on one hand have returned to the roots of this movement and on the other hand have driven Buñuel's technique, perspective, and content to the outermost limits of aesthetic tolerance.

The action of [Arrabal's] L'Arbre de Guernica—a satirical allegory set in the Spanish Civil War—alternates between Villa Ramiro, a stronghold of fascist and bourgeois ideals, and the town of Guernica, bombed by the Nazis on 26 April 1937. (p. 761)

Besides the cult of the imagination, anti-rationalistic optic, and episodic development, Arrabal's cinematic thesis is reinforced with scenes of the bizarre (snakes), strange juxtapositions (a skeleton among the bourgeois at a bullfight), dream sequences (a homosexual scene with a priest at Mass in a ludicrous helmet), and...