Un Chien Andalou (An Andalousian Dog) is a short surrealist silent film made in 1929, created by Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali.
Although I have seen this film on numerous occassions it never ceases to surprise me how much this film and its connotations interest me and how even after so many viewings I have yet to really understand any parts of the film.
One of the things about the film that probably stands out the most and perhaps would confuse the audience the most is its complete disregard for chronological order. The film itself opens with a card saying "Once upon a time" and continues to switch to various points in time, both in past and future, examples of this can be seen after the famous scene of the female characters eye being slit open by a razor when another film card appears saying "eight years later" and then others such as "around three in the morning", "sixteen years ago" and finally "in the spring." I found the dissaray of time lapses similar to that of French New Wave film "Breathless" (À bout de souffle), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, some aspects of Breathless and Un Chien Andalou seem similar to one another, like Un Chien Andalou, Breathless has no real sense of any chronological order and the film seems to skip back and forth through time and to different locations regularly although it has to be said not as dramatically nor drastically as Un Chien Andalou.
Another thing that interested me about the film was its inspiration behind its making, a good example of this is shown in the scene where the male character is staring at a hole in his hand that has a nest of ants crawling out of it, this scene is infact inspired from one of Salvador Dali's dreams he had prior to the making of the film. Another instance of this was also prior to the films creation when Bunel, upon talking to Dali in a café, told him about a dream in which he saw a cloud slicing though the moon "like a razor blade slicing through an eye." This we now know and recognise as one of the most iconic if not stomach churning scenes of Un Chien Andalou in which the female characters eye is sliced open by the male character. Behind the scenes of this film it is recognised that the eye used in this scene is actually that of a baby calf that through the use of extreme lighting was made to look like human skin. Through discussing their dreams the two became fasinated with what the human psyche could create and soon after set about creating An Andalousian Dog.
What i love most about this film is both Dali and Bunuel's complete disregard for the generic cinematic guidelines that films almost blindly follow without question, in Bunuel's writings after the making of Un Chien Andalou he made it clear that the only rule for writing the script was: "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." This in itself made me enjoy the film more as it showed that unlike most directors now and then, Dali and Bunuel almost seemed like they were making this film purely for the fun of doing so and had no real intentions of trying to make their audience understand the connotations (if any) behind the film.
Un Chien Andalou has proven far from funny however as a while after the film was brought to view of the general public both leading actors of the film committed suicide, Batcheff (the male character) overdosed on Veronal, the female character Mareuil committed self-immolation by dousing herself in gasoline and burning herself to death in a public square. This makes me wonder about the link between An Andalousian Dog and our recent lecture on Psychoanalysis and makes me question if films so drastic such as this one could manipulate the human psyche of the audience and indeed actors viewing (and starring) in the film at the time. Despite the arguably negative effects this film seems to have produced along with its years of confusion from its audience I still love the film and appreciate its approach in the film industry and I believe it will be a long time before Un Chien Andalou is forgotten.
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