Un Chien Andalou

It begins with a man cutting a woman's eye open with a razor blade, and ends with the same woman and another man dead buried half way in the sand. In between there are severed hands on the street being poked at with a stick, two priests being dragged across the floor tied to two pianos with dead donkeys on them, and a hand with a hole in it which contains ants.

These are some of the more famous images in "Un Chien Andalou", which is arguably the most famous short film ever made, also the most famous surrealist film ever made.

The film was made in 1929 in Paris, it was directed by Luis Bunuel, one of the great masters of cinema. He collaborated on the film with his friend at the time Salvador Dali, the famous painter who is seen on many t-shirts and posters. Dali and Bunuel created something special with "Un Chien Andalou", it was a culmination of cinematic surrealism at the time. This was the type of film which could provoke and challenge its audience not so much with narrative form, but with images, both shocking, funny, and tragic all at the same time.

What's great about "Un Chien Andalou" is how compact it is, which is why I think it stays refreshing. I enjoy films which test boundaries as to what cinema is, "Un Chien Andalou" did that in spades. Up to that point, movies were still considered brand new, sound did come in two years prior with "The Jazz Singer", but even that stayed to a conventional storyline which was pioneered by filmmakers like D.W. Griffith. Film had a narrative language, but the surrealists wanted to go further, to them film might've been a way to express the inexpressive.

"Un Chien Andalou" works in a dream logic, dreams are places where things don't make sense, yet to the person dreaming it, there might be some sort of Freudian explanation to all of it. I'm not sure if at any point Bunuel is making any sort of a statement with these images, I feel it was his idea to create a film to test his audience.

What I can say for certain is "Un Chien Andalou" is a film to be experienced, there are images in it that remain shocking, unsettling, and yes very funny. I do enjoy the film and am moved by it, it's in the way Bunuel mixes his images together, how each is cut, they always seem to blend into one another. There is also in his choice of music which heightens the way we may feel about a certain image. I always found it rather touching when a man on a bicycle is struck down in the streets of Paris, people gather around. The music is a classical piece which escapes me, but it raises my emotions. Does Bunuel mean us to feel a certain way with these images? Again I don't know.

I've seen little of Bunuel's work, what I have seen though are markings of a unique voice. His "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" was a film I saw in high school before I knew what the word surrealism was, yet it was the first film along with Fellini's "8 and a half" which made me think I was seeing a dream. "Un Chien Andalou" has the same effect on me even more so, it is as if we are watching an actual dream, it has that nonsensical yet familiar feel to it.

Surrealist cinema is a dying art form, you can see it practiced by people such as David Lynch or Guy Maddin today, I enjoy these films because they are meant to provoke, sometimes they fail to move me, but they always leave me curious. When I look at "Un Chien Andalou" I think of how much innovation there was back when film was beginning, and how much we still have yet to learn about this very young and exciting artform.