Directed by:
Luis BuñuelPlots(1)
In a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye is slit open--juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obscuring the moon moving in the same direction as the knife through the eye--to grab the audience's attention. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally. A man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey towards the woman he's itching to kill. A shot of differently striped objects is repeatedly used to connect scenes in this early French short. (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (5)
Watching Un Chien Andalou is like looking at a famous exhibit in a dusty museum collection, signed by two equally famous masters. For a movie fan, it is a duty to know them, for a snob to admire them, and for an egoist to claim to have understood them. Surrealism, for me, means Jan Švankmajer, Terry Gilliam, or indeed Luis Buñuel in his later films, such as The Exterminating Angel. Un Chien Andalou is an experiment that stood somewhere at the beginning and now has the value of just that dusty museum exhibit, which cannot emotionally engage me, and only the split eye sticks in my memory. I would say it is an experimental film for a small minority of intellectuals. Given the number of reviewers, it seems to be quite widespread. Overall impression: 45%.
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I can stomach almost all exotic and extinct genre varieties of cinema, but fuck this one. Surrealism should have stayed in painting and, at most, in literature, which nobody reads nowadays anyway, but not in film, where it has absolutely nothing to say except a bunch of question marks. I came and saw a film that can’t be understood... so I didn't really lose.
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After twelve years, I got to see Luis Buñuel's iconic surrealist film again, and my feelings about its scenes remained uneasy. On the one hand, Un Chien Andalou is morbid and perverse, on the other – perhaps unintentionally – quite humorous. The sliced eyeball, the animal corpses dragged on the piano, the omnipresent lust and that "stigmatic tingling", it’s as if you are watching some kind of sick dream that scares (and perhaps subconsciously fascinates) you.
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I like the idea of how people went to the cinema for this and were immediately greeted by a slashed eye in the first scene. It must have been unreal at that time. It is still a powerful experience even today. I don't find the film "Andalusian Dog" to be that incomprehensible, rather I feel that it is a kind of associative surrealism, where what is in the mind appears in reality, and thus it loses its meaning. That is what makes it beautiful. The scene with the woman who refuses to succumb to the man's desire is a beautiful testament to that. An incredibly daring film for its time, and I am glad it didn't end up forgotten or lost somewhere.
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