The Andalusian Dog
September 26th, 2007 | by Gautam |Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is a 16-minute film made in 1929 by legendary director Luis Buñuel. This film is one of the earliest works of Buñuel and is considered one of the most important films of the surrealist movement in cinema.
The first time I watched this film it haunted me. It was haunting not in a sense of horror or a thought-provoking way but it introduced me to an area of cinema that did not exist in my perception earlier. Prior to this film my only exposure to ’surrealism’ in cinema was in certain art house and other lesser known films. It was the first time I watched a completely surreal film and it was an experience that I’m not quite sure what to think of.
The infamous eyeball-slitting opening scene was a shocker. It took me by surprise and laid the foundation to be watchful and expect the unexpected. But unlike what I had imagined, the narrative of the film strays far away from conventional story telling. With the continuous under-running of erotic undertones and murdering desire shown by the two protagonists, the film becomes more of a symbolic representation of everything than an actual narration. Buñuel himself claimed that the film was deliberately made to not make any sort of sense and called everyone who enjoyed it as “that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful and poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder.” Maybe Buñuel was just having fun by doing things in this film that haven’t been seen before and thereby making the most of camera trickery, prosthetics and other effects available to a filmmaker in 1929. If this was the case, then Buñuel was the perfect man to do something like that.
Maybe this film is a lesson which tells us that there is more to what meets the eye (ironic reference intended) and that perhaps reason and logic must be abandoned every once in a while to enable us to experience things that we would normally not have. Watching this film is one of those very experiences and I would recommend anyone who is going to watch this film for the first time to abandon any level of reason and logic and perhaps even emotion. The film reminds me much of a dream and the structure is definitely built around a dream-like logic. The emotions of the characters involved change almost at the drop of a hat and never let us build a certain idea of what they represent. Buñuel made sure nothing makes sense.
I personally would like to look at ‘Un Chien Andalou’ as an important piece of what cinema is capable of representing. It is an abstract painting done by a true artist who explored certain terrains beyond the fencing of normal logic where no one dared to tread. Thus, the film finds it importance in the contemporary world as a document of the movement of surrealism in cinema in the late 1920s. You cannot call this film ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because there is no competing reference to measure it against.
This article is written as a contribution to the Bunuelathon ‘07 at Flickhead.
By Maya on Sep 27, 2007
Gautam, amazingly l’ve never seen this short. I keep waiting for it to show up sometime at the Pacific Film Archives. Thanks for offering up your impressions. Quite the handsome site. When time affords, it will be great to come back and explore.
By Daniel on Nov 3, 2009
Some films are much easier to understand when you just let go. Trying to make sense of films like these is a huge stress on people because nothing logically can be established. When I saw this film, I just let go. Things came more expectant, as if it were all a dream. Dreams are abstract as is surrealism.
What disturbed me the most about this film, however, was not the famous eye-slit scene, but the shocking end. The deaths came at me like a freight train, because not even a dream-like state could prepare you for such a change in the fates, in such a graphic way, for no particular reason.
This movie is definitely not what one would conventionally expect from a silent film!