Remote Control : Un Chien Andalou (1929)

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Un Chien Andalou
Directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali
Reviewed by Nick Burton

The most famous 20 minutes of the avant garde and just maybe the most notorious short film in the history of cinema. It’s first scene is certainly the most shocking and disturbing ever filmed – I have seen people recoil in sheer terror from it – but such was the initial plan of the films’ architects, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Surrealism had its arrows aimed squarely at the middle class it saw as poisoning society (as it still does). While Surrealist guru Andre Breton’s Marxist leanings had a more political role in mind for the new movement, Buñuel and Dali were satisfied just to make an audience squirm with supreme discomfort at their images.

Taking a cue from Breton’s manifesto on "automatic writing" – putting endless, disconnected sentences on paper without regard to their rational meaning – Buñuel and Dali’s script for Un Chien Andalou ("An Andalusian Dog") rejected anything even approaching rationality, accepting instead images from their dreams. The pair was prepared for trouble – Buñuel kept stones in his pocket to throw in case the premiere audience started a riot – but the film made Buñuel and Dali the darlings of the Underground.

Un Chien Andalou (Land Without Bread)
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali
Starring Luis Bunuel
VHS Tape - $25.49
Subtitles in English
Rated - NR

The film’s famous opening sequence has Buñuel himself sharpening a straight razor as a cloud passes portentously over the moon. We then see him draw the blade over the eye of a young woman (Simone Mareuil). In close up, we see the eyeball spurt forth an oozing liquid from the razor’s cut. Still shocking after over 65 years, the scene has been wrongly interpreted as everything from an allegory on cinema itself to a call for spirituality (as the elimination of the eye forces us to look within). The image in fact was done purely for shock value. It’s amazing to see an audience, so jaded by a generation of the most violent films possible, react in abject horror to Buñuel’s feral ocular attack. Even though it’s plain to see it’s not a human eye – a calf’s eye was used – it is still an eye. Though the scene’s setup anticipates the act, we can barely believe it when it happens. In other words, in his very first film, Buñuel delivers.

After the eye, we see Mareuil trying to enjoy her life as best she can, but constantly interrupted by a series of bizarre events. On the street below her, an androgynous woman in a suit and tie pokes a severed human hand before she is cruelly struck down by a car. A passing cyclist (Pierre Batcheff) falls down on the street and reappears in the woman’s room where his constant attempts at seduction are rebuffed. His sexual frustration manifests itself as two grand pianos pulled by ropes with dead, rotting mules on top of the instruments, and a pair of priests on the ground beside them.

The man sees his double appear and shoots him. The body falls in a field, where he grasps for the back of a naked woman before he dies. The woman sees a death’s head moth in her room while the cyclist resumes his seduction attempts. She opens her door to the seashore, where another young man awaits her. In springtime, the couple is seen buried alive up to their necks in the sand, surrounded by insects.

A Rorschach test where any meaning may suffice, since none was intended, Buñuel and Dali’s little film is as cosmically funny as it is subversive; it is the living definition of Surrealist wit. The music here is wonderful too: at the film’s premiere, Buñuel played records of Argentine tangos on a phonograph as the film played. (He again kept stones in his pocket in case the audience rioted, which they did not.) And he added the tangos, as well as a lovely excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde permanently on the soundtrack in 1960. (This explains why many prints of the film carry a 1960 copyright.)

Astonishing and essential, the film has been copied by everyone from Orson Welles (Hearts of Age) to Jean Cocteau (Blood of a Poet) and Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon). It’s more than likely that anyone you know who has made a short film for film school has made his or her version as well. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that underground filmmaking could have existed without it.

Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com
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NICK BURTON lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.