UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(On Jerry's List of Greatest Films of all Time)
(On Jerry's List of Greatest Films of all Time)
Dream-like imagery is putting it mildly - the whole film is a nightmare where connections do not exist and nothing makes literal sense. Bunuel's film (co-created by Salvador Dali) may seem like it is taking place in our dreams or in some other planet, but we can easily deduce that it takes place on planet Earth. There are recognizable visual elements: the moon, the Parisian streets, pianos, donkeys, bicycles, etc. There are also physical actions and acts of human savagery that could possibly happen, such as an attempted rape, the slitting of an eyeball with a razor (the most famous image from the film), a severed hand being poked by passerby, two corpses in a beach and dead donkeys. But then it is the juxtaposition of such recognizable elements that can cause confusion such as a woman's armpit hair replacing a man's mouth, a cloud slicing its way across the moon, ants crawling out of a man's hand (a Dali invention), a piano being dragged with two priests and the aforementioned donkeys - you get the picture. Or maybe you don't.
Luis Bunuel's tantalizing, striking film is not meant to make sense and it never will. The entire running time is 17 minutes and, in that short amount of time, Bunuel and Dali manage to create a world filled with tragedy, oblique humor, apathy and a slight sense of compassion. The woman we see in the opening shot who has her eye slit open (Simone Mareuil), reappears in the next shot, disturbed by someone's death and laying the clothes he had on her bed. The Young Man dressed in a nun's habit (Pierre Batcheff) suddenly falls and perhaps dies (the same Young Man that causes the woman's shock), reappearing later on as a sexually aggressive man who delights in witnessing the death of a woman on the street struck by a car. There is also a shot of breasts reimagined as someone's anus, and the repeated shot of a striped box (perhaps as famous as that mysterious box in Bunuel's masterpiece, "Belle De Jour").
I first saw "Un Chien Andalou" at the Biograph in New York in 1983 - it was a retrospective in honor of Bunuel who died that year. Every other time I've seen the film in a theater, the opening scene of the sliced eyeball caused the same reaction in the audience - a collective "ugh" moment and certainly completely unexpected by first-time viewers. I do not want to sound pretentious but "Un Chien Andalou" may in fact be the first Surreal film made about resurrection, perhaps tinged with hope. When all is said and done, if it is all a nightmare inside people's heads and about our unconscious mind, we will wake up and experience reality when it is over. Or maybe not. Maybe the film has no real purpose other than to wake us up from our doldrums - to feel free to imagine beyond our conscious mind. Or maybe not.
