Un chien andalou

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Image:Andalou.jpg Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog in English) is a 16 minute surrealist short film made in France by Luis Buñuel (Writer/Director) and Salvador Dalí in 1928. It is one of the best known surrealist films of the 1920s French avant-garde film movement. It stars Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff as the unnamed protagonists.

1 Synopsis
2 Analysis
3 Behind the scenes
4 Influence
5 External links

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Synopsis

The film is a series of apparently unrelated, and at times potentially offensive, scenes that attempt to shock the viewer. It also features surprising camera angles and other film tricks.

The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor (the man with the razor is played by Buñuel himself), and continues with a series of surreal scenes, including the following:

an androgynous woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane
a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and two live priests (Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene)
a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge
a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face.

There are two central characters, a man and a woman, who appear in both scenes, but they are unnamed. The chronology of the film is disjointed; jumping from "once upon a time" to "eight years later," etc.

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Analysis

Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The man dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of man's progress towards his goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that he is forced to bear. Likewise, the image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as Buñuel "attacking" the film's viewers. Also, Federico García Lorca viewed this film as a personal attack on him.

In spite of these varying intepretations, Bunuel makes clear through his writings, that between Dali and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was that "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explaination of any kind would be accepted."(Bunuel (Translated by Abigail Israel). My Last Sigh. Knopf. New York NY. 1984.)

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Behind the scenes

The eyeball being sliced is in fact that of a dead calf.

Modern prints of the film feature a soundtrack: excerpts from "Liebestod", from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and two Argentinian tangos. These are the same music that Buñuel played on a phonograph during the orginal 1929 screening; he first added them to a sound print of the film in 1960. Template:Fact

Both of the main actors in the film eventually committed suicide.

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Influence

The film is heavily referenced in the Pixies' song "Debaser".
During his 1976 tour, rock star David Bowie used the film as his opening act.
Esthero's music video for "Heaven Sent" draws heavily from the film's imagery.
The Eraserheads song "Andalusian Dog" derives heavily from the imagery of the film.

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