Cast: Luis Buñuel

Director: Luis Buñuel

Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali

Running time: 16 mins

Genre: Short Film/Surreal



CRITIQUE:


Un Chien Andalou holds no punches. Now renowned to be the quintessential manifesto of the late 1920s surrealist movement, it generates provocative images of disconcerting power that even until today they still permeate discourses in film cliques. Surreal artists-collaborators, the then-debutante filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali, construct a 16-minute silent short film that a) irreverent, b) viscerally shocking, and c) doesn’t make sense. Yet the film’s pure, undiffused strength lies in its incomprehensibility, challenging conventional narrative tropes and dared to flout Hollywood rules of chronological continuity. The opening convention of “Once upon a time” is immediately broken by years’ worth of flashforward, and later on, a bold flashback. It is obvious that this film is not supposed to “make sense”, and this surreal work is built up on dream sequences and visions, elements that later populates the oeuvre of more contemporary surrealists such as David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway. Its title, transcribed as “The Andalusian Dog” in English, doesn’t even contribute to any coherence available. But to anyone who has a deep appreciation on filmic techniques will find an editing genius here: the notoriously scandalous opener of Buñuel himself slicing a woman’s eye with a razor, cutting to a moon with a thin silver cloud passing by over it, and back to the actual slicing in an unapologetic close-up is a landmark in the status of Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho. And there are more images to marvel at; ants crawling out a hole in a hand, dead cows over the piano, a severed hand on a pavement, the death moth, and two dead lovers half-buried into the sand. Buñuel and Dali themselves piece these all together without a scintilla of intention to make sense, and rather uses Freudian complexities to draw interpretations from the projected “truth” of the duo’s imaginings. For all we can observe, it is a comic farce of romantic relationships (as it involves a vindictive husband, a wife and a lover), the irony of death and decay, and most of all, a sticking of two big fat fingers to the expectations of cinema.


VERDICT:

The most diabolical 16-minute short film of all-time. Hugely important, and for what it’s worth, almost a century on, Buñuel and Dali’s descent into madness ironically represents as a shining beacon in a dark cinematic path only traversed by the bold.



RATING: A