Un Chien Andalou

Un Chien Andalou – Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali - 1928
The surrealists were interested in releasing the power of the unconscious through procedures that followed the logic of dreams. Directors Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel used bizarre imagery and incongruous juxtapositions to recreate their own dreams.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

From its startling opening sequence, in which a man slices through and woman’s eyeball with a cut-throat razor, to the grotesque corpses of its closing scene, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ is a deliberate attack on the artistic and social convention of its time, Luis Bunuel himself described it as ‘a desperate and passionate appeal to murder’.
The sequence with the cut-throat razor cutting the female’s eyeball sets up the violent tone of the film and its underlying link between sex and aggression; a sort of sadistic impulse runs throughout. The films key meaning is also implied during the shot of the thin cloud cuts across the full moon and then cutting to the cut-throat razor slicing the eyeball open. It implies identity between nature and consciousness and action.
However in the film much of the editing is conventional, using much of the shot/reverse shot format. Bunuel was never to pander in the arty shot; there is always a rather simple straightforwardness to his framing, composition and editing.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

Un Chien Andalou’s structure is that of a dramatic one rather than a narrative one. The film is a blend of both ordinary and surreal events whose dramatic and shock qualities derive from their realist interpretation but which have no narrative cause or a sense of logic. However it is not an anti-narrative film but one that plays with narrative with many of its concerns – abstraction, free-flowing image-making, image and text, social analysis and dreams are similar to many of the European avant-garde films of the 1920’s.

Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'

Some of the images in the film such as the rotting donkeys on pianos and the severed hand, were staged before the camera, the most instinctive sequences are those where editing is used to imitate the patterns of unconscious thought, such as the sequence of puns that cuts between:
A moth, mouth, a smile that is wiped off a man’s face, an outraged woman frantically applying lipstick, a beard of pubic hair and an armpit.
Many of the films imagery has been related to the Freudian terms, although Bunuel however once stated ‘Nothing in the film symbolises anything’.