Un Chien Andalou (Dir. Luis Buñuel, 17m, 1929)

Once upon a time...

The year is 1929. Two men are enjoying lunch at a Madrid restaurant; friends since university, they will soon become titans in their respective mediums. One is Salvador Dali, barely 25 but already sporting the iconic moustache that will practically become his trademark for the rest of his life, and about to start on some of the most famous works of his career. The other, four years his senior, is Luis Buñuel, having already served as assistant to influencial film maker and essayist Jean Epstein for two films, as well as setting himself up as a prominent critic for a medium barely three decades old. They are discussing, as befits two men who find themselves at the vanguard of the nascent surrealist movement, dreams.

Buñuel leans across the table, and recounts his, of the moon sliced in half, like a razor through an eyeball, an image that will come to define the film's cultural impact in everything from the Pixies' "Debaser" to Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). Not to be outdone, Dali tells the increasingly intrigued Buñuel of an image of a hand crawling with ants. Without warning, Buñuel bangs his hand on the table, excitment overtaking him. There it is. "There's the film. Let's go and make it". That film, of course, is Un Chien Andalou, a film that practically kick-started cinematic surrealism, in its free-association of images, its experimentation with the nature of film, in both visual and narrative terms. 

In essence, as with many of the films that I will come on to discuss in this "Avant-Garde Cinema" month, Un Chien Andalou is a film loosely held by narrative; in essence, it tells the story of a young man and woman, and their connection to each other through a series of strange and often unnerving, or even disturbing, moments, until their sudden and untimely death. Certainly, Un Chien Andalou typifies the work of what became known as the Parisian Surrealist Group, with Dali and Buñuel's later L'Age D'Or, the work of visual artist, Man Ray, and the erotic La Coquille et le clergyman, scripted by avant-garde titan Antoinin Artaud.

This movement, in essence, took the new medium of cinema as a perfect medium to express suspense, mystery, and, more importantly, to depict the ridiculous as rational. As Andalou and its contemporary films depicts perfectly, tricks inside the camera, and in the editing process, from slow motion to reversing the speed of the film to superimposing layers of film on top of each other, perfectly depict the dreamlike state of unreality synomyous with surrealism. Whilst Andalou may be beaten slightly to the title of the first surrealist film, it is undoubtedly the film that codifies, and in some cases perfects, even in the nascent art form, its sensibilities, its focus on image over narrative.

And, unquestionably, Un Chien Andalou is a film where image drives the film along, in a number of sequences of free-associative, often tentative connection-Buñuel and Dali's scripting approach was simply to suggest suitably outlandish sequences to each other, with the other agreeing or vetoing them almost immediately. What follows over 17 minutes, (the film's runtime and its frames per second are, being silent, largely dictated by the score, with some versions running for 21 or even 24 minutes) from the opening credits, is a film dominated by surreal imagery. Beginning with a title card, reading "Once Upon a Time", the film cuts to a man, played by Buñuel himself preparing a razor, as clouds race towards the moon, before, in the film's single most shoking moment, as the film associates the eye with the moon and the clouds with the razor's edge, the film matches a shot of a young woman held in place by Buñuel with the real cutting of a dead animal's eye, making the audience assume that he has slashed her eye open

Today it may seem crude, an effect easily created by prosthetic, computer graphics or clever editing, but in Un Chien Andalou, this viserality, this matching of the dream of Buñuel with his artistry and the ability to edit together seemingly unrelated shots to create a narrative that forms the bedrock of not only the rest of the film, but surrealist and experimental filmmaking in general. 

Eight Years Later

The film abruptly jumps forward, as a young man and woman are introduced to the audience, the man dressed in a nun's habit, riding a bicycle and carrying a box, the woman reading, interrupted by the sudden fall of the man from his transportation. She takes him indoors, and attempts to revive him by placing his clothes, found in the box, on the bed. He appears by the door, and here we arrive at Dali's dream, as the duo watch ants emerge from and scurry around his hand, another piece of clever editing and trick photography. From here, through a match-cut that transforms woman's underarm hair into a sea urchin, we are introduced to what amounts to the film's other major character, a young woman dressed in male clothing, who prods at a discarded and rotting hand, before placing it inside a box identical to that the young man was carrying. We see the young man watching, voyeuristically in the window, until the woman is suddenly knocked down and seemingly killed, after which he gropes her, in the film's most obviously psychosexual element.

He attempts to follow her, but is suddenly weighed down by a multitude of bizarre objects, including pianos, rotting carcasses, and Dali and another man playing priests. Reaching the door, this is slammed on his arm, and his hand comes loose, once more cawlign with ants. He reappears in the bed, once more dressed as a nun

Three in the Morning

A second man, dressed in lighter clothing, arrives and forces the young man to discard his nun's clothing. Shot only from behind, he forces the man to face the wall.

Sixteen Years ago

The lighter dressed man turns to camera, revealing that he is played by the same actor as the young man (Pierre Batcheff), and following an altercation where he picks up books, shoots his doppleganger. The lighter dressed man appears in a wood, and is carried away by a group of men in a funeral procession. We return to the flat, and in perhaps the film's strangest sequence, the man wipes his own mouth off, only to have it replaced with the woman's armpit hair. Disgusted, the woman walks out, arrives on the beach, and with a third male companion, discovers both the box, and the nun's habit, and walks off, arm in arm

In Springtime...

The film abruptly cuts to the bodies, seemingly dead, of the couple buried up to their chest in sand. Fin. Curtains close, lights up. Buñuel breathes a sigh of relief, hand going to the stones he put in his pocket as a precaution against a rioting crowd. The production of this film has not been easy, financed by his mother, cut together in his kitchen, practically by hand. He turns to Dali, who seems almost disappointed by the way that the film has gone down, almost, vicariously, preferring the chaos of a riot or an angry audience than the warm reception it has recieved.

The shock of a film that Buñuel and Dali have intended as an affront, a surrealist lobster slap across the face of the affluent and fashionable Tout-Paris, and their beloved "avantgarde cine"...is that its audience, that include Picasso, Cocteau and the de Noailles, who will go onto to bankroll L'Âge d'Or...love it. It will go on to run for eight months before complaints due to the film's percieved cruelty, something that will go on to haunt Buñuel for most of the rest of his life, as his turn to leftwing politics and his flight from Francoist Spain to Mexico will only colour his films more in their surrealist angle before his triumphant return to Europe at the end of the 1960s. Dali, for his part, will fall out with Buñuel, politically and artistically, embracing Spain under Franco, and leaving his former friend to finish L'Âge d'Or alone.

Though Un Chien Andalou will go on to influence decades of film makers, surrealist and mainstream, and gain a soundtrack in the 1960s overseen by Buñuel himself, and comprising of two tango pieces and an excerpt from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, it will see only one re-release, in Finland, of all places, before the 1970s, where it once again collides with the mainstream and be seen by a wider audience through the most unlikely source. It is shown, in full, as a warmup act to David Bowie at his most esoteric and most avant-garde figure, the cold and clinical Thin White Duke, during his 1976 Isolar tour, and there's something suitable about the film giving way to the suitably strange and quasi-mechanical "Station to Station", audience still disorientated, brought into a dreamlike state in which this last guise of Bowie seems a perfect match.

But this is only going skin-deep, only grazing the surface. What is Un chien Andalou about? Is it simply two artists throwing ideas back and forth, inside the vague structure of a relationship between a woman and a man, surrealism for surrealism's sake? In his own autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel, himself writes that the film's sole rule was "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." Is Un Chien Andalou, thus, a deliberate retort to the mannered, structured work of Epstein and his peers, where every little element carries a meaning? Is the film essentially a prank, a collection of unassociated moments, deliberately grotesque strangeness and deliberately provocative attacks on an audience thatBuñuel, and Dali expected to attempt to make  meaning out of a film deliberately devoid of it?

To say, however, that Un Chien Andalou is entirely devoid of meaning, is however, impossible. One cannot help but read the film through the lens of both the psychoanalysis of Freud, and that of Buñuel's politics. Andalou, even to the most naive viewer, is a film rife with psychosexual imagery, from phallic boxes and ying-yang cloud and moon to the androgeny of one of its supporting characters, the vaginal wound from which ants pour in the man's hand, and so on. Certainly the sequence in which he leers over the female protagonist, and watches, sadistically and voyeuristically as the androgenynous young woman is run over, is perhaps the most obvious and certainly most deliberate example of this, and, overt or subconscious, deliberate or accidental, the film plays through many of Freud's key tenants, and one cannot help but feel that Buñuel and Dali echo Freud's suggestion that dreams, irrational as they may be, are narrative

There is, though, another reading, that of Un Chien Andalou as poltiical and social wrecking ball, aimed at the Spanish Catholic Church, and the "intellectual bourgeoisie", in a film that paints priests as rapacious, or figures to be mocked, the overbearing prescence of Catholicism present throughout. We see the man drag, physically embodied, the weight of religion in commandments, donkeys, priests, and pianos, a manifestation of the apparatus of religion, behind him, in search of the woman he is bessotted with. In any case, this focus upon religion in both of Buñuel's short films contributed to his banishment from Spain, such was the connection between Franco and the Church.

Is Un Chien Andalou thus a film that failed, in its warm acceptance from the very target it was aimed at, a film that caused Buñuel to exclaim "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions?" No. How can it be? It is, undoubtedly, the spark that started the entire idea of experimental cinema, that launched surrealism as a cinematic artform, and ninety one years on, it remains a stunningly modern, visually electrifying piece of cinema, its ideas permeating the artform even now.

Rating: Must See