Un Chien Andalou (no 43)

by Allan Fish

(France 1928 17m) DVD1/2

Aka. An Andalusian Dog

Razorblades and donkeys

p  Luis Buñuel  d/w  Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali  ph  Albert Dubergen  ed  Luis Buñuel  m  “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner and Argentinian Tango (1960 release), Mauricio Kagel (1983 reissue)  art  Schilzneck 

Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Jaime Miravilles, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Jeanne Rucas,

When I came to begin writing this series of reviews, I was asked by one of my fellow cineastes which of my selection I was least looking forward to reviewing.  I was able to answer without hesitation, Un Chien Andalou.  I was never in doubt as to its inclusion, but the fact is that Buñuel’s film is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most meaningless ever made.  Man Ray and Maya Deren may have made their lion’s share of baffling cinema, as Buñuel would go on to do himself, but nothing comes close to the bafflement of Buñuel’s first film as sole director (he’d previously co-directed The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928 with Jean Epstein). 

            As to the plot, your guess is as good as mine.  We start with a man preparing, or so it seems, to shave, only for him to slice open a woman’s eyeball instead, which sets the tone nicely for the casual physical and emotional violence to come.  Totally bizarre surrealist images follow in their droves; ants come out of a stigmata like hole in a man’s hand, a man dressed in a maid’s outfit, or something resembling one, cycles home, only to crash on the kerb; a boyish young woman plays with a severed hand in the street before being run over; a man feels up a woman’s breasts under her dress, only for the dress to disappear showing him gripping her naked breasts, then the dress reappears, then disappears again, this time revealing a naked bottom; a man pulls two priests across a room, who in turn are tied to two grand pianos, one of which is topped by a dead donkey; a caption comes up reading “sixteen years ago”, only for us to see the same room and scene, but with the same man stood with himself in different clothes; a woman sees a death’s head moth, then a man loses his mouth, then her underarm hair covers his mouth; lovers walk along the seashore, then later they are seen seemingly dead buried up to their waists in the sand.  And that’s about it, I think.

            Buñuel’s eye never waivers, but one cannot help the feeling that many people would see his pure surrealism as just a series of random cuts between totally irrelevant scenes with irrelevant characters in impossible situations with not one jot of reality in it.  Of course that’s half the point the surrealists were trying to make, and certainly Buñuel’s surrealism was at its most undiluted in his two early films with Salvador Dali (the other being L’Age d’Or).  Buñuel’s later films were undoubtedly more sophisticated and biting, and more unquestionably cinematic, but all the later Buñuel’s are, to some degree at least, diluted.  That is not to decry the merits of other classics included in this list (Belle de Jour, The Exterminating Angel and Viridiana, to name but three), but though they may represent Buñuel the film director at his peak, Buñuel the surrealist artist was at his peak in his early work.  Un Chien Andalou may have nothing to do with conventional narrative or acting or even direction, but the look of the film haunts the eye, the editing is somehow controlled in its seeming randomness and scenes and images from this film not only influenced cinema surrealism and fantasy for years to come, but also remain with anyone who has seen them.  The choice of music could not be more diametrically apart either, a tango on one part and his beloved Wagner Liebestod on the other.  They are wholly inappropriate and, thus, perfectly ideal for the statement Buñuel was making.  Frankly, though, it’s hard to believe Buñuel was making a statement; he may just have been having a joke with the cinema intelligentsia.  Its influence was plain on Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Chateau du Dé, but it’s best remembered as cinema’s purest experiment with chaos theory.  On that level, it’s mesmerising.