- Translates in English to 'An Andalusian Dog'
- 1929 silent surrealist short film
- Bunuel's first film
- The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word.
- The film isn't chronological, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much.
- Uses dream logic in a narrative flow (Freudian free association)
Synopsis (of scene one)
"The film opens with a title card reading "Once upon a time". A middle-aged man (Luis Bunuel) sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman (Simone Mareuil) being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead. Another cut to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the eye of a calf with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it. Visually, the suggestion seems to be that it's the woman's eye that's been cut."
The idea for the film began when Bunuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Bunuel told Dali at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dali responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Bunuel declared: "There's the film, let's go an make it." They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.
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| Luis Bunuel |
In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Bunuel made it clear throughout his writings that, between Dali and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was: "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." He also stated: "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."
Film scholar Ken Dancyger has argued that Un Chien Andalou might be the genesis of the filmmaking style present in the modern music video. Roger Ebert had called it the inspiration for low budget independant films.
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