Beware of the Dog

Released in 1929, Un Chien Andalou is an avant-garde collaboration between surrealist Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali. Described by A.L. Rees in Cinema and the Avant-Garde as the “stray dog of Surrealism”(Nowell- Smith 100) in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s The Oxford History of World Cinema, Rees is quick to point out that the silent film preceded Bunuel’s joining of the Surrealist movement.

The idea for the film itself came about when Bunuel told Dali of a dream he had had where (like in the movie) a cloud passes over the moon, slicing it in half “like a razor blade slicing through an eye" (Roger Ebert). Dali revealed that he had a dream where ants were eating blood from his hand. Both of these images were to be just two of the countless unsettling, and provocative images in early cinema.

Out of the whole movie, the slicing of the eye really unnerved me. Reading about it is one thing, seeing how realistic it looks is another. Rees states that the meaning behind the slicing of the woman’s (Simone Mareuil) eye “acts as an emblem for the attack on normative vision and the comfort of the spectator whose surrogate screen-eye is here assaulted” (Nowell-Smith 100). Bunuel did disturb his viewers, but the fact the story is not even told in a chronological fashion, means that the audience has to deal with putting the story together themselves, as well as, watching a silent cinema sexual assault, a transvestite on a bike, and a poke at Christianity with two priests being dragged after two grand pianos with rotting donkeys (IMDb).

After researching the film, I found out some interesting facts, so I’d like to share them with you:

•The budget for the film was provided by Bunuel’s mother (Ebert)

•Bunuel himself is the man who slices Simone Mareuil’s eye (IMDb)

•A real eye is actually being sliced…that of a dead calf (Ebert)

•Salvador Dali is uncredited as one of the priests being dragged after the piano (Ebert)

•There is a French phrase that to have ants in one’s hand literally means that someone is itching to kill (IMDb)

•Bunuel and Dali fell out before shooting Bunuel’s second film L’Age d’or in 1930. Dali accused Bunuel of being an atheist and a Communist, shortly after Bunuel secured a job in New York where he was to release propaganda films for release in Latin America (Nowell-Smith 432).

References:
Rees, A.L. "Cinema and the Avant-Garde." The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell- Smith. New York: Oxford UP, USA, 1999. 95-105. Print.

Chanan, Michael. "Luis Bunuel." The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell- Smith. New York: Oxford UP, USA, 1999. 432-433. Print.

Un Chien Andalou IMDb Entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/plotsummary

Un Chien Andalou Roger Ebert Review: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000416/REVIEWS08/401010369/1023