Un chien andalou

Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog in English) is a surrealist short film (16 min.) by Luis Buñuel (Writer/Director) and Salvador Dalí.

Related Topics:
Surrealist - Film - Luis Buñuel - Salvador Dalí

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Produced in France in 1928, the film both stems from and criticizes the French avant-garde film movement of the time.

Related Topics:
1928 - Avant-garde

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The film is a series of apparently unrelated, and at times offensive, scenes that attempt to shock the viewer. The film breaks from avant-garde tradition by focusing on content as well as on cinematic form: surprising camera angles and film tricks.

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The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor, and continues with a series of surreal scenes, including the following:

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• a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane
• a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and two live priests (Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene)
• a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge
• a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face

The chronology of the film is disjointed; jumping from once upon a time to eight years later, etc. The same two characters, an unidentified man and a woman appear throughout.

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Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The man dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of man's progress towards his goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that he is forced to bear.

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The image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as Buñuel attacking the film's viewers (Buñuel himself plays the man wielding the razor; the eye is actually that of a dead calf).

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In 1960, a soundtrack was added to this film under the direction of Buñuel. He used the same music that had played (using phonograph records) at the 1929 screenings — extracts from Liebestod, from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and two Argentinian tangos.

Related Topics:
1960 - Richard Wagner

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During his 1976 tour, rock star and icon David Bowie used this film as his opening act. It is also heavily referenced in the Pixies' song Debaser.

Related Topics:
David Bowie - Pixies - Debaser

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Esthero's music video for Heaven Sent draws heavily from the imagery of this film.

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Un chien andalou: External links ►