Un Chien Andalou (1929 film)
Un Chien Andalou (French pronunciation: [œ̃ ʃjɛ̃ ɑ̃dalu], An Andalusian Dog) is a 16-minute, 1929 French silent short film directed, produced, and edited by Luis Buñuel, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Salvador Dalí. Buñuel's first film was initially released on a limited basis at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou doesn't have a traditional plot. Its disjointed timeline jumps from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without changes in events or characters. It uses dream logic in its storytelling, similar to Freudian free association, showing a series of loosely connected scenes. Un Chien Andalou is a key work in surrealist cinema.
Synopsis
Duration: 15 minutes and 58 seconds.15:58 with subtitles available.CC
A man sharpens a razor and tests it on his thumb. He gazes at the moon, which is about to be bisected by a thin cloud. A young woman stares straight ahead as he brings the razor near her eye. A cloud passing in front of the moon is cut, followed by a close-up of the razor slicing her eye open.
"Eight years later," a young man rides a bicycle down an urban street, wearing a nun's habit and carrying a striped box with a strap around his neck. The woman from the first scene hears him approaching and puts aside the book she was reading. She goes to the window and sees the young man lying on the curb, his bicycle on the ground. She steps out of the building and tries to revive him.
Later, she assembles pieces of the young man's clothing on a bed. The man then appears near the door, with ants crawling out of a hole in his hand. An androgynous young woman pokes at a severed human hand in the street below the apartment while surrounded by a large crowd.
The crowd disperses when a policeman places the hand in the box the young man carried earlier and gives it to the androgynous woman. She stands in the middle of the street holding the box, and is run over by a car. The man in the apartment seems to take sadistic pleasure in the accident, gesturing at the woman with him, leering and groping her breasts.
The woman initially resists him but then allows him to molest her as he imagines her nude. She pushes him away when he starts to drift off and tries to escape by running to the other side of the room. The man corners her as she reaches for a racquet in self-defense, but suddenly, he picks up two ropes and drags along two grand pianos carrying dead donkeys, stone tablets with the Ten Commandments, two pumpkins, and two priests attached to the ropes. The woman escapes the room. The man chases after her, but she traps his hand—infested with ants—in the door. She then finds him in the next room dressed in his nun’s habit.
Sixteen years ago, the second man admires art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first man to hold two of the books as he stares at the wall. The first man eventually shoots the second when the books suddenly turn into revolvers. The second man, now in a meadow, dies while swiping at the back of a nude female figure that suddenly disappears into thin air. A group of men arrives and carries his body away.
The woman returns to the apartment and sees a death's-head moth. The first man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand; her armpit hair then attaches itself to where his mouth had been. She looks at him with disgust and leaves the apartment while sticking her tongue out. As she exits, the street transforms into a coastal beach, where she meets a third man and walks arm in arm with him. He shows her the time on his watch, and they walk near the rocks, where they find remnants of the first young man's nun's clothing and the box. They walk away happily, clutching each other and making romantic gestures. "In Spring," the couple is buried in sand up to their elbows, motionless.
Development
The screenplay of the film is based on two dreams of co-creators Buñuel and Dali. The idea began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí 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". Dalí responded that he had dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Buñuel declared: "There's the film, let's go and make it." The two decided to write a script based on the concept of repressed emotions. The title of the film alludes to a Spanish idiom: "the Andalusian dog howls –someone has died!” The screenplay was written in a few days.
According to Buñuel, they adhered to a simple rule: “Do not dwell on what required purely rational, psychological or cultural explanations. Open the way to the irrational. It was accepted only that which struck us, regardless of the meaning ... We did not have a single argument. A week of impeccable understanding. One, say, said: 'A man drags double bass.' 'No,' the other objected. And the objection was immediately accepted as completely justified. But when the proposal of one liked the other, it seemed to us magnificent, indisputable and immediately introduced into the script.”
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, Buñuel made clear throughout his writings that, between Dalí 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."
In his 1939 autobiography, Buñuel stated: "In the film the aesthetics of Surrealism are combined to some of Freud's discoveries. The film was totally in keeping with the basic principle of the school, which defined Surrealism as 'Psychic Automatism', unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond any form of control by reason, morality or aesthetics."
Filming
The film was financed by Buñuel's mother, and shot in Le Havre and at the Billancourt Studios in Paris over a period of ten days in March 1928. It is a black and white, 35 mm, silent film, with a running time of 17 minutes (although some sources state 24 minutes) and a physical length of 430 meters.
For many years, published and unpublished reports have circulated that Buñuel had used a dead goat's eye, or that of a dead sheep, or of a dead donkey, or other animal, in the notorious eyeball-slicing scene. However, Buñuel claimed that he had used a dead calf's eye. Through the use of intense lighting and bleaching of the calf's skin Buñuel attempted to make the furred face of the animal duplicate the look of human skin.
During the bicycle scene, the woman seated on a chair and reading throws her book aside when she notices the fallen man. When the book lies open, it reveals a reproduction of a painting by Johannes Vermeer, an artist Dalí greatly admired and often referenced in his own works.
In Buñuel's original script, the final shot was to feature the corpses of the man and woman "consumed by swarms of flies". However, this was modified due to budget limitations, with the film ending with a still shot of the man and woman half-buried in the sand.
The movie contains several thematic references to Federico García Lorca and other writers of that time. The rotting donkeys are a reference to the popular children's novel Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez, which Buñuel and Dalí both hated.
French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch has reported that after filming was complete, Buñuel and Dalí had run out of money, forcing Buñuel to edit the film personally in his kitchen without the aid of any technical equipment.
External links
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Un_Chien_Andalou_(1929_film) ]
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