Surrealism is an art movement that emphasizes achieving the liberation of the mind through the imaginative powers of the subconscious. In the study of cinema, one of the first avant-garde works was the surreal film Un Chien Andalou (1929), directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel and Spanish surrealist artist Salvardor Dali. The reception of this film mimicked that of the reception of most cult films: its distribution was severely limited. The reasons for this include the controversial nature of the film as well as its illogical content. The film’s run-time is approximately seventeen minutes long; it is silent, black & white, with a disjointed chronology. The film lacks any real plot, and follows an almost dream-like narrative flow; essentially emphasizing the imaginative powers of the subconscious.
The film begins with a title card reading "Once upon a time", it then continues with a shot of a smoking man holding a razor blade while staring at the moon. The next shot is a close-up of a young woman sitting on a chair. A man is seen standing next to her. She stares calmly straight into the camera; the man then lifts a razor blade up to the woman’s eye, suggesting that he will cut across her eye-ball horizontally with the blade. Before this happens, the next shot is of the same moon the original man was staring at, except now a thin cloud has cut across the moon horizontally, almost replicating what is soon to happen to the woman’s eye. The next shot is a close-up of what seems to the eye of a human being cut horizontally with a blade. The cutting of the eye-ball is shown from start to finish.
What has just occurred represents only the first half-minute of this sixteen minute nightmarish experience. A “persistent dream built upon disconcerting images.” The film then continues by presenting a series of random and extremely bizarre events; ranging from a bicycling man in a nun’s outfit, a severed hand placed inside a wooden box, and a dead couple buried in sand. The effects of discomfort and disturbance are largely felt while viewing this film. This film’s controversial nature and series of shocking images and events help in justifying why its distribution was so limited and why it was, in most cases, banned from public viewing. Un Chien Andalou was generally only viewed in private clubs or the studios of surrealists and artists.
The film was based on two separate dreams that Bunuel and Dali had experienced. Bunuel had recalled a dream in which a moon was sliced by clouds (similarly to an eye being sliced by a razor), while Dali had recalled a dream in which a hand was engulfed with crawling ants. They later decided to make a film that included these distinct images, their only rule had been that “no idea or image susceptible to reasoning would be allowed.” The film has been described as Dali and Bunuel’s quest to “goad the dull bourgeois mind.” It is representational of surrealism at its best, it follows no predetermined limits and is not designed to meet any specified expectations by its audience, and instead it is heavily invested in free association and the liberation of the human psyche. To be able to present the innermost ideas and creations of the subconscious and to defy all that society had deemed as acceptable was the main purpose of this film.
Its popularity amongst cult film fans is based on the film’s pioneering movement to defy the conventional and to present a form of art that was representational of alien ideas and concepts. It was unique and provoked audiences to think outside the box of what a film could or could not be. The film’s quality of excess coupled with its surrealist nature is what has distinguished this film amongst cineastes as avant-garde and noteworthy.
