Un Chien Andalou [An Andalusian Dog] ***** (1929, Luis Buñuel) – Classic Movie Review 1949

After all these years, writer-director Luis Buñuel’s and co-writer Salvador Dali’s uniquely disturbing, revelatory 1929 Surrealist short (17 minutes) film is a still brilliantly eye-catching Pandora’s box of the strangest of delights.

It spills over with apparently random and jumbled but stark and shocking images like a razor supposedly slitting open a woman’s eye (a cow’s eye was used), a dead horse being pulled along the top of a piano (the priest being dragged with the piano is Dalí), rotting donkeys inside grand pianos, a young woman with a box being run over by a car and ants emerging from a wound in a hand.

‘Nothing means anything,’ said its makers who added that were trying to achieve the muddled and meaningless effect of a dream or a nightmare. Even so, you are free to interpret it if as you wish, just as you do with your own dreams. Buñuel’s and Dali’s dreams must have been troubled!

It is Buñuel’s director début, starting him off on a long and brilliant career. Buñuel also appears briefly as the man in the prologue. At the Paris premiere, Buñuel hid behind the screen for fear of being attacked by the confused audience.

Buñuel added a soundtrack to this silent classic in 1960, using the same music played on phonograph records at the 1929 screenings – extracts from Liebestod from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Beethoven and two Argentinian tangos.

It was partly paid for by Buñuel’s mother and his friend Vicomte de Noailles’s lottery winnings. The film started when Buñuel told Dalí about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half ‘like a razor blade slicing through an eye’ and Dalí said he’d dreamt about a hand crawling with ants.

David Bowie began his 1976 Station to Station tour concerts by showing this film. 

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1949

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