Effectively Confusing
“Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” Luis Buñuel had this to say about his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), made during the heart of the surrealist period. This film came at a time during which the Dada movement was being substituted by the surrealist group, who were more intrigued by a materialist investigation of desire and irrational knowledge, and a de-alienated reconfiguring of the object world. Buñuel and Salvador Dali show a melding of the two in Un Chien Andalou, a film that toys with the corruption of reality, time, and symbolism. Dali believed that nature, including human nature, is itself irrational and surreal, …show more content…
“It is the mise-en-scène of a presence that affirms both its intention to narrate a story and power over the elements by means of which –and about which –it narrates.” Just in the nature of its presence, the viewer expects a story with the generally- accepted structure. Moreover, it speaks to the power such elements have on the way we perceive. This sense of disclosure and digression from the norm is continued in the following sequence. An unnamed man sharpens a razor blade as the clouds blow across the moon. With the same motion as the clouds, he holds a seemingly indifferent woman’s eye open and cuts it in half. The man goes unseen again in the film, and the victim (or accomplice?) returns, completely unscathed, after a title card reads ‘Eight Years Later.’ It is as if this opening is a completely different narrative than the rest of the film. The crime takes place in an unknown time or place with no visible consequences. Immediately the viewer is subjected to a world without the moral or physical confines of customary behavior. This sets the stage for the rest of the film as if to say, ‘Abandon all conceptions and
“Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” Luis Buñuel had this to say about his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), made during the heart of the surrealist period. This film came at a time during which the Dada movement was being substituted by the surrealist group, who were more intrigued by a materialist investigation of desire and irrational knowledge, and a de-alienated reconfiguring of the object world. Buñuel and Salvador Dali show a melding of the two in Un Chien Andalou, a film that toys with the corruption of reality, time, and symbolism. Dali believed that nature, including human nature, is itself irrational and surreal, …show more content…
“It is the mise-en-scène of a presence that affirms both its intention to narrate a story and power over the elements by means of which –and about which –it narrates.” Just in the nature of its presence, the viewer expects a story with the generally- accepted structure. Moreover, it speaks to the power such elements have on the way we perceive. This sense of disclosure and digression from the norm is continued in the following sequence. An unnamed man sharpens a razor blade as the clouds blow across the moon. With the same motion as the clouds, he holds a seemingly indifferent woman’s eye open and cuts it in half. The man goes unseen again in the film, and the victim (or accomplice?) returns, completely unscathed, after a title card reads ‘Eight Years Later.’ It is as if this opening is a completely different narrative than the rest of the film. The crime takes place in an unknown time or place with no visible consequences. Immediately the viewer is subjected to a world without the moral or physical confines of customary behavior. This sets the stage for the rest of the film as if to say, ‘Abandon all conceptions and