Un Chien Andalou

1929 during the Surrealist movement, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí created Un Chien Andalou. The film leaves a lasting impression on all its viewers and leaves them wondering what the purpose of the film was. It has no plot; it is a series of shots that do not link together. Title cards separate the shots and notify changes in time that do not match up with what is happening in the shots. The film pushed boundaries with its content and caused uproar among viewers. The purpose of the film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí was to evoke shock and anger in viewers, and show Surrealistic art in a different way. In 1924 André Breton wrote The Surrealist Manifesto, which began the Surrealist movement. Starting out as a literary group, they wrote whimsical poetry using free association. It later evolved into the eccentric paintings the movement is most known for today. It stemmed from the Dada movement, which was an…

The most famous images within the film are the severed hand, a hand swarmed with ants and a hand slicing into a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade. The repetitive use of the hand within Un Chien Andalou symbolises fetish; “what hands can do and how they can generate both intense pleasure and intolerable pain.” (Hutchinson, 2014) This relates back to the themes of subconscious desires which is emphasised by the grotesque imagery which dominates the film. Dali compared the slicing with “the…

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…

The very first scene in ‘Un Chien Andalou’ made me cringe when the man slit the woman's eyeball. Just the start of the move alone gave me the feeling that I would be watching a horror film. But as the rest of the film continued I started to feel that the movie may be categorized under a mystery or as a sci-fi. Though Un Chien Andalou wasn't one of my favorite films since it was quite hard for me to follow the story. From my understanding the movie was supposed to portray that the protagonist…

“Nothing, in this film, symbolizes anything” (Buñuel). Both Dali and Buñuel strived to have no image or idea in the film, Un Chien Andalou, have any logical or rational explanation. However, when you break up what Buñuel says you can argue that “nothing” stands for all the images and ideas in the film that to one represent nothing logical or rational, and these images can “symbolize anything” to the individual. When making this film, Buñuel’s intentions were to astound and offend the…

“What? Oh… yesterday? That’s not... I’m a film student at university. That was Un Chien Andalou. It’s amazing it’s this French film by a Spanish director and even Salvador Dali helped to make the film he’s an-” “He’s an artist… he does the funny clocks right?” Louis asked as he took a small sip of his coffee, it was sickly sweet and yet he liked it. “You’re into art?” Harry’s voice seemed to echo a slight surprise. “Not really, my boyfriend is mad about it, he thinks he’s going to be the…

In February of 2004, Jonathan Jones wrote an article titled, “The joy of gore” and shares that after 1929 and release of the short film Un Chien Andalou, was the turn when society began to look at cinema differently (Jones web). In this film, we are the viewer have no time to brace for the shock and honor or seeing the eye sliced open and begin to ooze, it sparked a new desire of the unexpected. While at first this was traumatic to many, society as a whole wanted more. In the film Spellbound by…

Un Chien Andalou is a silent movie that was produced in 1928 by the director, Luis Buñel, along with the help of Salvador Dali. The idea for the movie came from Buñel, after having a dream that he shared with Dali. Buñel said that he saw the moon being sliced in half by a cloud, while Dali responded that he too had a dream in which he had seen a hand crawling with ants. This led to Dali expressing an interest in creating a movie. The continuous collaboration between the two of them went very…

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” “Yes. If we put little wheels on the bottoms of our shoes, we could just roll around everywhere...” The characters Helena and Valentine from the film MirrorMask have this dialogue and it sums up the randomness of surrealism. It emphasizes how two completely arbitrary unrelated objects can be fused together in the creative world of surrealism where there essentially are no boundaries. This essay will discuss that in terms of the film MirrorMask, and Un…

Gary Wills is the author of the book James Madison, which details the life of James Madison through his career as a politician. The focus of the book is Madison’s presidency, which Wills brings to the forefront as the major topic. Wills states that most other books do not focus on Madison’s presidency saying, “Madison’s very presidency is semi-forgotten. When Madison expert Jack N. Rakove published a selection of his writings in 1999, only 40 of its 864 pages came from his presidential years.”…