Cinema
Un chien andalou
Luis Buñuel · 1929
Synopsis
A man sharpens a razor, looks at the moon, which a thin cloud is about to slice, and brings the blade close to a young woman's eye. “Eight years later”, a young man dressed as a nun falls off a bicycle in front of the woman's building. In the apartment, ants come out of a hole in his hand; in the street, an androgynous young woman touches a severed hand. The man chases the woman around the room, dragging pianos loaded with dead donkeys and two priests. The intertitles jump from one period to another without anything changing.
Context
Two dreams lie at the origin of the film: the director had seen a cloud cut the moon and a blade slit an eye, Dalí a hand full of ants. The two men wrote the screenplay in six days, rejecting any image that would come from culture or education, and Buñuel's mother paid for the shoot. On the evening of the premiere, at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, on 6 June 1929, the director had armed himself with stones. The film opened the surrealist group to him. The title was chosen to have no connection with the images; Lorca, their friend, believed himself targeted by it.
Who it is for
A silent short film, in black and white, with no continuous plot; its images refuse explanation, and that is the point.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the surrealist film par excellence; after its premiere, it stayed on the bill in Paris for several months.