"His first film, written in collaboration with the notorious surrealist
artist Salvador Dali, was "Un Chien Andalou" (1928). Neither the title
("an Andalusian dog") nor anything else in the film was intended to make
sense. It remains the most famous short film ever made, and anyone
halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually
several times.
It was made in the hope of administering a revolutionary shock to
society. "For the first time in the history of the cinema," wrote the
critic Ado Kyrou, "a director tries not to please but rather to alienate
nearly all potential spectators." That was then, this is now. Today,
its techniques have been so thoroughly absorbed even in the mainstream
that its shock value is diluted--except for that famous shot of the
slicing of the eyeball, or perhaps the shot of the man dragging the
grand piano that has the priests and the dead donkeys on top of it. . . .
It is useful to remember that "Un Chien Andalou" was made not by the
Bunuel and Dali that we see as crumbling old men in photographs, but by
headstrong young men in their 20s, intoxicated by the freedom of Paris
during the decade of the Lost Generation. There is a buried connection
between the surrealists and the Sex Pistols, Bunuel and David Lynch,
Dali and Damien Hirst (the artist who exhibited half a lamb in a cube of
plastic). "Although the surrealists didn't consider themselves
terrorists," Bunuel wrote in his autobiography, "they were constantly
fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn't guns, of
course; it was scandal."
The scandal of "Un Chien Andalou" has become one of the legends of the
surrealists. At the first screening, Bunuel claimed, he stood behind the
screen with his pockets filled with stones, "to throw at the audience
in case of disaster." Others do not remember the stones, but Bunuel's
memories were sometimes a vivid rewrite of life. When he and his friends
first saw Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary Soviet film "Battleship
Potemkin," he claimed, they left the theater and immediately began
tearing up the street stones to build barricades. True?
"Un Chien Andalou" was one of the first handmade films--movies made by
their creators on a shoestring budget, without studio financing. It is
an ancestor of the works of John Cassavetes and today's independent
digital movies. Bunuel (1900-1983), a Spaniard lured to Paris by vague
dreams of becoming an artist, found employment in the film industry,
learned on the job, was fired for insulting the great director Abel
Gance and drifted into the orbit of the surrealists.
He went to spend a few days at the house of Dali, a fellow Spaniard, and
told him of a dream he'd had, in which a cloud sliced the moon in half,
"like a razor blade slicing through an eye." Dali countered with his
own dream about a hand crawling with ants. "And what if we started right
there and made a film?" he asked Bunuel, and they did. They wrote the
screenplay together, and Bunuel directed, taking only a few days and
borrowing the budget from his mother.
In collaborating on the scenario, their method was to toss shocking
images or events at one another. Both had to agree before a shot was
included in the film. "No idea or image that might lend itself to a
rational explanation of any kind would be accepted," Bunuel remembered.
"We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images
that surprised us, without trying to explain why."
The image of the moon was followed by the image of a man with a razor
(Bunuel) slicing a woman's eye (actually a calf's eye--although legend
has transformed it into a pig). The hand crawling with ants was followed
by a transvestite on a bicycle, a hairy armpit, a severed hand on the
sidewalk, a stick poking the hand, a silent-movie style sexual assault, a
woman protecting herself with a tennis racket, the would-be rapist
pulling the piano with its bizarre load, two apparently living statues
in sand from the torso up, and so on. To describe the movie is simply to
list its shots, since there is no story line to link them.
And yet we try to link them nevertheless. Countless analysts have
applied Freudian, Marxist, and Jungian formulas to the film. Bunuel
laughed at them all. Still, to look at the film is to learn how
thoroughly we have been taught by other films to find meaning even when
it isn't there.
Bunuel told an actress to look out the window at "anything -- a military
parade, perhaps." In fact, the next shot shows the transvestite falling
dead off the bicycle. We naturally assume the actress is looking at the
body on the sidewalk. It is alien to everything we know about the
movies to conclude that the window shot and the sidewalk shot simply
happen to follow one another without any connection. In the same way, we
assume that the man pulls the pianos (with the priests, dead donkeys,
etc) across the room because his sexual advance has been rebuffed by the
woman with the tennis racket. But Bunuel might argue the events have no
connection -- the man's advance is rejected, and then, in an absolutely
unrelated action, he picks up the ropes and starts to pull the pianos.
While looking at "Un Chien Andalou," it is useful to look with equal
attention at ourselves as we watch the movie. We assume it is the
"story" of the people in the film -- these men, these women, these
events. But what if the people are not protagonists but merely models --
simply actors hired to represent people performing certain actions? We
know that the car at the auto show does not belong to (and was not
designed or built by) the model in the bathing suit who points to it.
Bunuel might argue that his actors have a similar relationship to the
events surrounding them.
Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) made another surrealist film, "L'Age d'Or"
(1930), which was accused of sacrilege and suppressed for many years. He
was a journeyman for MGM at one point, supervising the Spanish-language
versions of Hollywood movies. He made many movies in Mexico, some of
them, like "The Young and the Damned" and "The Criminal Life of
Archibaldo de la Cruz" highly valued. At 61 he had a worldwide hit with
"Viridiana." with its shocking scene modeled on the Last Supper, and for
the next 17 years, a period of inspired productivity, produced one
astonishing film after another, such as "The Exterminating Angel,"
"Diary of a Chambermaid," "Belle de Jour," "That Obscure Object of
Desire," "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise," "Tristana" and "The
Phantom of Liberty."
"Un Chien Andalou" is a curtain-raiser: In a way, he was never
unfaithful to it. A movie like this is a tonic. It assaults old and
unconscious habits of moviegoing. It is disturbing, frustrating,
maddening. It seems without purpose (and yet how much purpose, really,
is there in seeing most of the movies we attend?). There is wry humor in
it, and a cheerful willingness to offend. Most members of today's
audiences are not offended, and maybe that means the surrealists won
their revolution: They demonstrated that art (and life) need not follow
obediently within narrow restrictions that have been decreed since time
immemorial. And that in a film that is alive and not mummified by
convention, you never know what you might see when you look out the
window."
