And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Luis Bunuel said that if he were told he had 20 years to live and was asked how he wanted to live them, his reply would be: “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other 22 in dreams — provided I can remember them.” Dreams were the nourishment of his films, and from his earliest days as a surrealist in Paris to his triumphs in his late 70s, dream logic was always likely to interrupt the realism of his films
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.
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.
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.
