"Got me a movie
Slicing up eyeballs
Don't know about you, but I am
Un Chien Andalou
Wanna grow up to be a debaser." Pixies, in "Debaser"
Un Chien Andalou is a famous silent film whose "script" was
co-written by the (in)famous surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, and the renowned
director, Luis Bunel, and which marked Bunel's directorial debut. In
corroborating on this film, an early surrealist classic, Bunel and Dali both
agreed that "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation
of any kind would be accepted." There is, in short, no "plot" to this film.
Throughout its running time (only 16 minutes) the viewer is assaulted with
bizarre / shocking / unsettling images which stand in no definite logical and /
or causal relations to each other. The film is held together by a "logic"--if
one may speak of this film as having a logic at all!--of associations (e.g.
"stream of consciousness"), rather than an analytic, discursive logic. The
"point" of this film--again, if it has a point at all--seems to be to shock us,
to challenge us, and to overthrow the normal conventions / expectations we have
about the movies.
Since there is no plot to this film, I can't discuss it in this review. As
film critic Roger Ebert says, "To describe the movie is simply to list its shots
because there is no story line to link them." But as they're fascinating in
their own right, let me briefly mention some of the more memorable shots in this
film:
-
A man holds a straight razor in one hand and opens a woman's eye with his
other hand. This is followed by a shot of a full moon being "sliced" by a thin
white cloud. Next, we see an extreme closeup of an eye being sliced in half
(literally!) by a straight razor.
-
A man notices that there is a hole in the middle of his hand. A bunch of
ants come crawling out of that hole.
-
A woman looks at a severed hand which lies on a road and then pokes at it
with a stick.
-
A man sexually assaults a woman by grabbing her breasts. As he continues
to grab them, her top disappears and he's now grabbing a pair of bare breasts.
Then the breasts unexpectedly change into a pair of buttocks!
-
A man struggles to drag a big net across a room--a net which contains two
men, a piano, and a dead and bleeding calf.
-
A man's mouth disappears and in its place appears a thick patch of hair.
Then a woman examines one of her armpits and notices that it is hairless.
And so on. In short, Un Chien Andalou is full of such weird scenes
that follow one another but which stand in no apparent logical relations to each
other--we're talking "surrealism" with a capital "S"!
But, you might ask, why should one see this film at all? Personally, I
can think of the following reasons off the top of my head. First, since it is a
very famous and influential film, anyone who's even remotely interested in film
history should see it. Second, I think everyone should see at least one
surrealist film (e.g. to stretch their cinematic horizon--to put it simply, to
make you more open-minded). Third, its running time is very short: a scant 16
minutes (what else are you going to do with those 16 minutes?). Fourth, frankly
speaking, it is more interesting than most feature length films that Hollywood
puts out these days. Fifth, you get to perform the following thought experiment:
Nearly all the shots in this film were surprising / shocking to their original
viewers. Now, if they do not surprise / shock you, what does that
tell us about the contemporary expectations we have about films? (Have we been
so desensitized by films made since Un Chien Andalou that it no longer
has the power to surprise contemporary viewers--at all?) Finally, it is
interesting to observe ourselves trying to "make sense" of this film which
literally has no sense or meaning. Perhaps in this is revealed our natural
inclination towards order rather than disorder and chaos (i.e. We're not content
to view disorder as disorder but must transform it into something orderly
and intelligible.). If so, Un Chien Andalou would be doing something
which nearly all great films do: to teach us more about ourselves.
From seanmovies.freeyellow.com
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