The Movie Screen Scene

Any attempt to put together the enfant terrible of cinema and the enfant terrible of the art world was bound to result in mischief. In 1929, this took the form of Un Chien Andalou. The title refers to a Spanish expression: “An Andalusian dog howls –someone has died”. Other than catching the sinister mood of this production, the title is largely meaningless.

The two collaborators who made Un Chien Andalou were the artist Salvador Dali and the future film-maker, Luis Buñuel. Both men were Spanish, surrealists, iconoclasts and born troublemakers.

Salvador Dali was a flamboyant and eccentric man who enjoyed attracting attention, both positive and negative. His paintings were similarly off-kilter, and contained weird and disturbing images that did not seem to belong in the landscape around them.

Luis Buñuel went on to become one of the most unusual auteurs in the history of cinema. He was one of the movie industry’s great rebels, a man who made films with a sardonic and amused air. His likes and dislikes were clearly expressed in every film he made. He loathed Fascism. He despised the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church, largely because they supported the Fascists in his native Spain. He loved surrealism and dreams. He liked sexual fetishism, possibly because he thought it was funny.

In 1929, both men were young, cocky and rebellious, and quite ready to take on the world. Un Chien Andalou was an early example of an effective piece of independent film-making. It was made on a small budget, and funded by money that Buñuel had borrowed from his mother.

What made Un Chien Andalou memorable was shock value. It must be the most famous shocking film of the silent era. It includes such images as an eyeball being slashed by a razor, ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s hand, another hand that has been severed, the rotting corpses of two donkeys lying across two pianos, and a couple of young lovers half-buried and seemingly dead on a beach.

It would be several decades before film-makers realised that there was a commercial appeal in images of extreme horror and violence, and these images would become more common on our screens. Yet here we have a taste of what is to come in a short art-house movie lasting barely more than twenty minutes.

When Alfred Hitchcock pushed the boundaries of sex and violence in Psycho, he did so knowing that there was an audience out there who might gasp or scream, but who would also enjoy watching it. The motives of Dali and Buñuel were different. The two men were out to offend as many people as possible.

At the Paris premiere, they were prepared for a strong reaction. If Buñuel is to be believed, he stood behind the screen, and his pockets were filled with stones to throw at the audience if they became enraged and attacked him. Imagine the indignation felt by the two men when the film was actually liked by the very people that they sought to insult. An exasperated Buñuel exclaimed:

What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?

There was a belated reaction against the film, with calls for its ban, and even claims that it caused a couple of miscarriages, but overall the film was not the smoking gun that the two men hoped it would be. A return match was planned when Dali and Buñuel agreed to work on another film together, which became L’Age D’Or, one of France’s first sound films.

The second movie both did, and did not work out as planned. While Dali and Buñuel worked together on the script, these two wayward artists were unable to maintain the collaboration for much longer. They had a falling-out, and Buñuel is said to have chased Dali off the set with a hammer. However it produced all the outrage that they could possibly desire. Reactionaries threw ink at the screen and assaulted viewers. Newspapers condemned it. The film was withdrawn from public showings for over forty years.

However that is another story. Let us return to Un Chien Andalou. The film is said to have been intended to present suppressed human emotions as its subject matter. This would certainly explain the weird and ugly images on screen, but I would be inclined to take such an explanation of the film very lightly.

In truth the danger of watching Un Chien Andalou is to look for meaning or symbolism where there is none. The images in the film came largely from the dreams of Dali and Buñuel. The film seeks to maintain that dream logic. The imagery is surrealistic. The chain of events is presented without connection. There is no continuity or causation.

If you wish to seek meaning or an explanation for what is happening, then you are wasting your time. The message here is precisely the lack of message. The film has no narrative or story, and exists as art.

A narrative has a clear sequence of time, for example. Events are followed by other events, and past events are shown in flashback only insofar as they related to present events. Un Chien Andalou does not have this structure, or any structure. The intertitles that appear on the screen are deliberately random and confusing: “Once upon a time”; “Eight years later”; “Around three in the afternoon”. At one point an intertitle appears which says: “Sixteen years ago,” and yet the scene has not changed. Dali and Buñuel are having fun with audience expectations.

Trying to offer a plot summary of Un Chien Andalou is fraught with difficulties. To do so is to impose a storyline on a film that wilfully does not offer us one. An honest summary has to involve constantly pausing to challenge what we have seen, and what interpretation we have put on events.

The film opens with a man sharpening a razor. He then uses the razor to cut open a woman’s eyeball while clouds slash across the moon in a seeming imitation of his action. But wait. I am already imposing a meaning on the film that may not be there. Does he sharpen the razor in order to cut the woman’s eyeball, or are the two actions unconnected?

Is it the woman’s eyeball that is cut, or is it just a random eyeball? (The eyeball was that of a calf, which Dali and Buñuel treated to make it look more human.) We see the woman later and her eye is fine. Does that mean it was not her?

I am again imposing meaning. I am assuming that the film has continuity and causation. This is a surrealistic dream. If he cuts her eye, there is no reason to imagine that she must stay that way for the rest of the film, or that we need to explain why her eye is now intact. (I have chosen not to post a picture of the eye-cutting, as it is something of a cliché. Almost every review I have looked at shows the same image.)

The audience assumes these things based on the traditional composition of a movie in which contiguous images on the screen are related, but that is not the case here. Look at what follows. A man falls off a bicycle while wearing part of a nun’s habit. The woman rushes downstairs to revive him and bring him in the house. Does she go downstairs to revive him due to his accident, or does she just go downstairs and revive him? We make the assumption based on the construction of the scene.

Does a woman’s armpit hair change into a sea urchin, or is it simply that the film cuts between armpit hair and a sea urchin? Does the man show glee when he sees an androgynous male getting run over in the street, or is he responding to something else? Or nothing? We have become so used to reaction shots in movies that we assume his response is connected to another event that we see at the same time.

Suddenly the man corners the woman and sexually assaults her. Her clothes briefly disappear showing him fondling her breasts. The breasts become her backside. As this cannot happen, are we to imagine that he is thinking about her naked while he gropes her? Or does she really become naked for a few seconds? This is a dream where anything can happen.

Why does he respond to her rejection of him by dragging two pianos across the room, and why do they have rotting donkeys on them? Why do the pianos suddenly change into stone tablets, and then into two astonished priests? However we are assuming that these images are chosen for a reason, or indeed that the man’s action in dragging these items is a response to the woman pushing him away. 

We see a couple of hands thrust through a wall jiggling martini shakers. When the woman hears them, she goes to the front door. Are we justified in considering that they represent the sound of the doorbell, or are the two images utterly unrelated?

A man enters and gesticulates to the other man. He throws the nun outfit through the window, and makes the first man stand against a wall. We suddenly realise that both men are the same. The first man shoots the second. He falls outside, and detectives examine his body.

However the setting is completely different. There is no reason to imagine this new scene is the result of the man being shot earlier except that the two scenes follow one another. There is no reason to imagine that the men who look at his body are detectives except that detectives usually examine dead bodies.

Other weird images follow, culminating in a seemingly romantic interlude on the beach. A couple embrace and kiss, and it seems as if we may get a sentimental ending after all. However anyone who is familiar with Buñuel’s works will not expect anything so soppy. An intertitle appears with the cheerful words, “In Spring”. The scene cuts back showing the couple half-buried in the sand, and apparently lifeless. The film ends.

Despite the stream of bizarre images on the screen, the settings used in the film are ordinary ones. We do not have the bizarre and distorted sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, for example. This may reflect the film’s low budget, but it is also the perfect backdrop for a surrealist art form. Surrealism depends for its effect on blending the normal and the abnormal. If everything is abnormal, then nothing stands out. The viewer’s attention is more easily drawn to seeing strange objects and events when they are found in an ordinary setting.

To watch Un Chien Andalou is to ask questions about the nature of art. What is it that makes a work of art? Is it the storytelling, the message, or the meaning? Here is a film that is devoid of any of those qualities. It is hardly even style. It is mere spectacle. Nonetheless this is a work of art. How can this be?

What constitutes art suddenly becomes elusive. Art is more about the way that something is constructed in order to convey the concerns and preoccupations of the artist. In the case of Dali and Buñuel, those preoccupations include surrealism, dreams, sexual ambiguity, fetishism, violence and the Church.

While the two men parted ways, they remained faithful to many of the idea found in this early work. Dali continued to produce shocking and weird paintings for the world to gaze on in wonder and bemusement. Buñuel stayed in the field of cinema. Not all his films were surrealist, but many of them were, even five decades later. Many were banned or caused a stir on their release.

Both artists amply lived up to the promise in this early work, and livened up their respective mediums with bold and mischievous works that enraged, baffled, intrigued and amused the world for many years to come.