Un Chien Andalou
I am going to being this article with a nostalgia trip for me and how predominant this movie has been in my life. When I was six, I first visited London and instead of the usual Madame Tuesauds (not Man With Two Swords as I thought…) , The London Dungeons and such, my parents took me to the Museum of Moving images (now the BFI Southbank) which I believe quite rightly cemented my now destined career (cue mystical music.) Several images have stuck with me; trying and failing to make a cartoon in a carousel (I was six,) pretending to be Superman and a giant hand with ants coming out of it.
(Yeah...my childhood was weird)
That hauntingly and pretty scary (I was six,) image has been lodge in my mind since and lo and behold when studying film what did I end up watching;
Un Chien Andalou.
(This has been in lots of movies and television shows such as The Simpsons.)
A treat for both cult enthusiasts and fans of foreign movies (although there is no actual speaking within this movie,) French film (as it was produced in France) Un Chien Andalou is perhaps the oldest surrealist short movie of all time. As a collaboration between Spanish director Luis Brunel and artist Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou is a collection of striking scenes and images. There is no real narrative plot and the film plays like a dream sequence where the only key figures are a “Young Woman” played by Simone Mareuil and “Young Man” played by Pierre Batcheff. After this, the movie descends into some of the most striking imageries a movie can offer. The most famous would be the eye slicing scene where Brunel quite cleverly juxtaposes a cloud slicing a moon as he cuts our “heroines” eye. There is the previous ant scene that was inspired from a dream that Dali had, a man pulling a grand piano with two confused Bishops inside and a hand detached from its body holding a cane. Un Chien Andalou is an unsettling yet vivid movie.
According to cult legend, in 1928 when Un Chien Andalou was first released filmmakers Brunel and Dali were so convinced of a scathing response by cinema goers that they went to the premiere with rocks in their pockets to ward off gangs of loathing people. However, Un Chien Andalou was pretty successful. Infuriatingly, the film was much loved by the French Bourgeoisie. This was much to Brunel’s disappointment who created the film to oppose the sensible cinema and much of the normal narrative. He famously exasperated that he couldn’t do anything to rile the masses; “"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?*”
(One of these is Salvador Dali.)
But love it they did and perhaps it is due to its complete lack of sensibility. The disjointed movie has stripped back all conventions and created a moving images that are imprinted within us. It stays with us as a fantasy and as a dream. After all, we all dream and we all lose ourselves in images that haunt us long after they are gone. How often do we sit around dazed after awaken from the night trying to recollect the images that we cannot shake for days.
So maybe that is the secret to Un Chien Andalou. That the film has reached inside all of us and imprinted its images have stuck long after we first saw them. That we can accept its surrealism and weirdness because we have it within us. Un Chien Andalou is beautiful in its oddity and it lasts forever. What Brunel and Dali did was take our subconscious, accept its random non-linear ways because it is unforgettable and timeless. Un Chien Andalou is like melting watches in the desert, it is art. Moving art that is there to be striped, analysed and provoke memory and emotion with us.
Un Chien Andalou is a treasured masterpiece of surrealism because it is real to us all.
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