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Un
Chien andalou
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The directorial debut of Luis Buñuel, collaborating with artist Salvador Dalí, is etched into our consciousness of film history because of one image above all others: a razor slicing open an eyeball. What is this: shock tactic, symbol of a modernist "new vision", male aggression towards woman? For Jean Vigo – who hailed Un Chien andalou for its "social consciousness" – Buñuel's associative montage raised a philosophical query: "Is it more dreadful than the spectacle of a cloud veiling a full moon?" One thing is certain: the image kicks off a classic Surrealist parable of Eros ever-denied, ever-frustrated by society's institutions and mores. Too often – because of its heavy influence on rock video – Un Chien andalou has been reduced to, and recycled as, a collection of disconnected, striking, incongruous images: dead horse on a piano, ants in a hand. But this overlooks what gives the work its cohering force: the fact that, in many ways, Buñuel scrupulously respects certain conventions of classical continuity and linkage, creating a certain, disquieting narrative sense among these fragments from the unconscious. This amounts to a dialectic of surface rationality versus deep, churning, forces from the Id – a dialectic that Buñuel will explore to the very end of his career. MORE Buñuel: Belle de jour, Tristana, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Abismos de pasión, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie © Adrian Martin April 2003 |
