Luis Buñuel: Aesthetics of the Irrational: Un Chien Andalou + L’Age D’Or + Discussion featuring Maria Delgado, Jo Evans, Peter Evans, and Rob Stone (2024)

FAQs

What did Luis Buñuel do in writing about Un Chien Andalou? ›

In writing about Un Chien Andalou (Fig. 10.38), Luis Buñuel claimed that his aims were to evoke instinctive reactions of attraction and glorification in the audience.

Despite Buñuel and Dalí's energetic rejections of any rational meaning in the film, Un Chien Andalou is an exploration of desire and the obstacles in the path of instinctual passion, equally indebted to Surrealism and Freud.

Luis Buñuel (born February 22, 1900, Calanda, Spain—died July 29, 1983, Mexico City, Mexico) was a Spanish filmmaker who was a leading figure in Surrealism, the tenets of which suffused both his life and his work.

Final answer: The movie Un Chien Andalou was influenced by the Surrealist art movement, which emphasized the creative potential of the unconscious mind, and incorporated elements of Expressionism and Cubism.

After its "triumphant premiere", Un Chien Andalou was bought by the owner of "Studio-28". During its eight-month run, forty or fifty informers came to the police with a demand to ban such an indecent and cruel film. This was the beginning of years of insults and threats that haunted Buñuel until his old age.

The film's most famous scene, which features strange imagery and mysterious special effects, is a startling cut to the eye, shot with intense lighting and the eye of a deceased calf or goat.

In a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye is slit open--juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obsucuring the moon moving in the same direction as the knife through the eye--to grab the audience's attention. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally. A man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey towards the woman he's itching to kill. A shot of differently striped objects is repeatedly used to connect scenes.

An Andalusian Dog / Film synopsis

Un Chien Andalou has a scene of a man's hand with a razor that duplicates an intervening shot of clouds slicing a full moon by opening a woman's eye. The scene has been distinguished to become an emblem of surrealism in film.

In his 1939 autobiography, Buñuel further explained the Surrealistic approach that was taken in regard to Un Chien Andalou: “The film was totally in keeping with the basic principle of the school, which defined surrealism as 'Psychic Automatism,' unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond ...

Un Chien andalou, one of the seminal films of Surrealism and of the avant-garde cinema of the period, was the result of close collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

Who created surrealism in film? ›

Un Chien Andalou (1928)

Although The Seashell and the Clergyman is widely regarded as the first Surrealist film, it's legacy is somewhat overshadowed by Buñuel and Dalí's 1929 film Un Chien Andalou. Luis Buñuel was a Spanish filmmaker who aligned himself with the Surrealism movement.

Most of the filmmakers who made up the Fifth Generation had graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 and included Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Chen Kaige, Zhang Junzhao, Li Shaohong, Wu Ziniu and others.

The techniques that Dulac developed for his film - superimpositions, montage, displacement shots, hallucinatory, spectral imagery - would be found in later, better-known Surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou and Blood of a Poet.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Richard Wagner

He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Buñuel's works were known for their avant-garde surrealism which were also infused with political commentary.

Luis Buñuel created some of the most visually and emotionally shocking films of the 20^th century, particularly his first two films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or, and his Mexican film, Los Olivadados.

Un Chien andalou, one of the seminal films of Surrealism and of the avant-garde cinema of the period, was the result of close collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. During January 1929 the two worked on the conception of the script, tentatively titled Dangereux de se pencher au dedans.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou (1929) is infamous for many reasons, but perhaps the most indelible of its many strange images is the opener—a woman's eye being sliced through with a straight razor.