Un Chien Andalou

The great Spanish director Luis Bunuel once was asked what he would do if he had 20 years to live and he replied: "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other 22 in dreams, provided I can remember them." Dreams were the framework of several of his avant-garde films, starting early on during his early days with surrealist artist Salvatore Dali and right to the very end in Paris during the late 1970's. Un Chien Andalou was Bunuel's first film written in collaboration with Salvador Dali and its title which translated to 'An Andalusian dog', doesn't make logical sense along with anything else within the film, nor was it meant to. Un Chien Andalou remains one of the most famous short films in the world and sooner or later any film buff and cinephile will come across seeing it, probably more than once.

Un Chien Andalou's basic purpose was simple: To create a scandal among audiences and to shock, disturb and startle them. Critic Ado Kyrou said, "For the first time in the history of the cinema a director tries not to please but rather to alienate nearly all potential spectators." Today its revolutionary style and shocking images of a Freudian sexual nature are still discussed by film buffs, whether its the image of the moon followed by the image of a man with a razor slicing a woman's eye (actually it was a calf's eye), the hole in the hand with several ants emerging, the transvestite on a bicycle or a severed hand on the sidewalk with a stick poking at it. To describe the movie is simply to list its shots, because there is no real story to link any of these abstract images. The scandal of Un Chien Andalou has become a story of legends in the surrealist movement, in which Bunuel claimed that at the films first screening he stood behind the screen with his pockets filled with stones reading to throw at the audience in case of a disaster. Fortunately for Bunuel, he didn't have to use them.