Un Chien Andalou
NOTES FROM THE ROBERT SHORT INTRODUCTION
Bunuel and Dali had been college friends and they had a shared vision of decay and desire and a love of American comedy films, which at 19 and 25, respectively, they put in to ‘Un Chien Andalou’ after Bunuel’s mother gave him a loan.
They wrote the script in a week, much from shared dreams, and the film was shot in 2 weeks, of which Dali was only present for 1 day and seemingly interested in mise-en-scene (particularly the graphic match of dead donkeys and piano keys). They wanted no rational images in it at all, wanted to surprise and did not ever disagree over the making of it. This ‘logic of dreams’ was discovered, rather than invented.
Title – there were many alternatives, but seems to have been chosen because there is no reference at all to a Dog, from Andalusia or otherwise.
Surrealism had been slow to use films – Man Ray and others had made some attempt, but nothing had been successful.
This was Bunuel’s last attempt to get in to the film industry. He was not looking for profit (that would have been a bonus), but needed a critical success. Dali wanted the notoriety and acceptance in the Surrealist world. Bunuel attended the premiere with stones in his pockets, assuming the reaction would be bad. However, it was greeted enthusiastically and had a 8 month run.
Why did it work where other surrealist films hadn’t? Early examples had had no translatable parts and were completely bizarre for the audience. ‘Un Chien Andalou’ has a scaffolded structure – almost a half narrative. It had a revolutionary drive, it didn’t just want to defamiliarise reality. Bunuel and Dali made an ‘unholy pact’ with Hollywood conventions. They used a range of cues and gave the audience a promise of a realist text with conventional cinematography and characters – it can then tease and assault them. It is an interesting reaction against abstract and Hollywood cinema: ‘fertile ambiguity of dominant and counter culture.’
It called attention to the unreality of the medium – it used sight gags, the mix of high culture and trash and mature and infantile content.
Why did the surrealists stop making films? It was too expensive, they were a deliberately non-commercial group of people. They also weren’t interested in the drudgery and craft of film-making, so Bunuel became the only consistent surrealist export.