La chien andalou
FR 16m Dir: Luis Bunel
Original Screenplay
I think I'd best describe An Andalusian Dog as a surrealist nightmare. It's a collaboration between Spanish director Luis Buñuel and surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.
There's a debate to be had about whether it really has a plot. It's essentially just a series of disturbing images which include a woman's eye appearing to be sliced with a knife, a hand with a hole in from which ants crawl out of, an androgynous figure poking a severed hand in the middle of a street, dead horses on pianos and a woman's armpit hair suddenly moving to where a man's mouth should be.
Individually these images are intriguing and really well portrayed. The sliced eyeball is particularly disturbing and well executed. The film even has an appearance from a death head's hawkmoth, the insect that appear to have a skull on it's back which is more famously seen in Silence of the Lambs. They are pieces of art which both shock and intrigue in typical Dali style.
Strangely though, these images are stitched together into some sort of narrative. The same characters appear throughout and we see captions like "eight months later". It's unclear whether there is meant to be a story here or not. I tend to favor the latter opinion, that this is just a series of images which are linked together and that there is not story or meaning behind the film as a whole.
At the same time though, it's possible to come up with a meaning to it. I don't think there really is one but maybe the whole point of this piece was for viewers to watch it and then put there own interpretations of the story to it. It's not difficult to imagine groups of friends seeing this in Paris in 1929 and then spending much of the evening discussing it afterwards.
If I was forced to come up with a meaning to the narrative here, I'd say it's a story where an unhinged man pursues a woman who doesn't welcome his advances. He tries repeatedly to seduce her but fails. When he later discovers her with a lover on a beach he murders them both and buries them in the sand up to their necks. Frankly I don't know if this interpretation says more about the film or me!
I'm not sure whether I can say if I liked this or not. It's not a film in any conventional sense but it's an interesting artwork which you can think about endlessly and still never really come up with any conclusions about it.
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