Un Chien Andalou Essay

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The short surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) created by Spanish artists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí stands out in film history as one of the most influential and shocking films of all time. It was one of the first films described by Andre Breton as a true surrealist film (Edwards, 2005). Early surrealists praised the film for defying conventional filmmaking particularly concepts of narrative, they saw it as an assault of commercial filmmaking of the time (Lang, 2012). The film is not linear and the narrative is disjointed, there appears to be no narrative progression throughout the film, though many critics have searched for one. Narrative structure and making sense of a film tend to be two concepts that come hand in hand however with the ambiguous narrative it is not clear whether any meaning can be drawn from the film. Buñuel admitted “No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted” (Buñuel, 1983), therefore the filmmaker’s intentions from the outset was to take the viewer on an illogical journey. Buñuel and Dalí came up with the ideas for the film out of their own dreams …show more content…

For Buñuel there is a ‘link between the sexual act and death’ he resolves that he has learnt from the teachings of the Catholic Church during his upbringing. This sequence was important to try and ‘translate this inexplicable feeling into images.’ (Buñuel, 1983) In Surrealist film, images tend to derive from the arts life or subconscious, the donkeys for Buñuel could also be a reflection of his childhood where it was a common sight to see dead donkeys in the street, ‘I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance,” (Buñuel, 1983). It could be that narrative is carried through by the symbolism and imagery used to convey anti-establishment messages, views usually held by the

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