Un chien andalou

Produced in France in 1928 it both stems from and criticizes the French avant-garde film movement of the time.

The film is a series of apparently unrelated, and at times offensive, scenes that attempt to shock the viewer. The film breaks from avant-garde tradition by focusing on content as well as on cinematic form: surprising camera angles and film "tricks".

The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor, and continues with a series of surreal scenes - a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane, a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments and two live priests (Salvador Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene), a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge, a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face.

The chronology of the film is disjointed; jumping from "once upon a time" to "eight years later" etc. The same two characters, an unidentified "man" and a "woman" reappear throughout.

Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The man dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of man's progress towards his goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that he is forced to bear.

In 1960, a soundtrack was added to this film under the direction of Luis Buñuel. He used the same music which was played (using phonograph records) at the 1929 screenings - extracts from "Liebestod" from Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and two Argentinian tangos.

Another interesting thought is that the image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as Buñuel "attacking" the film's viewers (Buñuel himself plays the man wielding the razor; the eye is actually that of a dead calf).

During his 1976 tour, rock star and icon David Bowie used this film as his 'opening' act. It is also heavily referenced in the Pixies' song "Debaser". Esthero's music video for "Heaven Sent" draws heavily from the imagery of this film.

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