THE EYE IN UN CHIEN ANDALOU
Made in 1929, The Andalusian Dog was the product of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and enfant terrible filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Having shared their fever dreams with each other, the pair forged their film as a reaction to avant-garde cinema of the time, following no linear narrative or concept. “No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted,” Buñuel wrote to Dalí during their planning. Their film has continued to defy explanation, with images of a hand crawling with ants, rotting donkey corpses on grand pianos, armpit hair, severed limbs, nudity, moths, and this arresting moment when a woman’s eye appears to be sliced by a man (Buñuel) using a razor blade. There’s no dog in it, Andalusian or otherwise.
Though the 17-minute silent film was hailed as a triumph at its Parisian premiere (audience members included Pablo Picasso, Lé Corbusier, Christian Bérand and Georges Auric) and enjoyed an eight-month theatrical run, it was the subject of police complaints over its content – claims were even made of it inducing miscarriages in pregnant viewers. The sliced eye, which opens the movie, was deemed both shocking and offensive to cinemagoers. The quick cuts from a woman’s eyeball being threatened with a razor, to a cloud cutting through the moon, and then onto a dead calf’s eye being sliced open to reveal the gelatinous vitreous beneath, gave the illusion of a video nasty, but were deliberately ambiguous – Buñuel used bleached lighting to make the calf’s fur less obvious to give the suggestion of horrific mutilation.
The film made art-world rock stars of Dalí and Buñuel. They easily secured a bigger budget (Buñuel’s mum had bankrolled their debut effort) for a second film together, L’age d’Or (1930), but had a bust-up during production and stopped seeing, erm, eye-to-eye on art. However, their cinematic legacy remained strong, their collaboration inspiring future provocative auteurs such as Hitchcock, Lynch and Polanski – and the film was the pre-show act during David Bowie’s 1976 Isolar tour. JC