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Still shot from the filming of Un Chien andalou, 1929
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Still shot from the filming of Un Chien andalou, 1929
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Still shot from the filming of Un Chien andalou, 1929
Year: 1929
Director: Luis Buñuel
Original script: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
Producer: Luis Buñuel
Length: 16 min.
Un Chien andalou, one of the seminal films of Surrealism and of the avant-garde cinema of the period, was the result of close collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. During January 1929 the two worked on the conception of the script, tentatively titled Dangereux de se pencher au dedans. Filming took place in Paris during the first fortnight of April of that year.
In Dalí's words, Un Chien andalou was the product of fraternal collaboration and perfect mutual understanding between Buñuel and himself. According to Buñuel, the short film is the meeting of two dreams: Dalí's - a hand covered in ants - and his own - a knife slicing an eye. The script was written in less than a week, following a simple rule adopted by mutual accord: not to incorporate any image or idea for which the viewer could come up with a rational, psychological or cultural explanation.
The result is a succession of dreamlike sequences that violate conventional narrative schemes. Each of these sequences takes a nonlinear approach to time so that the viewer is unable to understand the plot in terms of the established principles of cause and effect. The famous scene in which the young man slowly cuts open the woman's eye with a safety razor, while a thin cloud passes in front of the disk of the full moon, can be interpreted as an invitation to look at cinema in a new way.