-Devdutt Trivedi
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou is perhaps the most iconic representative of surrealist film and ranks amongst the greatest short films ever made. The film would establish Buñuel as one of the most visionary directors of the cinema and become a milestone of surrealist art that would influence the subsequent paintings of Salvador Dali.
Before the film was made Luis Buñuel belonged to a movement known as the Ultraists movement, which ‘claimed to represent Spain’s avant-garde.’ Buñuel was an admirer of Dadaism the anti-bourgeoisie non-sensorial art form and the works of Jean Cocteau and Marinetti. Buñuel served as an assistant to Epstein in his Mauprat and The Fall of The House of Usher in 1925 and 1928 respectively whom Buñuel had a balanced view of :
The fact is that I learned very little from Epstein [ . . . ] When I watched Epstein direct, he frequently made me think – with the temerity of every newcomer – that this was not the way to do it, that the placing of the
camera, lights or cast ought to be in such or such another way. Epstein was patient with me. Above all, I learned by mentally elaborating the picture being made, seeing it in a different fashion
Salvador Dali, on the other hand, was the son of an attorney from Figueras in Catalonia and was termed ‘Czechoslovakian painter’ by his colleagues especially Buñuel whose description of Dali reeks of flamboyance:
He was a shy young man with long hair and a loud, deep voice. Indifferent to protocol and to life's little exigencies, he wore enormous hats, huge ties, a long jacket that hung to his knees, and puttees. Many people saw his strange appearance as an act of "vestimentary" provocation, and he had to put up with a fair bit of public insult, but he dressed that way only because he liked to. He also wrote poems, which were actually published; and as early as 1926 or '27 he had an exhibition of his paintings in Madrid, along with several other modern painters like Peinado and Vines.
The idea of making the film emerged when Buñuel shared one of his dreams of a razor blade cutting through an eye and Dali responded with one of his: a hand crawling with ants; which Dali claimed he had dreamt the previous night. The two had a script ready in a week, through a specific process of combining dissonant thoughts:
Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation
of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why. The amazing thing was that we never had the slightest disagreement; we spent a week of total identification.
The film works on the level of creating an experiential engagement with the truth which is in between realism and materialism, of creating the pure affection-image through its juxtapositioning of dissonant images. The surrealist artists Breton would recall this in his Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 through a piece of writing by Pierre Revedy:
The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from a
juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed
realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the
greater its emotional power and poetic reality...
The unusual juxtapositions do not ‘reduce the imagination to a state of slavery’ so that the viewer is in a position to ‘really live by [his/her] fantasies …[in order to].. give free reign to them.’ The succession of unusual juxtaposition decomposes the idea of ‘known’ logic to information so that the artists are mere ‘recording instruments’ and are not in themselves ‘mesmerized’ by the artworks they are making.
The film’s structure is based around specific inter-titles namely ‘Once upon a time’, ‘Eight years later’ and ‘Around 3 o’clock in the morning’ are transformed in the last section to the location of the beach prefaced by the inter title ‘At the beach.’ The spatial transformations of making ‘a room into a park, a room into a beach’ are co-ordinated with the temporal aspect which points to the nothingness beneath the surface of the film. The relative nature of time is first made abstract with ‘once upon a time’, then pushed through the operation of it being ‘years later’ until it becomes a denotational time ‘3 o’clock.’ This exploration of circularity (of time) in spatial formations (here the denotational space of the image) is denoted through Zeno’s paradox of the eccentric relationship between movement and trajectory (taken up in cinema by Hitchcock and Bresson) and Borges infinitely circular Library of Babel where the same book repeats twice in n number of repetitions.
The film addresses the Islamic formulation of the Zahir which can spatial transform from a coin to a tiger or a marble and is used to signify ‘being or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable and whose image finally drives one mad.’ Breton addresses madness in the Manifesto of Surrealism when he says:
It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.
The inter-titles and their addressing time from general to specific also engage with the cryptic temporal constructions of the Hindu texts describing Radha and Krisha:
Without Beginning or End,
Radha and Krishna,
Are yet to reach an acquaintance
The above poem is the opposite of the Surrealist masterpiece where the last intertitle would reach ‘Not at 3 O’clock in the morning.’
The film was premiered and Buñuel kept a few stones in his pocket fearing the worst. This was partially as he was concerned by the public agitation after the debut of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and The Clergyman(La Coquille et le clergyman,1928) scripted by Antonin Artaud. Those attending the premier at Ursulines in Paris included Picasso, Le Corbusier, Cocteau, Christian Berard, and the composer Georges Auric. Buñuel who described himself as a ‘nervous wreck’ at the time of the premier, was surprised by the prolonged applause after the screening and dropped the stones ‘one by one, on the floor behind the screen.’
After its triumphant premiere, Un Chien andalou was bought by Mauclaire of Studio 28 for ‘seven or eight’ thousand francs according to Buñuel. Despite its success, audiences complained, according to Buñuel,to the police about the film’s “cruelty” and “obscenity.” Henry Miller later described the audience’s reaction to the film:
Afterwards they showed Un Chien andalou. The public shuddered, making their seats creak, when an enormous eye appeared on the screen and was cut coldly by a razor, the drops of liquid from the iris leaping onto the metal. Hysterical shouts were heard.
Critical responses varied with the Brussels magazine Variétés, stating: ‘One forms the impression of being present at some authentic return of truth, of truth skinned alive.. .’ Robert Desnos’ criticism is the most important as he states: ‘I do not know of any film which affects the viewer so directly, which has been made so specifically for him, which engages him in conversation, in such an intimate relationship.’
The Surrealist movement found its basis is literature with a form of writing known as ‘automatic writing’ which Buñuel and Dali claimed they used, which replaced cause with subconscious juxtaposition. Buñuel himself wrote literary pieces and poems which appeared in several magazines. Literary elaborations on Un Chien Andalou were seen in the same year in Helix magazine, in Buñuel’s poem Palace of Ice (Palacio Del hielo):
The puddles formed a decapitated domino of buildings, one of which is the tower described to me in my childhood, with just one window, as high as the eyes of a mother when she leans over the cradle.
Close to the window is a man who has been hanged and who swings over the abyss, surrounded by eternity and howled at by space. IT IS I. It is my skeleton of which nothing remains but the eyes. At one moment they smile, at another they cross, at another THEY GO TO EAT A CRUMB OF BREAD IN THE INTERIOR OF THE BRAIN. The window opens and a woman appears, polishing her nails. When she believes that they are properly filed, she plucks out my eyes and hurls them into the street. My sockets are left, lonely, sightless, without desire, without sea, without baby chicks, without anything
Buñuel formed a triumvirate with Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca of opposing anti-bourgeoisie convention by producing a discourse of religion, being within the Church and opposing it through critique. Buñuel was critical of Lorca’s association with the outmoded Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, whom Lorca celebrated and calling his play ‘Love of Don Perlimplín (Amor de Don Perlimplín) a ‘piece of shit.’ When Lorca saw Un Chien Andalou, he was aware of Buñuel’s ‘uncompromising desire to offend’, and said:
‘Buñuel has made a little shit of a film. It’s called An Andalusian Dog, and I’m the dog’
The film maintains its ‘cult’ status after all these years. Buñuel and Dali would collaborate again for the last time in 1930 with L’Age D’Or (The Age of Gold). A follow up to Un Chien Andalou, the film was to be originally named La Bête Andalou or The Beast of Andulusia.
Reference
The Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton, 1924
My Last Sigh, Editions Robert Laffont, 1982
A Companion to Luis Buñuel, Gywnne Edwards, 2005
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges, New Directions,1964
Seen From Nowhere, Mani Kaul, Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern, Indira Gandhi Open University Press, 1991