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Un chien andalou
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Un Chien Andalou | |
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| Directed by | Luis Buñuel |
| Produced by | Luis Buñuel |
| Written by | Luis Buñuel Salvador Dalí |
| Starring | Pierre Batcheff Simone Mareuil Luis Buñuel Salvador Dalí Jaime Miravilles |
| Cinematography | Albert Duverger Jimmy Berliet |
| Editing by | Luis Buñuel |
| Release date(s) |  June 6, 1929 |
| Running time | 16 min. |
| Country | France |
| Language | Silent French intertitles |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Un Chien Andalou (English: An Andalusian Dog) is a 16-minute[1] surrealist film made in France in 1928 by Spanish writer/directors Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and released in 1929 in Paris. It is one of the best-known surrealist films of the French avant-garde film movement of the 1920s. It is also considered one of the most prominent films in Spanish Surrealism. It stars Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff as the unnamed protagonists.
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The film has no plot, in the normal sense of the word. There are two central characters, an unnamed man and woman. The chronology of the film is disjointed: for example, it jumps from "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events changing. It uses dream logic that can be described in terms of Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes that attempt to shock the viewer.
The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor. The man with the razor is played by Buñuel himself. In subsequent scenes, a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge (a literalization of the French phrase "ants in the palms," meaning that someone is "itching" to kill or is motivated by sexual desire); an androgynous blind woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane before being knocked down by a car; a man fondles a woman, who resists him violently, and then he drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and two live priests (Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene); the man's father (played by the same actor as the man himself) arrives to punish him, but the man eventually shoots him with two pistols that appear seemingly out of nowhere; and a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face.
At the end of the film, the woman walks out of the apartment building, and meets another man on the beach (also played by Dalí). They seem to be happy, but the final shot shows two figures (apparently Mareuil and Dalí) buried in sand, dead, and "consumed by swarms of flies" according to Buñuel's original script. However, this latter special effect was left out due to budget limitations.
Modern prints of the film feature a soundtrack: excerpts from Richard Wagner's Liebestod, the concert version of the finale to his opera Tristan und Isolde, and two Argentinian tangos. These are the same music that Buñuel played on a phonograph during the original 1929 screening; he first added them to a sound print of the film in 1960.[2]
American film critic Roger Ebert has called Un chien andalou "the most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times."[3]
In spite of varying interpretations, Buñuel made clear throughout his writings that, between Dalí and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted."[4] Moreover, he stated that, "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."[5]
Film scholar Ken Dancyger has argued that Un chien andalou might be the genesis of the filmmaking style present in the modern music video.[6] Roger Ebert has called it one of the first low budget independent films.[3]
The eye actually being cut in the opening scene was that of a dead cow. Through intense lighting, Bunuel was able to make the furred face of the animal appear smooth, as skin.
Both of the leading actors eventually committed suicide: Batcheff in Paris in 1932 and Mareuil in Perigueux in 1954.
This film was referred to in the song about Bunuel, Debaser, by indie band The Pixies.
- ^ http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Ca-Chr/Un-Chien-Andalou.html
- ^ Buñuel, 1968
- ^ a b Roger Ebert. "Un Chien Andalou (1928)". April 16, 2000.
- ^ Buñuel, Luis (1983). My Last Sigh, Abigail Israel (trans), New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-394-52854-9.
- ^ P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
- ^ Dancyger, Ken. The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice. New York: Focal Press, 2002.
- Buñuel, Luis; Salvador Dalí (1968). Classic Film Scripts: L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou, Marianne Alexandre (trans.), New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-85647-079-1.
- Download or watch Un chien andalou at UbuWeb
- Un chien andalou at the Internet Movie Database
- Roger Ebert's review
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