Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
33 connections found
View:
33 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Un Chien Andalou to
It does owe more to the 1929 short "Un Chien Andalou," in which a pig�s eyeball is sliced, than it does to There�s Something About Mary or the slew of raunchy comedies that have been released since (just think of recent ones: Say It Isn�t So , Tomcats , Joe Dirt, etc., etc., ad nauseam).
Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered is the most startling debut since Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou, with which it has a few things in common: both are constructed with a wilful disdain towards narrative; both are aimed at the outer limits of shocking imagery; both display an open hostility for the cultural status quo; and both joke on their audience's entrenched preconceptions of film form.
Researchers fall, evil keeps taking on new forms, and Carpenter has great fun setting up the scares in scenes that pay homage to Luis Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou,” Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, and other films that created a sense of the otherworldly on a limited budget.
Jeffrey discovers a severed, ant-infested human ear near a grassy trail (Lynch's homage to Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou ), bringing it to the attention of the local police chief.
Even as Psyche expresses this anxiety about falling under the influence of a film as much as of drugs, her interview, and those of the other dancers, are shown on a television set alongside a pile of videos whose titles – Suspiria, Possession, Hara-Kiri, Querelle, La Maman et la Putain, Un Chien Andalou, Labyrinth Man (i.e. the French title of Eraserhead) – will also cast a dark spell over what follows, dosing the narrative of Climax with their own specific motifs and moods (chiefly free love, writhing hysteria, disorientation and danses macabres, infanticide, suicide and transcendence).
There are VHS copies of Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salò and Harakiri, and books by Nietzsche and on Taxi Driver , Murnau and Fritz Lang.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Advertisement
Pan also evokes Bu/+/-uel -- sometimes very directly, such as in the image of Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) with a straight razor in hand and a cigarette in his mouth, deliberately recalling Un Chien Andalou (1927) -- but more gracefully, more organically.
The others are subjected to electroshock treatments, whippings, stabbings with an ice pick, the slicing open of an eyeball with a razor blade (cringeworthy, but hardly original; people who saw Un Chien Andalou have cringed already) and drowning by submerging one’s head in a barrel of water for two minutes.
What it inspires is morbid curiosity (will that guy actually perform an un chien andalou on his own eyeball?), which isn't the same thing.
And hey, that's good to know since Smith tells us that the idea of moviegoing will probably be dead in a few years -- a view accompanied by scenes from Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou .
A clip from Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou – the straight razor slicing an eye open – plays out in successive gross-out scenes: A close-up of Smith having his shoes vomited on in the club; then later, our pretty hero stepping into dog leavings.
Porn and horror film violence have always shadowed art cinema, and in films as varied as Un chien andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, Saló, Hiroshima mon amour, Persona, and Prénom Carmen, art cinema claims the power to depict the most extreme human behavior in a coherent, mediated way, incorporating but going beyond the capacity of marginal sensationalist genres.
This cinematic tradition can be traced back at least as far as 1929, when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí began their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou with a depiction of a man slicing a woman's eyeball open.
Her despair promptly ferments into a passionate hatred for her husband, who she subjects to prolonged torture after mutilating herself in a scene so shocking it makes the eye-slicing scene from Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (1929) look like a Hi-5 dance routine.
Advertisement
She does touch upon how the trio influenced each other's art (Buñuel only through his short film cowritten with Dalí, "Un Chien Andalou," which the Andalusian García Lorca interpreted as a rebuke).
That last image is from Luis Bunuel’s 1929 surrealistic classic “Un chien andalou,” which the director co-wrote with painter Salvador Dali.
And Morrison dares to throw Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" into the mix (and onto the screen), giving the famous experimental short a context heretofore unknown to most viewers.
In its best moments, it brings to mind none other than Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (available here ; watch it, because if you haven’t seen Un Chien Andalou, you haven’t seen jack).