Wednesday 15 July 2015

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Oh, this is the one where they do the cutty-eye thing..?

With the help of famous painter and friend Salvador Dali, this short film introduced the world to the surrealist mind of Luis Bunuel.

By the time I saw Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), I had already seen 3 or 4 Bunuel films and he was already making a huge impression on me. This 21 minute short, sometimes referred to as the best short film of all-time, was his opening foray into filmmaking.

This was an attempt to shock what he saw as the contemptible bourgeoisie, a theme that would become prevalent in his later works. The plot is disjointed, dream-like with unsettling images that have the ability to puncture into your pscyhe.

You can see the influence someone like David Lynch or Roman Polanski (I'm thinking Repulsion especially) would have taken from Un Chien Andalou. 

BEST SCENE: The eye cutting scene has stood the test of time.

BEST CHARACTER: N/A

BEST QUOTE: N/A


RATING:  ★★★☆ - I always struggle to rate short films but there is enough here to tentatively go 3 1/2 stars. It is very effective and I would have had no problem seeing another 40/50 minutes of this if Bunuel had fleshed it out to make a 70-80 minute feature film, much like Lynch's Eraserhead. That may have been able to allow for a little more narrative and character development (disjointed and strange as I'm sure it would have been)

MOVIES WATCHED:11
MOVIES REMAINING:990

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