Un Chien Andalou
Directed by Luis Buñuel
- fantasy
- thriller
- horror
The story
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
What it’s like
Stark black-and-white silent images with hard contrast and abrupt cuts: a razor sliding across a bright eyeball, clouds sliding past a full moon, a cut-off dinner party that feels staged against a flat, sunlit Parisian apartment. The camera is mostly static or gliding with blunt, dreamlike logic, and the grain of old 35mm stock gives everything a dusty, slightly scratched texture. Sound is absent in the original, so the mood comes from the rhythm of the edits and the sparse piano accompaniment that cycles through tango and Wagner. Its vibe is unsettling, playful and dissociative, somewhere between a nightmare and a practical joke. Pacing is brisk and fragmentary, under twenty minutes, with no conventional arc; the people are drifting, impulsive figures who never settle into a character. Violence is brief but shocking, with one notorious eye-cutting moment, plus sexual suggestion and a dead animal, and no gore beyond that single image. It suits a late-night viewing with a few friends or alone when you want to be disoriented, and it is for people who enjoy avant-garde cinema, surrealist art history and provocation.
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