Two dreams over lunch became the founding film of surrealist cinema
Luis Buñuel told Salvador Dalí about a dream of a cloud cutting the moon like a razor. Dalí replied with his own: a hand swarming with ants. Buñuel declared they had their film. Un Chien Andalou, shot in ten days in 1928 on his mother's money, still has no plot on purpose.
Buñuel was then an assistant to the director Jean Epstein, whose circle believed every artistic choice needed a rational reason. The pair wrote the script in a few days with the opposite rule: any image that invited a logical explanation was thrown out. When one proposed an idea and the other objected, the objection won instantly. Buñuel later insisted that nothing in the film symbolises anything, suggesting only psychoanalysis could probe it.
The result is a 17-minute black-and-white silent film, although some sources say 24 minutes, filmed partly at Le Havre and partly on Paris soundstages at Billancourt. Title cards jump from once upon a time to eight years later and sixteen years ago while nothing changes. A man drags pianos loaded with dead donkeys and two priests across a room; a mouth vanishes from a face. The notorious opening shot of a slit eye used a calf's eye, lit and bleached so the fur looked like skin. The donkeys mocked Platero y yo, a beloved children's book both men detested, and budget limits replaced a planned ending with a still of a couple half-buried in sand. Jean Rouch reported that Buñuel, out of funds, edited the reels in his own kitchen.
Picasso, Le Corbusier, Cocteau and André Breton's entire Surrealist group attended the premiere at the Studio des Ursulines. Buñuel claimed he had stones in his pockets to hurl at the crowd if things went wrong. Instead they loved it, which relieved him and reportedly disappointed Dalí, who found the evening less exciting for it.
The film ran for eight months. Some forty or fifty people went to the police demanding a ban, yet it was never prohibited. Buñuel, who had meant to insult the intellectual bourgeoisie, was exasperated by their applause. Breton then formally welcomed the two men as the first filmmakers admitted to the Surrealist movement.
Source: Un Chien Andalou
