So, is this a surrealist classic, or truly an Andalusian dog of a film?
This is yet another film that i became aware of at a young age, when it was obliquely referred to by Alan Frank in Horror Films (Hamlyn, 1977) - a tome that was bought for me second hand when i was bedridden with mumps - as the film that closed the first, silent, period of the genre and fantasy cinema but that it was "obscurity... taken by some critics to be the same as profundity". Therefore, since the age of ten or so, i have always been in something of a dichotomous dilemma over whether or not i ever wanted to see it. On the one hand, the brief synopses i'd read that went in any way to describing the content of the film - a short series of vignettes containing surrealistic, bizarre and horrific imagery - sounded great; on the other, Mr Frank's and others' opining that it was some kind of 'artsy-fartsy' experiment masquerading as a genre piece was always hovering like a sneering bit of reverse snobbery at the back of my cranium.
Of course, by the time i was a university student, the latter description would actually increase its appeal - me having grown into an artsy-fartsy type myself - and it was no coincidence (or perhaps it was, as it's a damn great record in its own right) that one of my favourite albums since secondary school was the Pixies' Doolittle containing the magnificent slab of noise 'Debaser' with its chorus quoting the title of Un Chien Andalou. And it would be at a gig by the then newly-reformed Pixies (i can still remember my excitement: who thought that would ever happen? I'd discovered them shortly after their implosion [my entry level 'album' was their post-mortem compilation Death to the Pixies] and so never dared to dream i'd ever see them live - but there we were in Glasgow's SECC on the 4th of October 2009, when before the band took to the stage the lights dimmed and the 16 monochrome minutes of Un Chien Andalou were projected upon the backdrop wall. Along time after i'd first read about it, here it was unspooling before me when i was already in a state of anticipation and excitement, and having to shush and wave away the friends around me who were impatient for some rock action.
Written by Salvador Dali and directed by Luis Bunuel (of future Viridiana [1961], The Exterminating Angel [1962] and Belle de Jour [1967] fame), this dog certainly has a fine pedigree. It opens boldly with one of its most infamous images: a man (a self-insertion cameo by Bunuel himself) calmly sharpening a straight razor before walking out onto a nighttime balcony to watch the full moon - then approaching a young woman (Simone Mareuil - who would later end her life by setting fire to herself in the middle of a town square ["Immolation's what you need, if you wanna be a Record Breaker", as Roy Castle certainly never sang]) before - as a thin wisp of cloud moves across the lunar eye in the sky - slicing her eyeball (actually the eye of a dead calf in extreme close-up, its fur bleached to register as human flesh tone in black and white); the bifurcated orb oozing it's horrid glue. This scenario was culled fro a discussion between Bunuel and Dali that was the inspiration for the movie: Bunuel having had a dream in which he saw a cloud slicing the moon "like a razor blade slicing an eye". This determination to chronicle personal nightmares and dreamscapes on film results in the entire piece's ambiguity and random jumps of dream logic akin to August Strindberg's reality-warping plays A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1908).
What follows is a series of vignettes connected by the strange flow and flux of REM sleep: a young woman (Mareuil) encountering a man (Pierre Batcheff - who would also go on to commit suicide subsequently: in his case a barbiturate overdose) dressed in a nun's habit who is run over whilst cycling in the street. Taking the box that he is wearing around his neck, she returns home to her apartment and opens it to find his nun's wimple and habit enfolded inside before laying them out upon her bed. Then the man appears in her room, staring at his own hand from which ants are erupting from a wound in his palm (a future suicide experiencing... formicide?).
Later, when the girl rejects his advances and backs into the corner of the room wielding a tennis racquet to keep him at bay, the man picks up a pair of ropes and proceeds across the room towards her dragging behind him two grand pianos, each containing the rotting corpse of a donkey. This iconic image was a snook being cocked by Bunuel and Dali towards Spanish author Juan Ramon Jimenez, who had authored a children's book entitled Platero and I about a small boy's relationship with a donkey (no, not in a Clerks II "donkey show" kind of way), which they both apparetly had an enmity towards. Though i don't think that the man who originated the quote "If they give you lined paper, write the other way" can be all bad.
In summary: i agree with Black Francis rather than Alan Frank. A surrealistic pillow indeed.
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