Chicago based DVD producer Facets Video has finally brought the long awaited Surrealist masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou” by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel (“Belle du Jour”, “That Obscure Object of Desire”) to DVD and the film is as perversely horrifying and hilarious as it was when it was released 75 years ago.
When you see the eyeball scene you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I will not provide the readers with any sort of plot summary here. Roger Ebert did a far superior job than I ever could in the pages of his “The Great Movies”. Allow me to say, however, that the film, like the work of David Lynch 50 years later, works in a sort of Freudian dream logic. Nothing really makes sense and this is what makes the film an incredibly fascinating experience. The viewer is not a passive presence, he or she takes the visual information on screen, which literally has a complete lack of logic, and pieces it together in a form of narrative involving a man slicing open his lover’s eyeball, a cross-dresser, a mild sexual assault, a severed hand, a piano with a bunch of dead mules on it, and more than a piano full of Surrealist and Dadaist imagery.
The interpretations, while not literally endless due to the fact that they have some sort of limitation by the direction provided by the editing and the form of the film. It is an extremely subjective experience and this is evident in how the film is either loved or hated. It is a piece of art, it asks questions about art and ourselves, and sometimes people find that an uncomfortable experience.
For me, “Un Chien Andalou” is a piece of magic. It would be the only time Dali and Bunuel would successfully work together and it serves as a marker of cinema, Surrealism, and the beginning of Bunuel’s impressive filmography. Watching it for the first time, even the tenth time, can be an incredibly startling experience (no matter how many times you see “the eyeball scene” you’ll still squirm). I am incredibly thankful, as I know many of my friends in the film studies discipline are, that someone has finally stepped up to release the film on DVD. The film now is in a medium which can successfully reach more people outside of the cinephilic circles than the poor bootlegs that were floating around.
Comments