Un Chien Andalou: A Film By Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali

By Robert Short

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929) is the first classic of underground cinema, a ferocious assault of mutilation, madness and multiple manias set in the fractured framework of a nightmare. Ants, rotting donkeys, severed hands, and ocular destruction are just some of the film's provocative motifs, drawn from the world of Surrealism. This special ebook study of UN CHIEN ANDALOU provides an in-depth analysis and history of this seminal Surrealist film, accompanied by the original film scenario by Buuel and Dal', and a gallery of photographic illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909923041

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UN CHIEN ANDALOU

BY ROBERT SHORT

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-04-1

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

INTRODUCTION

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s most celebrated cinematic collaboration remains Un Chien Andalou (1929); but this 17-minute work was only the visible culmination of several years of interplay between its progenitors, a period during which both men were developing their own original, though convergent, theories of film. Varied and complex forces were at work in Un Chien Andalou’s far from immaculate conception: a genesis, indeed, that the Spanish authority Agustin Sanchez Vidal has called ‘an endless enigma’.[1]

The Buñuel/Dalí duo of 1929–30 had earlier been – and for six or seven years – the Buñuel/Dalí/Lorca trio. These were the terrible triumvirate of the ‘Generation of 1927’, each with a formidable destiny before him: Juan García Lorca was to become the most important Spanish dramatist of the century; Salvador Dalí was to become, at any rate as far as the general public is concerned, the personification of Surrealism both in his work and in his life; and Luis Buñuel, long after his partnership with Dalí broke up, was destined to be a supreme exemplar of European post-war ‘art cinema’ alongside Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut.

What so impresses observers of the Dalí/Buñuel/Lorca milieu in the early twenties is the depth of the complicity which existed between them and the degree to which the shared imagery, themes and obsessions of their later careers can already be spotted in the student culture of their Madrid years.

The threesome met up at the Residencia des Estudiantes, Madrid’s equivalent of Oxbridge. Buñuel was the first to arrive, in 1917, registering for an agronomy degree but switching to philosophy. He was keen on sport, especially athletics, boxing and arm wrestling. He was a prankster who would climb up the façade of the Residencia for a dare, and have his friends jump on his stomach to test his muscles. He had a reputation for telling tall stories – like the one in which he claimed to have given street directions to the King of Spain without raising his hat. Lorca arrived in 1919 and the two became instant friends. Lorca had already published his first collection of poetry. Hugely gifted as a poet, painter, musician and later playwright, Lorca, with his shining, dark, Andalusian eyes, was also a magnetic personality.

A year later, in 1920, they were joined by Dalí, the most single-minded of the three at this stage, who enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. He dressed provocatively, sporting enormous hats, huge ties, a long jacket that hung down to his knees. They nicknamed him ‘the painter from Czechoslovakia’. He also behaved provocatively, scuppering his chance of completing his course at the Academy by shouting at the panel of examiners: ‘No one has the right to sit in judgement upon me. I’m leaving’.

Buñuel recalls, ‘Along with Lorca, he became my closest friend. We were inseparable; Lorca nurtured quite a grand passion for Dalí, but our Czechoslovakian painter remained unmoved.’[2]

Dalí was the son of a successful lawyer from Figueras in Catalonia, Lorca came from a well-to-do land-owning family from near Granada in Andalusia, and Buñuel’s father in Aragon had made a fortune dealing in Cuban sugar. So the ‘three musketeers’ at the Residencia could live the life of reasonably well-heeled señoritos. It was a round of drinking bouts, practical jokes, improvised happenings, brothels and jazz sessions late into the night.

Buñuel founded ‘The Order of Toledo’ in 1923 with ranks of caballeros and escuderos. To become a caballero you had to love Toledo without reservation, drink there a whole night long, and enjoy wandering through the city with no destination in view (just as the surrealists did in Paris). The little band elaborated shared rituals, mythologies and bestiaries. They invented the ‘putrefact’, an Ubuesque figure who stood for philistinism and ‘bourgeois’ crassness.

Putrefaction was the sentimental, the decaying, the formless; the opposite of Dalí’s favoured clarity and dispassion. They planned to produce a ‘Book of Putrefaction’ to rival Flaubert’s Dictionary Of Received Ideas. Yet the ‘putrefact’ became shot through with ambivalence as Buñuel and Dalí moved towards Surrealism; the intimacy of attraction and repulsion vis-a-vis rottenness is evident enough in the Dalí/Buñuel films. Another object of their common mythology was Saint Sebastian, the tutelar of homosexuals and sado-masochists, and, since Mantegna’s painting, a favourite icon of Christian and erotic martyrdom.

Ever paradoxical, Dalí had the Saint stand for objectivity, the power to control emotion, and patience in extreme agony. According to Ian Gibson, in September 1926, Dalí mischievously asked his friend Lorca if he had noticed that, in the representations of the martyr, there was never any suggestion that the arrows pierce his buttocks – a teasing allusion, to anal intercourse and the poet’s attempts to possess him.[3]

Common to all three, it seems, was an extreme form of adolescent anxiety about sexuality – in the forms at once of uncertainty about their own gender, fear of women and of impotence, along with a residual sense of the sinfulness of sex.

Buñuel describes in his autobiography how the tight association in his mind between sex and death dated from his childhood in Aragon. ‘As in the Middle Ages, death had weight in Calanda; omnipresent, it was an integral part of our lives. The same was true of faith. Given