[Film Journal]
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Thinker
August - 2021
Un Chien Andalou (1929), directed by Luis Buñuel and co-written with Salvador Dalí, is a surrealist short film that defies traditional narrative structure and logic. It unfolds as a dream-like sequence of seemingly disjointed but highly evocative images. Below are some interesting metaphors and interpretations:
Un Chien Andalou: A Dream Without End
A cloud drifts across the moon. A razor glides across an eye. In that single cut, the world is split open, logic abandoned, and the dream takes hold. Un Chien Andalou is not a story in the traditional sense, nor does it attempt to be one. It unfolds like a series of fleeting, half-formed thoughts, images that linger at the edge of consciousness, familiar yet deeply unsettling.The Eye and the Act of Seeing
The film’s opening moment, a man calmly slicing a woman’s eye open with a straight razor, remains one of the most shocking in cinematic history. It is also one of its most symbolic. The act is a direct attack on vision itself, a rejection of passive observation, forcing the audience to abandon conventional ways of seeing. In surrealism, perception is fluid, and the world is not what it appears to be. To truly experience the film, one must look beyond what is shown on the surface.Ants, Rot, and Hidden Decay
A man gazes at his own hand, and from its palm, ants begin to crawl. It is an image of quiet horror, a moment that suggests something festering beneath the skin, desires, fears, anxieties that cannot be contained. Ants, in surrealist thought, are often symbols of decay, of the unstoppable process of time breaking things down. The hand, a symbol of control and action, is compromised, overtaken by forces beyond its owner’s will. It is a reminder that beneath the surface of the everyday, something uncontrollable is always at work.Objects That Transform, Time That Collapses
A woman’s armpit shifts into the spiny form of a sea urchin. A book turns into a gun. A severed hand, once a part of the body, is now a discarded object in the street. These transformations are not logical, but they make emotional sense. In dreams, one thing easily becomes another, and so it is in Un Chien Andalou. The film plays with the instability of reality, showing how objects and people morph, carrying hidden meanings just beneath their surfaces.Time, too, refuses to behave. At one point, a title card reads “Eight Years Later,” yet nothing has changed. The past and present collapse into one, and linear storytelling is abandoned. This is not a film that moves forward in a straight line—it folds back onto itself, like memory or a dream.
The Weight of History and the Burden of the Past
Perhaps the most absurd yet deeply resonant image in the film is the man struggling to move forward while dragging two grand pianos, each loaded with a rotting donkey, two priests, and the weight of something unseen. The pianos - symbols of culture, refinement, and artistic tradition, are no longer sources of beauty. Instead, they are burdens. The donkeys, decomposing and grotesque, bring death and decay into the scene, while the priests suggest the oppressive weight of religion.This could be seen as a critique of the forces that hold individuals back, the expectations of society, the weight of history, and the institutions that demand obedience. The man struggles, but he does not move. The past drags behind him, refusing to let go.
Desire and the Unstable Self
Desire permeates the film, but it is never straightforward. A man reaches for a woman, only for his form to shift and dissolve. The pursuit of desire is interrupted, frustrated, and unstable. Even when the characters find one another, the connection is fleeting, incomplete. Un Chien Andalou does not depict love in any traditional sense, it presents it as something elusive, tangled with violence, transformation, and power.
The Lovers Consumed by Time
The film’s final image is haunting in its stillness. A man and a woman lie buried up to their waists in sand, motionless, forgotten. They were once alive, once in pursuit of something, but time has overtaken them. They have been absorbed into the landscape, reduced to figures in the dust.This ending suggests a kind of inevitability, no matter how much we chase, struggle, or desire, time eventually wins. Everything is swallowed. The lovers are not granted a conclusion, no final moment of clarity or resolution. They simply fade into the earth, as all things do.