40. Un Chien Andalou (1928)

Directed by Luis Bunuel

Synopsis

Stuff Happens.

Review

Well, that was surreal.

At only 16 minutes long, you won't waste much time watching this film, and I definitely reccomend that you do just that. As the defining surrealist film, there is no plot to talk about, in fact everything is created in a way that there is no possible interpretation of what happens on the screen. All attempts to give interpretations to what the hell is going on in it are really not understanding what the film is about at all.

That said there are somethings that you can get out of the film, but they tell us more about who made the film than really anything else. One thing that is immediately apparent is that there is an obsession with the human body and with it's two most powerful images, those of the body as a sexual object and as a dead object.

Eros and Thanatos are the two real main characters here, the images of death and mutilation are there side by side with a sexualisation of the body, sometimes with split seconds of separation, like when the man is fondling the woman's breasts and the following shot of his face shows him in a sexual ecstasy where his eyes are white and he's dribbling blood from his mouth. Watch it. You can buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

The purple donkeys lap up the milk of the lizard's head while the nun kills the leopard.