Here's a French, seventeen-minute long silent short which marks the debut of acclaimed director Luis Bunuel and his unique collaboration with surrealist artist Salvadore Dali. It's certainly a visual masterpiece viewed highly in many quarters, a film which demands close attention and repeated viewing in order to understand the various themes running through it. On first appraisal one can appreciate the shocks and fantastic visual imagery that Bunuel and Dali fill their movie with but the rest is a bit befuddling, an abstract film that reflects the battle of the sexes and a man's attempts to love a woman.
The defining moment of this production is the opening, in which a man nonchalantly uses a straight-razor to slice open the eyeball of a woman sitting in a chair (if you think the effect is disturbingly realistic, it's because a cow's eyeball was purportedly used for this shot). It's testament to this film's power that even today this scene is still talked about by fans of the ghastly and grotesque as being one of the most sickening shocks in screen history and time hasn't had any effect on this bit at all - it's still as horrible as it ever was. The rest of the scenes are memorably bizarre if not quite so disturbing. Men meet and fight themselves in different periods of their lives, a woman plays and cradles a severed hand in the street and a man sees ants pouring from a wound in his hand. It may not make much sense but you won't ever forget the images here - making a must for the fan of the surreal and bizarre.
The defining moment of this production is the opening, in which a man nonchalantly uses a straight-razor to slice open the eyeball of a woman sitting in a chair (if you think the effect is disturbingly realistic, it's because a cow's eyeball was purportedly used for this shot). It's testament to this film's power that even today this scene is still talked about by fans of the ghastly and grotesque as being one of the most sickening shocks in screen history and time hasn't had any effect on this bit at all - it's still as horrible as it ever was. The rest of the scenes are memorably bizarre if not quite so disturbing. Men meet and fight themselves in different periods of their lives, a woman plays and cradles a severed hand in the street and a man sees ants pouring from a wound in his hand. It may not make much sense but you won't ever forget the images here - making a must for the fan of the surreal and bizarre.