User Reviews

This famous film starts in a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye (a cow's eye was actually used) is slit open and juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obscuring . After that , there take place several bizarre events such as a man has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge , it is shown literally ; later on , a man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey and two priests being dragged with the piano (a priest is Salvador Dalí) ; a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with his cane (legend has it that the severed hand used in the street scene was a real hand, and Dali convinced a man to cut it off in exchange for enough money to buy lunch) , among others .

Abstract film that marked strong polemic in the epoch when it was realised , especially its sliced eyeball at the beginning , and still packs a punch even nowadays . In fact , at the Paris premiere, Luis Buñuel hid behind the screen with stones in his pockets for fear of being attacked by the confused audience . After editing the feature , Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí didn't know what to do with it , as an acquaintance introduced Buñuel to Man Ray, who had just finished Les Mystères du château Dé and was looking for a second film to complete the program , the two movies premiered together at the Studio Ursulines ; it made a deep impression on the Surrealist Group, who welcomed Buñuel into their ranks . The movie contains several references to Federico García Lorca and other writers of that time . The rotting donkeys are a reference to the novel "Platero y yo" by Juan Ramón Jiménez, which Luis Buñuel and Dalí hated . In 1960, a soundtrack was added to this film at the direction of Luis Buñuel , he used the same music which was played , using phonograph records , at the 1929 screenings-extracts from "Liebestod" from Richard Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" and two Argentinian tangos.

This rare short belongs to Luis Buñuel's first period and has been voted as one of "The 25 Most Dangerous Movies" . After moving to Paris , Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs , including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein . With financial help from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film , this 17-minute "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its disturbing images and surrealist plot . The following year , sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first picture , the scabrous witty and violent "Age of Gold" (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War , where he made ¨Las Hurdes¨ , as Luis emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros . He subsequently went on his Mexican period with "The Great Madcap" , ¨Los Olvidados¨ , ¨The brute¨, "Wuthering Heights", ¨El¨ , "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De la Cruz" , ¨Robinson Crusoe¨ and many others . And finally his French-Spanish period with notorious as well as polemic films such as ¨Viridiana¨ , Tristana¨ , ¨The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and his last picture , "That Obscure Object of Desire" .

I saw this recently n i am shocked at the violent content n nudity in a film made in 1929.

Candyman borrowed the scene where insects come out of a palm.

Luis Buñuel, Calanda, in the province of Teruel in the south of the region called Aragón, a town itself afamed for the twenty-four hour non-stop drums (`la tamborada') in the streets played by hundreds of people together in Holy Week, as a young man fled to Paris with the intention of doing something great in this world. There he met Salvador Dalí who had done the same, leaving his native Catalonia in his mid twenties - some five years younger than Buñuel - with more or less the same ideas in his head.

These two young men, who in later years were to be known - even admired in some cases - as the most extravagant and flamboyant creators of art, were not alone. Pablo Picasso, not yet 50, had already been blazing the trail, to mention another Spaniard among those thronging the avant-garde Paris of the times. Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel had led the impressionist movement in music for many years, and the `Imagiste' school in poetry was well under way. Anybody who was anybody in the artistic world flocked to Paris, and either made a hit and became someone eminent, or did not.

Cinema was a new art form still to be experimented with; no wonder, then, that these two men of evidently original ideas trying to burst out of them, had to do something so as to gatecrash into the gentry of the established circles of artistes and would-be artistes or hangers-on. The Buñuel-Dalí tandem knew they would produce something different; not necessarily to scandalize anyone, but more with the purpose of attracting attention, whether from intellectuals, artists or their entrepreneurs, or just newspaper editors. Simply following the logical sequence that words can be poetic and an image is worth a thousand words, and that poetry can be abstract, thus so can images, and if they move - better still.

Buñuel got a bit of money out of his mother's purse, and thus the two young men had finance to start on making an abstract poetic sequence which did not pretend to have any logical meaning of any kind. `Un Chien Andalou' was to exist in the same way that any later painting either by Picasso or by Dalí himself would exist without necessarily purporting to mean anything, either significant or insignificant, and without necessarily any implicit objective - far less objective - raison d'etre than simply existing in itself. Whether the result could or should be considered `art' in any quintessential sense is/was up to the pundits, pseudointellectuals, newspaper critics, or anybody else who thought he had any ideas on the matter. Buñuel himself says in his autobiography `My Last Breath' that he would have quite happily burnt the film, but that would not have made any difference anyway.

`Un Chien Andalou' was the only silent film he made; whether because of lack of funds or otherwise intentionally, is hard to say. `L'Age d'Or' one year later had sound; however I cannot help thinking that Buñuel and Dali wanted to make a silent film, which then does not explain why in the 1960s Buñuel chose to add music - Wagner interspersed with a tango, a blatently at-odds combination - which would seem to have been some attempt at being unfaithful to the original. But Buñuel was nothing if not a contradictory person, to say the least. But by the 1960s he was beginning to turn out his best repertoire - `Viridiana' (qv), `Tristana', etc - and maybe his sense of maturity reigned over his other feelings, compelling him to `up-date' the film for newer audiences, even though he might be accused of unloyalty.

But, how does one remain loyal to abstract concepts which defy rationality?

Thus `Un Chien Andalou' remains one of the most misunderstood pieces of art to have ever been made public, and is perhaps the most widely-known short film of all time.

Good way to sample the filmography of Luis Bunuel is to begin with this surreal short. An excellent intro to Bunuel's more mature work because his films are full of bizarre images that began here. Un Chien Andalou(1929) like the rest of Bunuel's early works experiments with use of film image and surrealism. Illustrates the beginning of a career full of amazing, bizarre, and subversive films. Things could only get better for Bunuel's film career and they did.

Un Chien Andalou(1929) was an artful collaboration between two surrealistic masters in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. These two artists were part of a surrealism movement in Spain that influenced the country's art. Bunuel and Dali had a fruitful but short film partnership that ended once each wanted to go their separate ways. After the early 1930s these talented artists would never work with each other again. For Un Chien Andalou(1929), Bunuel and Dali created images of eccentric force based on their day and night dreams.

Surrealism was very popular in early 20th Century art especially during the 1920s. The surrealist movement took shape in places like France and Spain where it flourished for a period of time before falling apart in 1930s. Un Chien Andalou(1929) is a good example of what made the surrealist movement tick. Salvador Dali designs images with social and symbolic meanings. Bunuel's skills as a surrealist as first shown here would become more abstract once he started mastering his craft.

Plotless short film that is basically a series of images. Un Chien Andalou(1929) is an 'Absolute Film' which relies on abstract imagery in an attempt to unnerve the viewer. In Bunuel's early films, imagery took precedent over things like dialogue and plot. In the history of cinema its a rarity especially since the beginning of the sound era for pure imagery to be the sole existence in a motion picture. Un Chien Andalou(1929) contains images that ranges from the erotic, frightening, funny, strange, and symbolic.

Bunuel's direction for Un Chien Andalou(1929) is very good considering its his first piece of cinematic work as a film director. He uses the same type of dreamlike logic here that prevails in his best films. He directs each image with unlimited imagination. Direction for Un Chien Andalou(1929) may be crude a little unsophisticated but its still fascinating to observe. Luis Bunuel first put his name among the cinematic ranks with the historical important, Un Chien Andalou(1929).

Forever immortalized on celluloid is the eye slicing image of Un Chien Andalou(1929). Cinema's fascination with eye motif probably began here and continued from then on. The destruction of sight is an important them in Un Chien Andalou(1929) and other cinematic works. Jean Vigo remarked in opinion of eye slicing image, "Is it more dreadful than the Spectacle of a cloud veiling a full moon"? Eye slicing image was influential to Italian horror espically to the films of Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava(the former did an updated version of image with eye penetration moment from Zombie Flesh Eaters[1979]).

Caused an enormous scandal in the late 1920s with depiction of disturbing and outright strange imagery. I can picture the reaction of disgust and shock on audiences faces as they watch tongue tied at the images that bombard their senses. Un Chien Andalou(1929) may have lost a little of its shock power by today's standards. Still this short film continues to retain the ability to dare which is an improbability in today's Hollywood cinema. Luis Bunuel's next film, L'Age D'Or(1930) caused an even bigger scandal and riots broke out during the film's opening show.

Not much in the way of substancial acting in a film where characters exist only as impulses and symbols. One of the most important pieces of film during first half of 20th Century cinema. Showed filmmakers that the power to provoke is as important as acting, cinemtography, dialogue, and plot. Un Chien Andalou I think is a forethought to the daring and subversive films of period covering 1967 to 1977. Un Chien Andalou(1929) I feel is the near last of a group of films concerned with film imagery that occupied the silent film genre for twenty plus years.

A motion picture ahead of its time in more ways than one. One reason its ahead of its time is the image of a woman's bare naked breasts being touched by male hands. Image such as one mentioned above was unusual for the period the film was made. Also, there are a couple of images in the film that are on the slightly gory side. Obviously done by a young Bunuel who was more sexually open minded than the older man who though an on screen kiss was obscene.

Bunuel's fetishes and Obsessions that occupied the images of Un Chien Andalou becomes maturely developed in later films. Couple of motifs from Un Chien Andalou shows up in films like Simon del Desierto(1965). Dreamlike imagery of short frequents the stories of El Angel Exterminador(1962) and Belle De Jour(1967). Its a warmup to Bunuel's next film, L'Age D'Or(1930) which is also his first feature length film. Un Chien Andalou(1929) is an exercise in artistic expression and artistic vision by an artistic genius.

I still remember my visit to Philadelphia Museum of Art, back in the April of 2005. One of the reasons I went there was to to see the Salvador Dali's exhibitions but the tickets were sold out. While in the museum, I was able to see two films that Dali was a big part of. In the video Gallery of the museum, two intriguing projects have been running together in the continuous loop, the early "Un Chien Andalou" (17 minutes) and the recently released, animated Destino (6 minutes). This was the first viewing for me. I kept coming back to the gallery few more times and I never was tired of both short films.

The inspiration for "Un Chien Andalou" began with the dreams of two young rebellious men, the artists and the friends, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. They exchanged the dreams they both had, Bunuel - about a slender cloud slicing the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye", and Dali - about a dream involving a hand enveloped by ants. Both artists soon began working on a film script based on these ideas.

Made in 1929, the film has not aged at all. Its disconnected but haunting scenes and images are as shocking today (at least, for me they were) as I am sure they were all these years ago for the viewers who faced them for the first time. The reason the film is so powerful even now may be the themes of love, sex, death, and decay that are eternal and will always attract the artists and audiences alike. It is also could be in the establishing and following by both artists the certain rules, "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind will be accepted...We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us without trying to explain why." Perhaps, Dali and Bunuel intended their film to be experienced directly, on the visceral level, and not analyzed by the viewers.

"Un Chien Andalou" is amazing. A fifteen minute dream that's both breathtaking and eerie. This was the first film collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. They both wanted to take their dreams and put it into a film. I must say they succeeded. The film is most notorious for the beginning sequence of the razor across the eye. The film was definitely ahead of its time. Even today, more than 75 years later, the image is still disturbing. A cow eye was used for the effect. The film also has a severed hand, ants that crawl from a wound and a man's Frudian like sexual obsession with a woman. If you are interested in surrealism or surreal films, this would be a perfect place to start.

Probably the greatest short film in existence, and one of the most influential films ever. Preferable, in my view, to the longer follow-up *L'Age d'Or*, if only because *Un Chien Andalou* wastes no time trying to construct an even peripheral narrative. Just seventeen minutes of masterly, bizarre images and dream-logic. There's something gratifying in the fact that, in Bunuel's first film, Bunuel himself is practically the first thing we see. After he cuts open a woman's eyeball with a straight razor, we see him no more. A fine introduction.

The famous Slitting of the Eyeball constitutes Bunuel's clarion call for cinema to ATTACK the audience right at the organ with which it consumes the medium. From that point on, he never looked back during the next five decades of movie-making. You'll notice I've waited this long to mention his putative collaborator on *Un Chien Andalou*, Salvador Dali. That's because dragging him along is wearisome, and frankly, not even germane. This movie is strictly Bunuel's baby, and I don't care what the credits say: we get the guns, bugs, rotting carcasses, sexual fetishism, and idiotic clergymen that featured in almost every Bunuel film that followed this one. I'm not sure which part of the movie constituted Dali's dreams . . . but from where I'm sitting, *Andalou* strikes me as wholly Bunuelian.

It's also not as sloppy as some critics have made out. The images may be as disconnected as in any dream, but the logic behind them is rooted in the aesthetic philosophies of the great Surrealists like Artaud, Cocteau, and the rest of 'em. Don't kid yourself into believing that Bunuel was a lazy hack with a camera, the directorial equivalent of a homely poet scribbling free verse at your local Starbucks. He knew exactly what he was doing, and in this film, made each of those seventeen minutes count. There is a ruthless economy actuating all that kinky whimsy.

A landmark achievement that prodded the medium forward even as it announced the zenith of the Surrealist movement. 10 stars out of 10.

Distilled surrealism. 100% pure but joyously unrefined. This film can never age, it will still be slicing film students' eyes wide open a hundred years from now. As movies get more and more codified it's a real joy to watch something like this, utterly freewheeling.

What makes 'Un chien andalou' exciting for me is that it's so replete with imagery that an instinctual human fear of anarchy kicks in and you can't help trying to piece it all together somehow, as if it were one of those 3D art posters and if you stared at it long enough you'd finally "get it." Yet it just can't be understood in any conventional way, and anyone who tells you otherwise is simply trying to push their own subconscious on you.

I don't have anything against Wagner but this film should definitely be watched without the distraction of the score that Buñuel added later.

Slashing an eyeball, dead donkeys on pianos, ants on a palm, fondling breasts and buttocks, a woman's armpit hair on a man's mouth - there's no denying the charm and impact of this vintage short, whose influence has been pervasive. Artistic luminaries Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí collaborated and created this little gem that remains the highlight of Surrealism in film. Watch this and stop making sense.

This is a truly ground-breaking movie. Surrealist geniuses Dali and Bunuel combined their powers and produced this short collection of shocking scenes. This is the film that first showed that art is not there only to please the audience but also to annoy and depict our darkest thoughts and dreams. The proof of its success is that nowadays the shock value is almost zero (except the ultra-famous eye scene). What then seemed an outrageous and demoralizing attempt is now common practice. I still think though that given their talents, they could do an even better movie if they were more serious about it, but one should not forget they were two young guys trying to revolt against the establishment.

It's time for some experimental film with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The staple of art school courses the world over. I can't remember the first time I saw Un Chien Andalou, a young teenager perhaps, but I remember being shocked. That eyeball scene sticks with you and of course being immortalised by my beloved Pixies didn't hurt either. Apparently it was constructed around a load of weird dreams from both creators. This explains quite a lot, but it's still bonkers. Yes it's packed with the surrealist fantasies you'd expect, but there's a surprising amount of structure to it too, housing comedy and tragedy, along with the grotesque and not forgetting a little smut. Does it have any thread, any meaning, any purpose? Well no, maybe and probably. It's indulgent artistic expression and some people will like it because they think they're supposed too. I like parts of it, but not all. I like films with substance and arguably this is the opposite of that. Nearly 100 years old though, it still displays a lot of imagination.

A film based on the madness and bizarreness of dreams, scenes that for the time are impressive, the scene of the eye being cut, the naked woman and the man groping her, in addition to other delusions worthy of surrealist art.

"Sitting comfortably in a dark room, dazzled by the light and the movement which exert a quasi-hypnotic power... fascinated by the interest of human faces and the rapid changes of place, [a] cultivated individual placidly accepts the most appalling themes...and all this naturally sanctioned by habitual morality, government, and international censorship, religion, dominated by good taste and enlivened by white humor and other prosaic imperatives of reality." - Luis Bunuel

Un Chien Andalou exists to shock the viewer of this stupor that Bunuel elucidates above. Freudian dream imagery, amorphous space/time, and absurdist humor combine in this drawn out mating ritual between a confused cyclist and the female he pursues. May be the most inventive fifteen minutes of film anywhere.

One of the best short films since the 1920s. The production team includes the genius and paranoid painter Salvador Dali and the master of Surrealist cinema Luis Buñuel.

This '16 minutes of mystery, monstrosity and brutality' has been transformed into an artistic surrealist film that is enough to make us feel uneasy, shudder, fear and madness. This is similar to Jacob Böhme's 15 Minutes of Mystical Experiences.

Not only is it a masterpiece, but its influence on later generations, including David Lynch, Jan Svankmajer and Guy Maddin, is immeasurable.

The scene in which a razor blade cuts through a human eyeball is, in fact, one of the greatest depictions in the history of black-and-white cinema. This kind of brutality and experimentation was later recreated by Kenneth Anger and cited by Pasolini.

The film had a profound influence on what is called Japanese animation and C-grade cinema, eroticism and grotesque nonsense.

The intense visual experience of Un chien andalou is more than enough to extenuate the sins of Luis Buñuel's almost-failed films that followed, and none of Buñuel's films surpass this one. However, the visual situation of Buñuel's later years has been enlightened to a kind of "sacerdotal" status.

Perhaps the best critics, unless they are very cynical, would list it as one of the best short films of all time.

The fact that George Melies foresaw in 1902, that showing off scantly-clad women loading a bullet into a very large, very phallic chamber, would stimulate audiences. This in turn, would become a staple in Hollywood, and with this film, Bunuel and Dali try to do the same thing with "shock value". Forget the symbolism and imagery, That part is easy. It's the SHOCK VALUE baby. Shock value in 1928 no less.

There are two scenes actually. The famous eye ball scene (that one is easy) and the molestation scene, with flashes of nudity seen throughout. That is something you don't expect from a classic silent film. All this happening way back in 1928, topped off by a dead deer. It is the shock value that makes this film good. As soon as you see the razor blade scene you are hooked, because something in you kicks in and makes you want to know what the hell just happened. When you are exhausted by the images flashing across the screen, they throw in the attempted rape in the molestation scene. Add all this with the imagery and symbolism and the film accomplishes the ultimate goal by getting the viewer to think about the film hard. It stimulates thought and discussion.

I saw this film for the first time in college in the early 90s, but for the purposes of this review, I watched it three times. The best form of a story I was able to put together is, it is a story about a box with religious clothing in it, that travels through time and space. It acts as a portal between good and evil, and evil may have won in this case. Of course, I could be way off and the film could mean nothing. But, as I mentioned before, it stimulates the thought processes.

The easy part of this film is studying the use of symbolism (a Dali staple), imagery and montage. This film pioneered avant-garde, film-making and influenced many after it. It contains great uses of dissolves and editing for collage purposes. The only bad spot is the scene in the woods as they carry away the body. It has too many, bad jump cuts, however it is capped off with a beautiful shot at the very end of the scene. As a former film-student I really like this film, not really for what it is, but mostly for what it has accomplished since it was originally released. The best friend that this film has is the fact that it is from 1928.

9.1 (A- MyGrade) = 9 IMDB.

It's hard to conceive of a time when film was at its most primitive state but the 1920s was just that; it was a time when people were still trying to understand how images could be used to penetrate people's deepest emotions. In Buñuel and Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929), there is literally no understandable plot. And yet, the imagery on display elicits unsettling feelings and, even 90 years later, one can see just how ahead of their time these two visionaries were. True Artists. It's easy to see the film's immense influence through the body of work of auteurs like David Lynch and Gaspar Noé. It's not to try and "get", it's to "feel".

I am about to answer the question that has been unanswered since 1929. I have the answer that explains what is happening in this film and why. More simple than it really is, the entire film is not as complicated as many think. The entire film is a mixture of dreams and thoughts coming from the male lead. He has nothing on his mind but his girlfriend. Throughout the entire film, we see him question himself whether or not he should marry her! That's it! We see examples of this with the way he looks at her and then sees images of commitment, divorce, and priests carrying a burden over their shoulders like a dead mule. A wonderful film non the less, you have to check this out whether or not you're a fan of Avant-Garde

I liked the line "oh look there's an Andalusian Dog!"

I mean surreal nothingness in the best sense. I guess one can interpret the film in whatever way one wish. I don't think there is a truly right answer. I go into this without knowing anything about its plot. Quite frankly, there is no plot. It is a series of non-sensical surreal segments that is meant to bend your mind. There is indications of time like "Once upon a time" and "eight years later" but non of that means reality. This is more of a dreamscape that shocks and confuses. It starts with a woman getting her eye can open and the blade slices into the eye. It doesn't take anytime to explain the images. There is something unsettling as well as liberating. I try to decipher this movie for the first 10 minutes but then realize that there is no deciphering. It is simply a movie to be experienced. I also didn't know Salvador Dalí was involved in the movie but it's obvious that he would do something like this.

Luis Bunuel presents to you a film about film-making, completely outrageous and self-conscious, meant to repel and not draw you in, and it does its job, so it gets a high mark. Not for the infamous eyeball-cutting scene, but mainly because Bunuel does it with a straight face when this is obviously a joke, perhaps a thumbing of the nose at the art crowd for expecting too much and therefore delivering this hilarity. We can call it pithy but it's also very over-dramatic.

But is it Horror, or genre at all? I say thee nay. Surrealistic in the extreme, but not disorienting in a fantasy manner, more like a music video for a Goth or metal band. While it's tempting to say all this adds up to genre, it just doesn't in my opinion.

Free online at 21 minutes and also the older 16-minute version.

Even those who do not like Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" will probably never forget it once they see it. It's one of the weirder and more interesting films that you'll ever run across, and even aside from its significance, it would be worth seeing for the distinctive style and material.

It is also very well-crafted, despite its apparently chaotic narrative (or lack thereof). Even when it is impossible to attach meaning to some of the images, it seems clear that it has been filmed almost exactly as Buñuel and Dali intended. Even the music seems to have been chosen deliberately, and at times it complements the images surprisingly well.

While the exact meanings of many of the symbols are probably deliberately obscure, it strongly suggests some general themes such as desire, frustration, and the like. To attempt to analyze it carefully is almost certainly a mistake, and it is probably best taken as a dream or a dream-like series of events without the kinds of obvious connections that one might want to find.

Likewise, it's hard to determine just how good or how important it may be. The extreme disregard of cinema conventions is hard to evaluate now, in that the movie itself established some alternative conventions of a sort. The images themselves are often fascinating, sometimes unsettling or even off-putting, almost always interesting and suggestive.

Perhaps the one thing that can be said about such a movie without much risk of going astray is that almost anyone who has a real interest in cinema or cinema history will (or ought to) want to see "Un Chien Andalou" for himself or herself. Hearing it described by someone else really cannot adequately convey what it is like.