Un Chien Andalou AKA An Andalusian Dog

[related: Salvador Dalí]

Landmark 1929 short film collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, often seen as a seminal work of Surrealist cinema, notable for its radical discontinuities, dream logic, and violent rejection of narrative coherence. Un Chien Andalou is composed entirely of deliberately irrational vignettes —most famously the shocking images of an eyeball being sliced open with a razor, two dead donkey's trapped in pianos, and ants crawling out of a severed hand. According to the director, the film mobilizes Freudian symbolism and subconscious association to rupture bourgeois sensibilities and cinematic conventions alike. Audiences were shocked and appalled by the film - in fact, two women were said to have miscarried upon attending its premiere, leading to Un Chien Andalou being banned in cities throughout western Europe. In recent years, the film has received a resurgence of interest. Film critic Roger Ebert positively positioned Un Chien Andalou to be a precursor to the kind of populist abstraction and jump-cutting found on WASP MTV. Taboot, a number of experimental ensembles, including Art Zoyd (France) and Black Screen o'Death (US), have taken to live scoring notorious silent films like Metropolis and Buñuel and Dalí's visionary masterwork.