The crew are reunited after a jungle trekking, island hopping, volcano hunting adventure. This weeks audible indulgence is the best yet, from proto-punk and pyche-rock to mariachi beats and Anatolian freak-folk. Good stuff, enjoy.
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, 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 Buñuel
Controversial?
Luis Buñel and Slavador Dali created this 16-minute short film in 1929 featuring a series of startling and horrifying visions. Iconic imagery such as a womans eyeball being sliced slowly open with a razor blade crosscut with a similarly shaped cloud moving across the moon was received well by surrealists of the time and continues to be shown regularly in film schools and societies today.
At this time, cinema was still a new art-form prime to be experimented with. Buñel and Dali were not scandalists but definitely sought attention from intellectuals and newspaper editors alike. Buñuel and Dalí carried sacks of rocks in their pockets on opening night as self-defense, expecting a negative response from the audience. They were disappointed when the audience enjoyed the film, making the evening “less exciting”, according to Dalí. They followed a simple formula that if words can be poetic and a picture can tell a thousand words thus a moving image can be more meaningful still. For example: The French phrase “ants in the palms,” (which means that someone is “itching” to kill) is shown literally when ants emerge from a wound in a hand in a sort of Freudian stigmata. The filmmakers were fascinated by what the psyche could create through its suppressed emotions.
The film has been referenced copiously in pop culture, from David Bowie showing the film in its entirety at the beginning of every concert during his 1976 “Station to Station” tour. (If you’ve ever heard an audience groan at the opening scene, imagine an entire auditorium, most of whom were undoubtedly seeing it for the first time.) Most famously perhaps is Pixes song Debaser from the album Doolittle. Un chien andalou is referenced when sung by Frank Black “Slicin’ up eyeballs / I want you to know!”. To quote Frank Black: “I wish Buñuel was still alive. He made this film about nothing in particular. The title itself is a nonsense. With my stupid, pseudo-scholar, naive, enthusiast, avant-garde-ish, amateurish way to watch Un chien andalou (twice), I thought: ‘Yeah, I will make a song about it.’ [He sings:] “Un chien andalou”…. It sounds too French, so I will sing “un chien andalusia”, it sounds good, no?”.
Although many cinéastes have tried to psycholanalyse the filmmakers, Buñel made clear through his correspondence with Dali that “no idea or image lending itself to rational explanation would be accepted … Nothing in film symbolizes anything.”
The film is so powerful today because themes of love, sex, death, and decay are eternal and will always attract artists and audiences alike. If you are interested in surrealism, film or both, this would be a great place to start.
By way of Wikipedia sourced trivia we discovered both of the leading actors eventually committed suicide: Batcheff overdosed on Veronal on April 13, 1932 in a hotel in Paris, and Mareuil committed self-immolation on October 24, 1954 by dousing herself in gasoline and burning herself to death in a public square in Perigueux, Dordogne.
