UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929)Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil & Luis Buñuel |Horror | B&W | Golden Age Film

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Un Chien Andalou (French pronunciation: [œ̃ ʃjɛ̃ ɑ̃dalu], An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 French silent short film directed, produced and edited by Luis Buñuel, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Salvador Dalí. Buñuel's first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.

Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes. Un Chien Andalou is a seminal work of surrealist cinema.

Synopsis

A man sharpens a razor and tests it on his thumb. He gazes at the moon, which is about to be bisected by a thin cloud. A young woman stares straight ahead as he brings the razor near her eye. A cut occurs to the cloud passing in front of the moon, and then to a close-up of the razor slicing open a calf's eye.

"Eight years later", a young man bicycles down an urban street wearing a nun's habit and carrying a striped box with a strap around his neck. The woman from the first scene hears him approaching and casts aside the book she was reading. She goes to the window and sees the young man lying on the curb, his bicycle on the ground. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive him.

Later, she assembles pieces of the young man's clothing on a bed. The man then appears near the door, with ants emerging from a hole in his hand. An androgynous young woman pokes at a severed human hand in the street below the apartment while surrounded by a large crowd.

The crowd clears when a policeman places the hand in the box previously carried by the young man and gives it to the androgynous woman. She stands in the middle of the street clutching the box, where she is run over by a car. The man in the apartment seems to take sadistic pleasure in the accident, and he gestures at the woman in the room with him, leering and groping her breasts.

The woman resists him at first, but then allows him to molest her as he imagines her nude. The woman pushes him away as he drifts off and attempts to escape by running to the other side of the room. The man corners her as she reaches for a racquet in self-defense, but he suddenly picks up two ropes and drags two grand pianos containing dead donkeys, stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, two pumpkins, and two priests who are attached to the ropes. The woman escapes the room. The man chases after her, but she traps his hand, which is infested with ants, in the door. She then finds him in the next room, dressed in his nun's garb.

At "around three in the morning", the man is roused from his rest by the door buzzer (represented by a cocktail shaker). The woman goes to answer the door and does not return. Another young man arrives in the apartment, gesturing angrily at the first. The second man forces the first to throw away his nun's clothing and then makes him stand with his face to the wall.

"Sixteen years ago", the second man admires art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first man to hold two of the books as he stares at the wall. The first man eventually shoots the second when the books abruptly turn into revolvers. The second man, now in a meadow, dies while swiping at the back of a nude female figure which suddenly disappears into thin air. A group of men come and carry his corpse away.

The woman returns to the apartment and sees a death's-head moth. The first man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand; her armpit hair then attaches itself to where his mouth had been. She looks at him with disgust and leaves the apartment while sticking her tongue out. As she exits her apartment, the street is replaced by a coastal beach, where she meets a third man with whom she walks arm in arm. He shows her the time on his watch and they walk near the rocks, where they find the remnants of the first young man's nun's clothing and the box. They walk away clutching each other happily and making romantic gestures. "In Spring", the couple are buried in sand up to their elbows, motionless.

Cast & Crew

Simone Mareuil as Young Girl (as Simonne Mareuil)
Pierre Batcheff as Young Man and Second Young Man (as Pierre Batchef)

Directed by: Luis Buñuel
Written by: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí
Produced by: Luis Buñuel
Cinematography: Albert Duverger, Jimmy Berliet (uncredited)
Edited by: Luis Buñuel
Music by: Richard Wagner
Distributed by: Les Grands Films Classiques (France)
Release Date: 6 June 1929 (France)
Running Time: 21 minutes
Country: France
Language: Silent film (French intertitles)
Budget: < 100,000 francs