Un Chien Andalou (1929)

...but her work pales in comparison with this film. It is one of the most surreal of all surrealist films, and is one you won't forget. Deren's work I would normally write an analysis for, but this film isn't entirely explainable. I suppose if I thought about it...but then again, maybe it wasn't Bunuel's intent for people to think about this. In fact, according to what I've read, Bunuel and Dali were actually hoping to cause riots with this film--thinking that maybe, just maybe, a man randomly slicing a woman's eye with a knife would be gruesome and horrid enough to get people's attention. That it certainly did, but nonetheless, despite their wishes, this response that they were hoping for didn't come (even though they even threw in some porn, for the heck of it).The most famous image in this film that is the most remembered today is the eyeball slicing. It comes at the very beginning of the movie and there it has no connection whatsoever to the rest of the movie. I suppose it was meant as an attention getter more than anything else. In the rest of the movie, there are at least different characters, although none of it actually makes sense.Bunuel wasn't mad as the other reviewer said. Obviously, they made it entirely for the purpose of being artistic. After watching this, you'll probably start thinking he was a film directer version of Vincent van Gogh. However, part of it was Dali, who really made this film what it turned out as in the end. Dali was a surreal artist. I'll bet you he was like "hey, Bunuel. I've got me an idea. How about we try to create a scandal!! We could make a film so stupid and weird people will faint! We could have a woman's eye get cut up, a hand in the middle of a street, etc. I can hear the audience dropping already." Surrealism was Dali's best talent--this film is proof.And even if you don't like this film, you gotta give credit to them--Maya Deren certainly got inspiration from this. Watch her "Meshes of the Afternoon" and you'll see why I say this. And, as for the hidden story, I can only guess it's about a woman who likes a man--but only certain traits of him. That at least explains the different versions of him that appear throughout the film. Maybe it's kind of a variation on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Who knows? Well, let's not try to make TOO much sense of it! Hahahaha.

There are some films whose cultural and cinematographic value is much more related to the people involved in it than to their quality or interest as "story told". This movie is one of them. Its so repulsive and incomprehensible that only Buñuel and Dalí would be able to make it worthy of some appreciation. It often recalls some 1970s trash films, and short films made by pseudo-intellectuals, which still pollute the route of European film festivals. Thus, this film is very difficult to swallow, even by confessed connoisseurs of surrealism. Having no plot, it consists of a succession of images, often graphically provocative, highly inadvisable to sensitive people. Just that. Personally, I often compare Buñuel to Edd Wood, but maybe the latter can be even better that the Spanish director, in the sense that he, at least, managed to make some funny films.

Un chien andalou aka The Emperor's Wiener Is Showing is just a collection of weird and disturbing images made by two deviants who fooled everyone into thinking it's art. Fans of such garbage like to tell the people who dislike it that they "don't get it". The only thing you could get from this is either a headache or the feeling that you're wasting your time. It's one of those movies many people say they like just to appear smart. The rest of them just like meaningless crap.Un chien andalou is mostly remembered for the eye slicing scene, where the woman suddenly changes into a horse or cow or whatever when the razor touches her eye. After seeing the whole movie, I'm not sure if it's intentional or just a crappy special effect. It's this scene the fans will bring up when they tell you how awesome and deep the movie is...because some pretentious magazine or website said so. Trust me, the best thing about Un Chien Andalou is the "off" button on your DVD player.It's a pity that Salvador Dali decided to waste his talent making movies like this, and paintings of melting clocks and Hitler masturbating. The man could obviously paint. The sad thing about Bunuel is that he knew about the existence of movie cameras.(Zero stars)

Buñuel's and Dali's opus, when both were strapping young guys in Hemingway's Paris, is film pure. Even more so than 2001, a film that I rate even one notch higher.There is no story here. There are no morals. There is no deep psychology, although the Freudian crowd has of course provided pitiful interpretations for the imagery. It is just imagery. The Freudians are just like hapless children taking a Rorschach test and trying to assign meaning to random ink blots. It is well-known that the two surrealists basically just one-upped each other with their weirdest dreams, and then tried to put on the screen what the special effects and micro-budget of the day allowed. In fact, "Un Chien Andalou" is one of the grand-daddys of independent film. No studio would have touched this thing with a pole. Fatty Arbuckle jumping on actresses and literally exploding them under his weight was poppycocks by comparison.I know that when a film really impresses me, it gets me to do something difficult. After "Chien," I had to sit down and write out some of my weirdest dreams as a stream-of-consciousness short story. About 20 pages of intense writing. My brother and his wife tell me it's pretty far out - but it's not as far out as this film.For some reason, whenever I see this film, I have to think of Brian O'Nolan's "The Third Policeman," a book that starts out harmless enough but then falls into a rabbit hole so deep that it all seems like self-iterative dream."Chien" is simply surreal. If you like Dali's melting clocks and elephants on sky-high stilt legs, or Hieronymus Bosch's medieval monstrosities, you'll like this film. And if not, let razor-blue sky of the blond-eyed and blue-haired take you to the beetle crevice with the whispering headlights that roll up and down in that labyrinth of crackling plaster walls, all rounded, too soft and too steep to climb up from, so you are trapped.