Original subtitles

(Narrator) "Once upon a time" reads the opening intertitle:

the inviting and reassuring first words of bedtime stories

since the world began.

We're led to expect the unfolding of a straightforward story line,

the stuff of fairy tale and pulp fiction

that became the staple of movie entertainment.

But that this might be a disquieting kind of fable

is signalled by the following shot.

This so-called prologue is the key to the rest of the film

and the image of the slashed eye is one of the icons of Surrealism.

It's worth looking again at the reasons for its celebrity.

They boil down, I think, to three:

the almost unbearable impact of the action

that produces a physical shock which doesn't diminish,

even after many viewings.

The figural density and poetic resonance

of the visual elements brought into play,

together with the complex way that they're strung together,

and the challenge the sequence delivers to us, as spectators,

to think again about the satisfaction we get from watching films.

It is profoundly shocking.

Nothing prepares us for this gratuitous attack.

The effect is exacerbated because, unusually for the cinema,

the woman's eye is looking directly out at the audience, returning our gaze,

implicating us.

We grasp that it's also ourselves who are the intended victims

of this visual assault.

And the tranquility with which the action is performed

is another twist of the knife in the spectator's unease.

Denying us shots of anticipation or reaction,

on the part of either the aggressor or the victim,

it's a grotesquely cruel exercise in clinical objectivity.

No wonder Buñuel has been dubbed "the surgeon of the look".

Of course, as Hitchcock famously said,

"“Cutting is the best way."

He meant it was the best way for a murderer to do a killing

and the best way for a film director to manipulate his audience.

Buñuel, who had just published an essay extolling découpage

as the key to expressivity in film, would have agreed.

It's he, the director on the screen, who engenders the film by a cut.

Cutting is symbolically appropriate also

because the central preoccupation of the film

is sexual desire and sexual anxiety

including, more specifically for the male, the fear of castration.

Complexes about castration also lead to fetishism.

The fetishist substitutes as the object of his desire

a part of the thing, a cut of it, for the whole.

Fragmentation therefore reigns

because the film deconstructs the sexual subject

and opens up contradictions within desiring

in the exchange of looks, the circulation of fetishised objects,

and body parts.

Mutilation of the text matches mutilation of the body.

The initial act of physical violence

is directly related to the textual violence that will follow.

The thumbnail on which Buñuel tests the sharpness of the stropped blade

is about the size of a 35mm film frame.

And the razor stands in for the guillotine

on the editing rostrum.

It's significant, perhaps, that Buñuel disappears from his own film

having accomplished the act of cutting.

The slicing is an effect of montage.

Of course, it's not the actress's eye that is cut up,

but a dead calf's.

It's all down to the Kuleshov effect

and Eisenstein's "montage of attractions",

or, in this case, of repulsions.

It's down to our conditioned reflex to shot following shot, to the cut,

that we get conditioned to by the first films we ever see.

What kind of relation can there be

between a cloud passing across the moon

and a razor slicing an eye?

It's impressive as a graphic match and as a visual metaphor.

By and large, cinematic metaphors are difficult to read,

draw attention to themselves and disrupt the narrative flow.

They're found mostly in avant-garde and experimental films.

Metonymies, in contrast, are unobtrusive

and may well accomplish their work without being recognised as figures at all.

Common sense reminds us that this is just an illusory figure,

yet, watching the film,

we will have willed the connection between the two.

It's as if we want the eye to be broken.

It's our desire that the cloud passing is a cause

and the razor slash, an effect.

And it seems that if we consciously egg the film on towards a mutilation,

we may at the same time have unconsciously willed it towards a rape.

Enough's probably been said

about the spectator's masochistic identification

of his/her own vision with the severed eye.

But by the sadistic side of the same coin,

the razor slash is even more obviously

the film's symbolic deflowering of the woman.

The moon is a traditional symbol of virginity, after all.

The implied vagina symbolically completes a triad

with the moon and the eye,

just as the implied penis completes a phallic triad

with the cloud and the razor.

So the prologue not only indicates

the kind of spectatorial responsiveness

that will be subsequently expected from the audience,

it also prefigures the chains of sexual motifs

that will recur and ramify in the sexual obstacle race to come.

The graphic forms and patterns deployed in this opening sequence

will inform the rest of the film,

constantly recurring and resonating one with another,

at the same time as they disrupt the smooth unfolding of a story.

In regard to circular forms,

we'll participate in a game of echoes and repetitions,

alternately concave and convex,

that takes in the thumbnail, the moon, the eye, the hole in the hand,

the armpit, and so on.

And we will observe a corresponding series of linear forms

that includes the razor, the slither of cloud, the striped box, the tie:

so many shapes standing in for the phallus.

But what does Un Chien andalou as a whole film mean?

It is, basically, after all, a love story.

Ostensibly, the plot's trajectory is the classic Hollywood and folk-tale one

of the formation of the couple,

even though that satisfying outcome is eventually thwarted.

Yet Buñuel and Dali's way with the story

sets up a troubling tension between this proverbial cosy anecdotal line

and the perversely irrational content that subverts its causal chain.

And it's with this discrepancy

that the problems interpreting Un Chien andalou start.

Is it, after all, just a tissue of self-indulgent nonsense,

a farrago of non sequiturs?

Is it an exercise in a symbolism so arcane

as to be intelligible only to the initiated?

Or should we take Buñuel and Dali seriously

as logicians of the unconscious?

There are compelling reasons for reading the film psychoanalytically

as I've already argued vis-a-vis the prologue.

Indeed, this has always been critics' and interpreters' preferred approach.

Faced with the film's enigmas,

they've been encouraged in this by Buñuel himself,

who famously commented that

"the only method of investigation of the symbols"

"would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."

The fact that the film was immediately qualified as surrealist

and that Surrealism itself, since Breton's 1924 Manifesto,

had located itself on Freudian maps of the psyche,

is further support for a psychoanalytic reading.

Breton had long before noted the similarities

of poetic figures like the metaphor and analogy

to the work of condensation and displacement

in Freud's picture of the unconscious mental processes.

But a psychoanalytical reading need not mean the search

for an exclusive one-to-one equivalent

between an image in the film and some specific psychosexual theme.

Early critics all assumed that the film contained an allegorical master narrative

which recounted the sexual development

of a single, hypothetical male protagonist.

It was, they said, about adolescent sexual development and frustration,

starting with an invocation of the castration complex or the sexual act

and continuing with the sexual pilgrim's progress

through phases of infantile narcissism, mother fixation,

homosexuality and much else besides.

Yet no two interpretations have ever agreed on the specifics

of the psychosexual allegory.

Almost certainly this was because they closed their eyes

to elements in the film that didn't fit their particular decoding.

Early critics equally reductively, if understandably,

tended to see it as the record of a dream.

It is not a film dream, nor even,

despite Buñuel account of the origin of the screenplay,

the record of a series of his own and Dali's dreams.

Un Chien andalou is more fruitfully read

as being about the workings of the unconscious,

than it is about the content of any particular dream.

The unconscious is not so much

a pre-existing hidden treasure house of symbolic content

waiting for the artist to loot.

It is rather a psychic activity, better viewed as a process,

by which desire and anxiety express themselves,

not just for Buñuel and Dali,

but for ourselves in the audience, watching the film.

This helps explain why this little film

has assumed so much importance for more recent film theory.

Recent approaches have stopped asking "What does this film mean?"

in favour of "In what position does this film put the spectator?"

The contradictoriness

of successive rival core-narrative readings of the film

combined with their selective inaccuracy and distortion

of what we actually see on the screen,

has by and large discredited attempts to interpret Un Chien andalou

as either the dream of a unified subject,

the hypothetical hero,

or as the allegory of the hero's sexual development.

More recent approaches have emphasised the ways

in which the film opens up possibilities of meaning.

For the surrealists, following Freud in this,

the workings of desire are primarily unconscious.

By what means, then,

could one hope to represent something that was unconscious?

Buñuel's and Dali's solution to the problem

was via the transgression of more familiar discourses.

Un Chien andalou's shocks and disorientations are not random.

They're predicated on a systematic breaking of the frame

of traditional narrative,

and thus come across as parodies of the conventions

of both mainstream and the art cinema of the time.

In mainstream cinema, an impression of reality or verisimilitude

is usually assured by apparent fidelity

to the audience's experience of time and space.

The audience's belief in what is seen

comes from spatial continuity and the logic of cause and effect.

It is these logics that Un Chien andalou mocks

and largely defies.

In terms of the ordering of film, it is in the cuts, the very points

at which classic narrative montage strives most for continuity,

that the body of the film is dismembered.

The signs of narrative logic and continuity are present:

shot, reverse shot, alternation, eye-line matches and so forth.

As spectators, we therefore assume

that a logic of causality links the successive shots,

because the conventional cues are visible.

But the mutually inconsistent images montaged together by Buñuel and Dali

refuse to be read as continuous.

The time axis is repeatedly disrupted

in ways that both poke fun at narrative film conventions

and enhance the spectator's sense of temporal confusion.

Thus, the misleading intertitle "Sixteen years before"

follows "Towards three in the morning".

Abrupt changes of setting, achieved through montage,

confound our sense of the integrity of space.

For example, there is continuity of action across cuts

between unrelated locations

when the murdered double starts his death-fall indoors

and completes it in a park.

The whole film is an assemblage of incongruities.

Likewise, at the level of characterisation,

there is neither psychological nor physiological consistency.

Batcheff plays apparently three characters:

the cyclist, "himself" and "his" double.

Characters: the razor man - Buñuel, the androgyne and the new lover

are inserted into and ejected from the story with equal arbitrariness.

Bodies endure the transfer of hair and the erasure of a mouth.

The normal frontiers of the human form are blurred

as an eye is broken and yet miraculously restored

and as breasts transmogrify into buttocks.

But even hell has its laws.

And Un Chien andalou substitutes alternative patterns of ordering

for the conventional ones that it subverts.

In compensation, it makes all sorts of connections,

between the otherwise disjointed episodes

via its many repetitions, pairings and doublings.

The gouged-out eyes of the piano-borne donkeys

remind us of the sliced eye of the prologue,

just as they prefigure the empty eye sockets

of the half-buried lovers in the final shot.

Un Chien andalou is a perpetual movement

between opposing poles of signification.

Just as the prologue is ordered on alternating figures

based on presence and absence,

so the film that follows is patterned on symmetrical oppositions

between assertion and denial:

sight versus blindness, regeneration versus lifelessness,

attraction versus repulsion,

horizontal lines versus circular shapes

and, dare one say it,

male versus female.

Instead of a regular narrative, the unfolding of Un Chien andalou

presents us with a succession of repeated displacements

of the same structures of desire:

the eternal return of Freud's repressed.

But these repetitions-with-difference do not overwhelm the text

in such a way as to sabotage altogether the movement of a narrative.

The lineaments of characterisation and time reference that a story needs

are present at least in tantalising filigree.

And if the characters have no names

and next to no anchorage in everyday reality,

they do have goals.

It is on account of this persistence of story

that Surrealism is probably the only avant-garde

within the parameters of narrative cinema.

And it's their residual story lines that almost certainly help account

for surrealist films' lasting popularity over the other avant-gardes.

We've seen how psychoanalysis gives privileged access

to Un Chien andalou.

But this doesn't mean that Freud is spared the same subversive treatment.

The very literalness of the Freudian tropes in the film

points to the knowing irony of their enlistment by Buñuel and Dali.

Un Chien andalou is a play not only of the Freudian paradigm but with it.

After all, the surrealists had never gone the whole way with Freud.

They had major reservations about the therapist Freud.

They distanced themselves from the conservative moralist

who was prepared to pay too high a price in discontents

for the rewards of civilisation.

Many early viewers took Un Chien andalou very seriously indeed.

Cyril Connolly, "Palinurus", saw it as a sort of unholy rite

and recalls leaving a Paris screening

"with the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror."

But to dwell exclusively on the terroristic violence,

is to miss the humour, however dark, that pervades the film.

But the film's ironic perspective

puts a certain saving distance between us and the cruelties

that helps us turn them into objects of contemplation

and even of pleasure.

This is where the surrealists' favourite oxymoronic agent,

black humour, comes into operation.

Black humour converts a pain

that accident and necessity inflict on the self into pleasure

and thus brings about a kind of liberation.

It's a kind of intellectual victory over circumstance,

the last redoubt of the vanquished but unbowed.

Un Chien andalou is indeed a story of defeated passion,

but done in such an exhilarating way

that defeat is turned into a kind of victory.