All language subtitles for Un perro andaluz (Luis Bunuel - 1929) (otra más)_track6_[eng]

(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.