A Film Canon

The most famous short film ever made, Un Chien Andalou seems far less impressive when viewed alongside its avant-garde contemporaries. Buñuel and Dalí are at their strongest when generating a kind of abstract horror, most famously in the opening scene, in which a man cuts open a woman's eyeball, but also in the uncanny use made of animals, such as the ants which continually crawl out of a man's palms, and the donkey corpses inserted into grand pianos. However, this horror has its limits, mainly because it seems ill-suited to the cinematic medium. The narrative syntax is (as Buñuel readily admitted) so tangential that the film can only really be appreciated as a succession of discrete images - and, even then, the transition between those images is so rapid as to prevent the viewer from fully appreciating the proximity to reality that distinguishes them from other kinds of representation, although this rapidity is also arguably what produces psychoanalytically productive free association. Nevertheless, it feels as if the film would be more effectively rearranged as a painting, its shots replaced by compositional details - or, alternatively, as if Buñuel is ultimately providing a kind of cinematic essay on Dalí's paintings, from which many of the images are directly or indirectly transposed, rather than an autonomous film.