OUDF501: Un Chien Andalou (Visual Analysis)

Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 French short film directed by Luis Bunuel and the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali. The movie was inspired by the Faustian concept of suppressed human emotions, when analysed psychoanalytically the film delivers numerous concepts such as Sigmund Freud's fetishism. Although the directors to this film originally insisted that nothing on this film symbolises anything, the viewer is free to make up his or her meaning to what the narrative is.

The film begins with a series of strange disturbing images, the first and foremost being the infamous iconic scene of Bunuel himself using a man's shaving razor to slit open a woman's eye. This shot is immediately replaced by one in which a line of clouds travel in the foreground of a full moon, depicting as the razor blade slicing through the eye. The similarities to these scenes represent a link between people and nature. There is another scene later in the film in which a woman's armpit hair fades out into a later location showing grass on in a beach, this is another relation of human and nature.

Another striking scene in which a man is groping a woman and thinking lustful thoughts, this can be linked to sexual repressing mentioned in Freud's book. The man shows animalistic behaviours as he forces himself onto the woman this can be linked to fetishism.

Bunuel's story is clearly non linear as one of the scenes is set sixteen years before, but what's puzzling is that the characters and the set have not changed. Bunuel and Dali seemed to be determined to make this film illogical.