All I can say is that I saw this film and immediately realized it was a calf’s eye. Mainly because I had the dubious pleasure of dissecting same in 6th grade AND 8th grade…interesting short flick though. 
Oh yeah…link.
I have to disagree strongly with this statement in Euty’s reply:
There is quite a lot of evidence that both Bunuel and Dali were being disingenuous and even a little pranksterish (as was their way) in this claim, for there are, in actuality, a number of connections between the images. Surrealism was grounded on the idea of art emerging by tapping into the dream state, and dream states are very rarely random but are usually free associative. So is Un Chien Andalou
This is evident from the opening scene, where the razor across the eye is intercut with the cloud cover slicing across the full moon. This is not random; this is a literal and figurative portrayal of the same event. While there is no doubt that Bunuel & Dali subvert ordinary narrative structures at every turn, they also comply with just as many. People look out a window or open a door, and then the next shot is a POV or an action-matching shot that, though bizarre, allows for a certain continuity. This is why Chien is so tricky–because Bunuel & Dali were both well-versed in cinematic language, and their ability to subvert this language isn’t random at all, but strictly calculated for maximum effect.
Even Dali admitted there was a theme of the film: “The pure and correct line of ‘conduct’ of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian, patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality.” Certainly, there is a preoccupation with the notion of romance/love and sex/lust that recurs throughout the film (even in Bunuel’s musical choices). In addition, throughout the film, we see images that would serve as recurring symbols in most of Bunuel’s other films: clergy (religion and its repressive nature), pianos (bourgeois culture and its pretensions), hands (connection/disconnection, impulse & desire), insects (decay, perversion).
This is not to say the film makes any “sense” in conventional terms, or that there is a single, linear interpretation. And Bunuel & Dali both had stated that their primary intention was to incite or provoke, not to convey any larger “meaning.” But to say that the images are simply random, and therefore completely unrelated to each other, is also not entirely accurate.
THE ANDALUSIAN DOG is like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – that is, on first viewing it seems confusing, but if you go back and watch again, you will see that the underlying intent is not really so obscure.
Gwynne Edwards in his book “The Discreet Art of Luis Bunuel” gives an interesting interpretation of the film based on Bunuel’s interest in Freudian psychology. I don’t agree with everything he says, but only because the film is too elastic and ambiguous to be distilled down to a single “correct” interpretation. That said, however, the fact that a film doesn’t have a single unambiguous meaning is not the same as saying it has no meaning at all.
For some reason, some people (like Euty, apparently) prefer to think that work like this is some kind of joke fobbed off by the artists onto a gullible public, who then waste their time looking for meaning where there is none.
By the way, even if we were to agree that there is no meaning to the film, it is clear that the images are not random. For instance, the dissolves from the woman’s armpit hair to the sea urchin to the hair on top of another woman’s head: we can debate where this has some kind of symbolic meaning, but the images are clearly linked by the visual similarity in a way that makes us sit up and take notice, whether or not we “understand” what we are seeing.
While it is too much to say that Bunuel and Dali’s film makes strict, linear, sense, there are, none the less, scenes and connections between scenes which lend themselves to ready interpretation.
The first time I saw this movie–which was more than twenty years ago–it was introduced by an art history professor who said he had been told that the film appeared to be largely about a pair of lovers who never seem to quite “get together”. He also added that though he had been told this by several viewers of the film, he himself did not “get” this.
Neither did I. Then, when I saw the film a second time after an interval of about ten years, it seemed pretty clearly to me to be (at least mostly) about two lovers who seem unable to truly connect and commit themselves to one another emotionally or spiritually.
Some of the symblism, and the logic, of the film is based on puns.
The scene in which the pair are seen dragging dead cattle, pianos, and priests tied to a rope suggest that they burdened by a great many inhibitions and burdens acquired from the culture in which they were raised. In modern parlance, we would say they “have baggage”, and the image is a sort of visual pun on this.
Bunuel appears to have used this same sort imagery in his much later film “That Obscure Object of Desire”, where Fernando Rey is forever carrying a sack around without explanation. While some critics said, for no particular reason, that it was a sack of dung, he no longer has the sack when he steps out of a store front just before the very end of the movie. Looking into the store through a window he sees a woman sewing what appears to be a white lace wedding dress, and is visibly excited. I suggest that what he was carrying around was the material for the dress, and it symbolized his sentimentality and his romantic notions, which were a guiding force, and a burden, to him throughout the film.
In the scene where the woman is staring in horror at a moth, it is significant that it is, specifically, a Death’s Head Moth; she is apparently contemplating her mortality, and the question of whether she is fated to live and die alone. This same symbolism appears to be used in a classic 19th Century English painting in which a shepherd, who seems to be in a rather seductive pose, is showing such a moth to young woman. Unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me think of the name of the painting or the painter just now.
Another way of putting this is that she is questioning whether she is fated to stagnate in her progress through life as she stares at the death’s head. This same issue of stagnation is addressed in the image of a hand caught against a door. When ants come crawling out of the hand, this is a play on a French figure of speech. Where we say in English that one’s hand has “gone to sleep”, in French one says his hand has ants in it.
I never said that the film was a joke, rather that the film was created without the necessity for cinematic, thematic, or narrative unity. It was created pretty much for shock value, not in order to promote any “theme.” And while we might project some Freudian analysis after the fact, and Dali may have tried to explain it afterwards, there is, as far as I know, nothing from Bunuel or Dali which speaks towards a specific theme concurrent with the films creation. See Roger Ebert : http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2000/04/041601.html
and Damian Cannon : http://www.film.u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/Chien_Andalou.html
Hey, Eutychus55:
I’m sorry if I mistated part of the point of your original Staff Report. But I continue to object to your command not to “look for any real meaning in the film” because “it’s purposely not there.” Yes, the film is intentionally irrational, but that doesn’t mean it is devoid of meaning.
Bunuel may have never stated a specific theme for the film, but then that was typical of his attitude toward most of his work, even when his later films had traditional narrative structures (“I did not in any wya want to make a thesis film,” he said of LOS OLVIDADOS).
Regarding ANALUSIAN DOG, Bunuel did make comments that implied the film was conceived with Freudian psychology in mind; this is not just somethign that was applied retroactively by viewers desperate to find meaning in the meaninglessness:
“In the film are amalgamated the aesthetics of Surrealism with Freudian discoveries,” Bunuel said in a biography written by Francisco Aranda. He added that despite the dreamlike quality of the film, “the environment and characters are of a realistic type. Its fundamental difference from other films consists in the fact that the characters function animated by impulses, the primal sources of which are confused with those of irrationalism, which in turn are those of poetry. At times these characters react enigmatically, in as far as a pathological psychic complex can be enigmatic.”
Clearly, there is no intended narrative logic to the movie. Maybe there isn’t even a specific theme that the film can be distilled down to. But those “primal sources…or irrationalism” are fertile ground for fruitful analysis.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
Just thought I’d contribute a (an?) hysterical chat session on this very film that was posted on another website I visit from time to time. Enjoy.
KITTEN SANDWICHES!!!
Heh heh heh … “Un Spinnwebe Andalou II: Kittens on Fire!”