I hadn't seen this before, though I of course knew about the infamous eyeball scene. Often lauded as a masterpiece, it's a French/Spanish surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali but I'm not going to describe the film any more than that — watch it and you'll understand!
I have to say I'm seriously wondering if there's an Emperor's New Clothes thing going on here. Buñuel is a revered director (who made several highly regarded films surprisingly not on this list) and Dali is one of the most famous artists of the last century, so obviously this has to be a great film. After all, that's what film students the world over are told. So how come it seems to be total shit? Oh well, it must be my shortcomings as a film watcher because all those people can't be wrong. I don't want to look like a dick so I'll just pretend that it's actually awesome.
Except I'm more than happy to look like a dick, so here's an honest review.
The most interesting thing about it is probably the fact that it's utterly meaningless. And that's not me being stupid; the writers purposefully made it void of all symbolism, metaphor or interpretation. This means that any critic who claims to possess some deep understanding of it is an idiot. There's also no plot and I'm pretty sure there aren't any characters either — there are actors in common through the piece but they're just showroom dummies on which the director dresses his bizarre scenes. Just because the girl in the opening scene looks the same as the girl running away from the bloke tied to the pianos (sigh...) doesn't mean it's the same person any more than Jake Gittes is the same person as Jack Torrance. The whole thing is just really empty and pointless.
Don't put this down to surrealism-bashing. I'm not against the movement and it led to some excellent pieces of artwork. David Lynch's backwards-talking dwarf, for example, is one of the coolest scenes in all television and is undoubtedly "surreal". True surrealism tries to express the chaos of the mind and the trip into Dale Cooper's dream psyche is perfectly weird. Un Chien Andalou, by comparison, is just very tiresome. A load of random stuff happens but you don't care about any of it, can't find any meaning in it and it's not even particularly interesting from a purely visual perspective.
Watch Porky in Wackyland instead — a much better example of surrealist film.
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So I finally got round to watching this last night. Although I'm not sure I share the vehemence of your disapproval, I think you're right to call this an overrated work.
ReplyDeleteAs ever with these early films, I'm confused by the chronology, by which I mean I can't work out precisely the impact it would have had at the time. Looking back, though, this does seem to be an attempt to cock a snook at convention as much as a true piece of artistic expression (imagine Salvador Dali being involved with such a thing?!). There were points at which I expected the camera to pan over to John Cleese to announce something completely different.
It's probably worth trying to see "L'age d'or", Bunuel's second film, if you can (if you ever go to Madrid, it's on a loop at the Thyssen-Bornhemiza museum). It does things in a similar way to Chien Andalou, but has a slightly firmer narrative and is feature length. I found it much more enjoyable, if no less incomprehensible at times.