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Un Chien Andalou
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí
An eye slit by a razor blade
Donkey's carcass in the piano
A hand crawling with ants
A sequence of weird, shuddering installations* from the dawn of surrealism.
College, Auditorium Maximum, 25 years ago, hardly any space to sit, the film is running,
and we are loaded with questions and riddles.
Mysteries, too.
Pál Z. Szabó's new book just came out to answer these questions, riddles and mysteries.
The book - Revolt against Death -
takes us into Buñuel's hermetic world
into depths we have never seen or suspected
"If someone were to tell me
I had twenty years left,
and ask me how I'd like to spend them,
I'd reply: "Give me two hours a day of activity,
and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
I love dreams, even when they're nightmares,
which is usually the case.
My dreams are always full of the same familiar obstacles, but it
doesn't matter.
The dreams, they say, always bombard our brains, they come in waves
stirring up real storms.
During one night billions of images emerge and dissolve;
the earth is covered in clouds of lost dreams.
There is nothing that someone hasn't dreamt and forgotten one night."
Surrealists considered dreams an important component of the creative process.
The dreams represent the hidden reality, the other world, the world of desires sought by the surrealists.
That made them celebrate the invention of cinema.
Buñuel had stones in his pocket to throw at the audience in case the reception would be unfavorable.
Eventually it was a screaming success.
Un Chien Andalou came from an encounter between two dreams.
When I arrived to spend a few days at Dalí's house in Figueras, I told
him about a dream I'd had in which a long tapering cloud sliced the
Moon in half
and a razor blade slicing through an eye.
Dalí immediately told me
that he'd seen a hand crawling with ants in a dream he's had the
previous night.
"And what if we started right there and made a film?" - he wondered aloud.
There is a great debate that's never likely to be resolved about whose film it is.
But looking at Dalí's oeuvre,
it is clear that the motifs and thematics of the film
are found in his paintings way before the film was made.
And when we go through the entire oeuvre of Dalí,
we find that the entire oeuvre revolves around the thematics,
and the same motifs keep recurring throughout Dalí's life.
The script was written in under a week following a very simple rule:
not to accept an idea or image that could provide a rational,
psychological, or cultural explanation.
Only accept what impresses us without any explainable reason.
I have been studying the film for quite a while, and it always comes
up with something new, and there are conflicting ways of interpretations,
but the bottom line is simple:
a young man longingly approaches the women.
He seeks his lost mother,
while she wants man to fall in love with, to have sex with, but the
boy is in terror of sexuality.
What we see is the struggle between the boy and the woman, where the
boy is striving to force her into the mother's role,
while she wants to turn the infantile, young boy into a young man.
The story ends when this struggle reaches it climax,
and the next moment is not seen.
The opposition between the man and the woman depicted in the film,
or generally the complementary opposition between man and woman
represents the duality of the world.
The male corresponds to the spiritual, the female the material,
sensual, lunar forces.
In this myth the man's job is to conquer these lunar, inferior forces,
to spiritualize the matter.
This is the subject of the film,
the message of the film:
the role of man, the role of art is to restore the broken unity of the world.