Dali, Surrealism and Cinema E-Book

Elliott King

• Herausgeber: Kamera Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Salvador Dalí is one of the most widely recognised and most controversial artists of the twentieth century. He was also an avant-garde filmmaker - collaborating with such giants as Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock - though the impetus and endurance of his fascination with film has rarely been given the attention it merits. King surveys the full range of Dalí's eccentric activities with(in) the cinema. Influenced by the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick, Dalí used the cinema to bring the 'dream subjects' of his paintings to life, providing the groundwork for revolutionary forays into television, video, photography and holography. Dalí's writings continue to be relevant to discourses surrounding film and surrealism, and his embrace of academic technique partnered with contemporary technology and pop culture is a paradox still relevant today. From a movie-going experience that would incorporate all five senses to the tale of a woman's hapless love affair with a wheelbarrow, Dalí's hallucinatory vision never fails to leave its indelible mark.

Leseprobe

Elliott H. King

DALÍ, SURREALISM AND CINEMA

CONTENTS

Title Page

1 Salvador Dalí, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in His Time

2 Art and Anti-Art

3 ‘C’est un film surréaliste!’

Un Chien Andalou

L’Âge d’Or

Five Minutes on the Subject of Surrealism

Against the Family

The Sanitary Goat

Babaouo

The Surrealist Mysteries of New York

4 Hollywood

Giraffes on Horseback Salad

Moontide

Spellbound

Destino

Father of the Bride

The Temptation of St Anthony

5 Later Films

The Wheelbarrow of Flesh

The Soul

The Catalan Blood

The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros

Interview with… Robert Descharnes

Chaos and Creation

Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí

‘The Explosion of the Swan’

Dune

Impressions of Upper Mongolia – Homage to Raymond Roussel

Interview with… Amanda Lear

‘The Little Demon’

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright

Salvador Dalí, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in His Time

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) once remarked, ‘The day that people seriously turn their attention to my work, they will see that my painting is like an iceberg where only a tenth of its volume is visible.’1 The Catalan artist was referring to the profundity of the ideas that went into his fantastic seascapes populated by ‘soft watches’, though the word ‘painting’ might easily have been replaced with ‘movies’. Dalí loved movies. He enjoyed watching the old silent comedies starring Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the great Italian and French films by Federico Fellini and Marcel Pagnol, and the animated films produced by Walt Disney – he used to project them for friends at his home in Port Lligat. His artwork also referenced cinema celebrities: Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West and Sir Laurence Olivier all became ‘dream subjects’ in Dalí’s masterfully-rendered canvases. But the films Dalí conceived himself have rarely been given proper consideration. They’ve remained beneath the surface of that Dalínian iceberg.

Dalí at his studio on the 8th floor of the Zeigfeld Theatre (New York) posing with his oil painting Movies (1944) from the Seven Lively Arts series. The painting was subsequently destroyed in a fire. Photo by George Karger/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Some will probably know the 1929 short he made with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog) – its opening, in which a razorblade slashes a young woman’s eyeball, has become one of the most celebrated sequences in cinema history – and perhaps also the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), but these are only the most famous examples; the majority of his ideas never materialised. Though less arcane than they once were, most of Dalí’s scripts are still not well known, particularly to English-speaking readers – the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí’s anthology of the artist’s writings is presently published only in Catalán and Castilian. The current volume aims to introduce those lesser-known projects, or at least those for which we have known scenarios. As I will emphasise in the last section, ‘Later Films’, we can be sure that Dalí’s experiments went well beyond those for which we have written evidence or existing footage. Little is known, for instance, about his movie adaptation of his 1942 autobiography, TheSecret Life of Salvador Dalí, at one stage pitched to Federico Fellini; the tarot deck he designed – or that he reportedly asked Amanda Lear to design for him – for the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) that was axed from the picture when a price couldn’t be negotiated with producer Albert R. ‘Cubby’ Broccoli;2 or the poster for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) that was ordered but apparently never completed.3 He also reportedly made a brief video in 1972 in which he superimposed the facial features of American actress Denise Sandell onto the head of Marilyn Monroe, telling her he planned to put to film the Paris Vogue cover he had designed in December 1971 using Philippe Halsman’s collage photograph, Mao Marilyn.4 No remnants have surfaced for most of these projects, though hitherto unknown scripts, anecdotes and film segments are bound to emerge as more people turn their attentions towards Dalí and film.

One of the reasons Dalí’s relations with the cinema have received less attention than his painting or even his sculpture, per se, is probably because his activities rarely achieved their intended ends. I have brought together about 20 films at varying degrees of completion for this book, and only 7 of them were actually realised during Dalí’s lifetime: Un Chien Andalou, L’Âge d’Or, Spellbound, Father of the Bride, Chaos and Creation, Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí and Impressions of Upper Mongolia – Homage to Raymond Roussel. Further, perhaps only two of those – Un Chien Andalou (1929) and Impressions of Upper Mongolia (1975) – ultimately corresponded with Dalí’s vision. So what happened? Why wasn’t Dalí able to realise more of his ideas for cinema? Art historian Haim Finkelstein has postulated that some of the scripts Dalí wrote were never intended to be shot – keeping in mind the popularity of certain scenarii intournables (‘unfilmable scenarios’) in the 1920s;5 while this may have been true with some of the 1930s scripts, later it was more often the case that his designs were simply too costly and elaborate – and, indeed, esoteric – for studios to justify. As for his apparent inability to mount the films on his own, Paul Hammond describes Dalí as ‘a great ideas man’ but rightly observes that he consistently needed a strong director to transfer his imagination to the silver screen – a presence that was often lacking after his friendship with Luis Buñuel deteriorated.6 Dawn Ades offers that many of the artist’s cinematic projects may have been left unfinished because he came to see film as a ‘“secondary form”, involving the intervention of too many people in its creation’;7 it is indeed curious that Dalí conceived increasingly elaborate cinematic spectacles requiring more and more professionals, but the films that materialised to his satisfaction came mostly when he was working alone with a director on a film that could be shot in less than two weeks. Amanda Lear – Dalí’s model and muse, and one of his closest confidants between 1965 and 1980 – adds that the greatest obstacle the artist faced to finishing films was the unreasonable demands he deliberately put upon people of the industry. These demands, she suggests, were made chiefly to compensate for his own inability to direct and to ensure the project’s failure: ‘[W]hen he was confronted with real filmmakers, big filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Fellini, he realised what an incredible job they were doing. It’s very difficult to direct people. Dalí couldn’t direct anybody; I mean, he couldn’t even direct himself!’. In her 1984 book Le Dalí d’Amanda, Lear notes that Fellini was interested in working with Dalí but found him too unreasonable;8 probably many others felt the same way.

But the story of Dalí and cinema should not be regarded only as a chronicle of failures. Though most of his scenarios weren’t realised, a cursory glance at his manuscripts reveals a sophisticated understanding of film’s capabilities and, above all, the same profound imagination that permeated all his endeavours – in writing, painting, illustration, sculpture and theatre design. Even when they were not made, Dalí’s cinematic visions boast sufficient intrinsic interest to justify a thorough examination – one that merits a greater depth than that which I have begun in the pages that follow, though I hope this will contribute to the discourse by introducing a wider audience to Dalí’s lesser-known scenarios. One may note that I’ve made a special point of detailing his ‘later films’, when television became a more dominant medium for him than true cinema; these projects are frequently overlooked when one thinks of ‘film’, but judging from how Dalí used television, they certainly warrant acknowledgement.

For their help unpacking these and other Dalínian forays, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the people who took time to speak with me about their first-hand experience with Dalí and the cinema: Leonardo Balada, Robert Descharnes and Amanda Lear. For their help in realising this book, I would like to thank my editor Hannah Patterson, as well as Dawn Ades; Montse Aguer and the Centre d’Estudis Dalínians at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí; Carol Butler, William Jeffett and Joan Kropf of The Salvador Dalí Museum (St Petersburg, FL); Robert and Nicolas Descharnes; Christopher Jones and Michael Taylor. I also owe enormous gratitude to June and Dale King and Mary Alice and Garth Haigh for their unwavering support, and to Emily King, follement aimée, for her careful proofreading and for her love and understanding as I continue to fill our home with books and assorted ‘soft watch’ paraphernalia.

Notes – SALVADOR DALÍ, THE YOUNGEST, MOST SACRED MONSTER OF THE CINEMA IN HIS TIME

1 Salvador Dalí with Louis Pauwels, LesPassions selon Dalí, Éditions DeNoël, Paris, 1968, p. 122.

2 Amanda Lear, My Life with Dalí, Virgin Books, London, 1985, p. 170. Originally published in French as Le Dalí d’Amanda, Favre, Paris, 1984.

3 Interview with Amanda Lear, in this volume.

4 Conversation with Denise Sandell, 24 September 2006, London, England.

5 Haim Finkelstein, The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 124–125.

6 Paul Hammond in Dawn Ades (ed.), Dalí, Bompiani Arte, Milan, 2004, p. 430.

7 Dawn Ades, Dalí (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 206. Originally published in 1982.

8 Amanda Lear, My Life with Dalí, Virgin Books, London, 1985, p. 60. Originally published in French as Le Dalí d’Amanda, Favre, Paris, 1984.

ART AND ANTI-ART

Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 in the Catalan town of Figueres on the Empordá plain. As a child, Dalí rarely shone as a student, though he exhibited extraordinary imagination and artistic prowess. His father, Salvador Dalí i Cusí, the town notary, hoped his son’s future would also be that of a bureaucrat, but the young Salvador was far more interested in painting and making a general spectacle of himself. In September 1922, at the age of 18, Dalí began his art studies at the prestigious Residencia des Estudiantes1 – the ‘Resi’, as it was known – and soon met two figures who would change his life: a strapping young engineering student from Aragón, Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), and a handsome and charismatic poet from Andalusia, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936).

The intellectual activity that was galvanised between Dalí and his friends profoundly affected the young painter in various areas, amongst them the realm of cinema. Dalí’s friends were avid film-goers – like the Surrealists in Paris, they adored Hollywood silent comedies starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. It was also at the ‘Resi’ where Dalí and his cohorts discovered the translated works of Sigmund Freud and Isidore Ducasse’s sadistic novel, The Songs ofMaldoror, both of which were to make a lasting impression on Dalí.

One of the most important attitudes to develop out of the ‘Madrid period’ was Dalí’s position on so-called ‘anti-art’. Despite its name, ‘anti-art’ was not against art: Rather, Dalí sought to distinguish between ‘authentic art’ – that which he admired that pushed the boundaries of the avant-garde, created by the likes of Picasso, Joan Miró, Juan Gris and Jean Arp, for example – and the half-hearted modernity he castigated the establishment for promoting. Dalí’s most direct statements on anti-art emerged in 1927, though one spies its roots in his earlier relations with Lorca and their development of the ‘putrefacte’, a quasi-Dadaist inside joke that attacked various esteemed Spanish personages who were respected in the fields of art and literature but whom Dalí and Lorca considered overly conventional and bourgeois. The duo ascribed to such fetid luminaries a quality of putrescent formlessness, contrasting the mathematical clarity they admired that they called ‘astronomy’; they even began planning a Book of Putrefaction, though it never materialised: It seems Dalí finished his contributions but Lorca failed to produce a preface. Amongst the most heavily attacked ‘putrefactes’ was the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, whom Dalí declared the ‘Head of the Putrescent Philistines of Spain’.2 Dalí had previously enjoyed Jiménez’s work and had even sent him two drawings in 1925, but by 1927 the Catalan painter’s ‘anti-art’ attitude had become more militant. He took special offence to Jiménez’s Platero y Yo, a sentimental tale recounting the idyllic travels of a poet and his faithful donkey companion, Platero. In the story, Platero eventually passes away from eating a poisoned root and is buried in a flowering orchard. As Dawn Ades observes, this scene must have inspired Dalí’s recurring depiction of the rotting donkey in such works as Honey is Sweeter Than Blood (1927) and The Rotting Donkey (1928) – an image that would become famous in 1929 with Un Chien Andalou.3

The cinema was an ideal instrument for Dalí’s anti-art platform: Not only did it readily lend itself to the visual effects that interested him, but, moreover, it was absolutely modern and accessible by the masses. Presaging ideas that would motivate Pop Art in the 1960s, Dalí embraced the ‘vulgar’ manifestations of cinema – specifically Hollywood slapstick, which he, like Buñuel, considered the cinema’s greatest poetic accomplishment4 – that stood in opposition to ‘high art’. ‘“Artistic”’, Dalí wrote to the art critic Sebastià Gasch, ‘– horrible word that only serves to indicate things totally lacking in art. Artistic performance, artistic photography, artistic advertisement, artistic furniture. Horror! Horror! What we all like, on the other hand, is the purely industrial object, dancehalls and the quintessential poetry of Buster Keaton’s hat’.5

Another important aspect of Dalí’s work linked to the cinema that developed during this period was his enthusiasm for ‘naturalism’. In October 1927, the artist exhibited two pictures, Honey is Sweeter ThanBlood and Apparatus and Hand (both from 1927), in the Barcelona Saló de Tardor (autumn salon); both were hailed by critics as ‘Surrealist’, though at the time Dalí was unwilling to accept this label and answered that they were more accurately ‘anti-artistic and direct’: ‘My painting is wholly and marvellously understood by children as well as by the fishermen of Cadaqués’, he wrote, suggesting that his paintings were simple and straightforward as opposed to ‘artistic’ works that were intellectual and complex.6 Dalí referred readers to his article, ‘La fotografia, pura creació de l’esperit’ (‘Photography, Pure Creation of the Spirit’), published in the 30 September 1927 issue of L’Amic de les Arts, in which he emphasised the importance of seeing things afresh and praised the objective power of the camera: ‘Let’s be content with the immediate miracle of opening our eyes and being dextrous in the apprenticeship of proper looking’, he wrote.7 Dalí lauded the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, whose eyes he declared ‘the case of the highest probity’, an idea that would influence him much later when, in the 1970s, he would compare Vermeer to the contemporary American Hyperrealists.

Other resonating concepts in ‘Photography, Pure Creation of the Spirit’ included the observation that, through a simple change in scale, photography could provoke the most unusual similarities and analogies: a cow’s eye could readily become a landscape with a light overcast, Dalí observed – an example Dawn Ades has traced to publications like László Moholy-Nagy’s book Painting, Photography, Film (1925), in which a photograph zoomed in on an eye, creating an abstract image from an otherwise identifiable subject.8 Like the poet Louis Aragon, who in 1918 observed that in the cinematic close-up an object is given over to the world of the fantastic – ‘On the screen objects that were a few moments ago sticks of furniture or books of cloakroom tickets are transformed to the point where they take on menacing or enigmatic meanings’9 – Dalí immediately recognised the potential the close-up offered for distorting reality. Later in 1927, in the December issue of La Gaceta Literaria, Dalí authored another article, ‘Film-arte, film-antiartístico’ (‘Artistic Film, Anti-Artistic Film’), in which he observed that, thanks to the faculties of close-up, a lump of sugar could loom on the screen as large as a city, while Vermeer’s painting The Lacemaker (1669–1670) – a relatively small canvas – could become grandiose.

I introduce these ideas here because they recur over and over again in Dalí’s dealings with film. His fascination with the close-up as a means of looking at objects anew was introduced in the 1920s, but it would arguably not fully come into its own until 1975, when his film Impressions of Upper Mongolia – Homage to Raymond Roussel launched all its action from the microscopic scratches on a ballpoint pen. His contemporaneous interest in the capabilities of photography to capture a subject ‘naturally’, but through simple effects transform it into something altogether unexpected, was another aspect that would take precedence in his work in forthcoming years, particularly in the development of ‘critical paranoia’. Of course, influences introduced after the 1920s had their impact on Dalí’s vision of the cinema too – most profoundly, Surrealism. But, through it all, he never gave up on the ideas he forged in the 1920s – that is, those views that very nearly led him to pursue film and photography instead of painting.

Notes – ART AND ANTI-ART

1 Once described as ‘Oxford and Cambridge in Madrid’ (JB Trend, A Picture ofModern Spain [1921], 36. Quoted in Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Faber and Faber, London, 1997, p. 90.

2 Rafael Santos Torroella (ed.), Salvador Dali escribe a Federico Garcia Lorca [1925–1936], Poesia, Revista ilustrada de información poética (Madrid), no. 27–38, April 1987.

3 Dawn Ades, ‘Morphologies of Desire’, in Michael Raeburn (ed.), Dali: The EarlyYears, South Bank Centre, London, 1994, p. 139.

4 C.f., Luis Buñuel in Gaceta Literaria, no. 56, 15 April 1929, translated in An UnspeakableBetrayal: Selected Writing of Luis Buñuel (University of California Press, 1995), p. 123–124.

5 Sebastià Gasch, L’expansió de l’art catalá al món (Barcelona: privately printed, 1953), 142. Quoted in Gibson, p. 146.

6 Salvador Dalí, ‘Els meus quadros del Saló de Tardor’, L’Amic de les Arts (Sitges), 2 (19) 31 October 1927. Supplement. Translated and published in Haim Finkelstein (ed.), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 51.

7 Salvador Dali, ‘La fotografía, pura creació de l’esperit’, L’Amic de les Arts (Sitges) 2 (18) (30 September 1927), p. 90–91. Translated and published in Finkelstein, p. 46.

8 Ades, ‘Morphologies of Desire’, p. 142.

9 Louis Aragon, ‘Du Décor’, La Film, September 1918. Quoted in Robert Short, TheAge of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, Creation Books, New York, 2003, p. 13–14.

‘C’EST UN FILM SURRÉALISTE!’

While Un Chien Andalou is now widely considered the quintessential Surrealist motion picture – in 1929, Buñuel even went so far as to declare in the pages of the Surrealist periodical La Révolution surréaliste that ‘Un Chien Andalou would not exist if Surrealism did not exist’1 – in the years leading to its inception Dalí was, as we have seen, resistant to Surrealism (in 1927 the art critic Sebastià Gasch labelled Dalí ‘the archetypal anti-Surrealist’, adding, ‘Nobody loathes Surrealism as thoroughly as Dalí’!2). Un Chien Andalou is arguably Surrealist in many ways, but in exploring its irrational storyline it is good to keep in mind that it was also heavily indebted to the ‘anti-art film’ Dalí ideologically developed in the late 1920s, spurred by Buñuel and Lorca, Joan Miró’s ‘assassination of painting’ and his own growing dissatisfaction with the Catalan avant-garde; much later this ‘anti-art’ attitude would inform The Wheelbarrowof Flesh (1948–1954) and The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker andthe Rhinoceros (1954–1962), both of which Dalí would describe as completely contrary to artistic, experimental film.

Un Chien Andalou, 1929

In the opening to his 1964 self-promotional journal, Diary of a Genius, Dalí expressed the benefits he perceived to wearing shoes that were too tight: ‘The painful pressure they exert on my feet enhances my oratorical capacities to the utmost.’3 One wonders, then, about the state of his feet in 1928, when – according to his account, anyway – he penned the then-untitled script for what would become his most celebrated contribution to the cinema, Un Chien Andalou (The AndalusianDog) (1929); he had just purchased a new pair of shoes, he later recalled, and he wrote a very short scenario on the shoebox lid that ‘went completely counter to the contemporary cinema.’4

Around the same time, the 28-year-old Luis Buñuel, one of Dalí’s closest friends and soon to become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated directors, was preparing a film entitled Caprichos, based on a series of short stories by the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Buñuel envisioned a man reading a newspaper from which Gómez de la Serna’s short stories would appear animated in different sections. Buñuel’s mother had already agreed to loan the 60,000 francs needed to finance the picture, but Gómez de la Serna had yet to come up with the promised screenplay. Dalí wasn’t impressed with the idea at all, which he subsequently described as ‘extremely mediocre’ and avant-garde ‘in an incredibly naïve sort of way’;5 he, on the other hand, had his shoebox scenario, which, he declared immodestly, ‘had the touch of genius’!6

Buñuel was impressed, recognising in Dalí’s scenario some affinities with Surrealism, the intellectual movement with which Buñuel had recently made contact in Paris. The term surréalisme was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 and was thence taken up in 1924 by a group of politically-minded intellectuals in Paris led by the poet André Breton (1896–1966). Surrealism sought to unleash the potential of the unbridled mind – a mission reflected in the definition of Surrealism put forth in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924): ‘Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.’ This endeavour initially limited the Movement to the realm of writing – unsurprising given that its founders were all chiefly poets. In these embryonic years, painting and other visual arts were not considered sufficiently ‘automatic’ to authentically fulfil the Surrealists’ aims of tapping the subconscious. This prejudice ultimately gave way, however, as artists such as André Masson, Joan Miró and Man Ray persuasively applied the Surrealists’ ideology to their visual work.

As the Surrealists’ scepticism about painting waned, they became increasingly enthusiastic over the prospects of film, which had already proven a popular vehicle for the Dadaists (of which Breton had also been a member). The reasons were clear:

The only truly modern art form, it was unhampered by tradition; its immediacy and emotive power offered fertile ground for the surrealist metaphor; its condemnation by the establishment as immoral and corrupting clearly enhanced its potential for social revolt and the expression of sexual fantasy; its perceived similarities to the state of dreaming seemed ready-made for the surrealists’ own exploration of dreams and subconscious desires.’7

The Surrealists were zealous movie spectators: Breton and his friend Jacques Vaché would often wander from one theatre to the next, buying tickets for anything that was showing and then exiting the film halfway through, ‘relishing the visual collage thus put together in their heads as if it were a single film.’8 For the Surrealists, cinema was an intermediary state between life and dream – not a means to escape reality but to intensify it. The Surrealist Philippe Soupault recalled, ‘One can think that, from the birth of Surrealism, we sought to discover, thanks to the cinema, the means for expressing the immense power of the dream.’9

But despite the Surrealists’ enthusiasm for others’ films, they were having difficulty conceiving ‘automatic’ films of their own; those made by Man Ray and Antonin Artaud failed to live up to the Group’s aspirations. They needed a catalyst, not only to launch Surrealism into the realm of cinema but also to expand its international scope. The climate was opportune for Buñuel, who had come to Paris in 1925 with the idea of becoming a diplomat; when this fell through, he secured an apprenticeship with the renowned French director Jean Epstein, notably serving as assistant director on Epstein’s acclaimed adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). He began frequenting the Café Cyrano in the Place Blanche where the Surrealists routinely held meetings, and by January 1929 he was a fully-fledged member of the Group. Now Dalí’s script was his opportunity to truly bring Surrealism to the silver screen.

Buñuel spoke to Dalí about his shoebox script and made plans to travel to Figueres in February 1929 to work over the scenario. ‘The aim is to produce something absolutely new in the history of the cinema’, Buñuel told the newspaper reporter Josep Puig Pujades, who disseminated news of the film in La Veu de l’Empordà. ‘We hope to make visible certain subconscious states which we believe can only be expressed by the cinema.’10 Writing took only six days and was, according to both, a quick and joyful collaboration, while their attempt to expel reason in favour of whatever wild fantasies came into their heads was readily comparable to the automatic writing the Surrealists championed. Buñuel recalled:

We wrote with minds open to the first ideas that came into them and at the same time systematically rejecting everything that arose from our culture and education. They had to be images that would surprise us and that we would both accept without discussion. Nothing else. For example: The woman seizes a racket to defend herself from the man who is about to attack her. And then he looks for something to counterattack with and (now I’m speaking to Dalí) ‘What does he see?’ ‘A flying toad.’ ‘No good.’ ‘A bottle of brandy.’ ‘No good.’ ‘Well, he sees two ropes.’ ‘Good, but what’s on the end of the ropes?’ ‘The chap pulls on them and falls because he’s dragging something very heavy.’ ‘Well, it’s good he falls down.’ ‘Attached to them are two dried gourds.’ ‘What else?’ ‘Two Marist brothers.’ ‘That’s it! Two Marists. And then?’ ‘A cannon.’ ‘No good.’ ‘Let’s have a luxury armchair.’ ‘No, a grand piano.’ ‘Very good, and on top of the grand piano a donkey – no, two donkeys.’ ‘Wonderful.’ Well, maybe we just drew our irrational representations with no explication…11

In the end, it is impossible to know just who was responsible for what images in the film, though the collaborative effort of the two suggests that this was anyway meant to be a moot point (and might have stayed so had Dalí and Buñuel not experienced a falling out after L’Âge d’Or [1930], leading each to claim the best parts of the film for himself and blame the rest on the other!). It is also unclear to what extent Dalí had already conceived the film’s storyline on the shoebox – indeed, no trace of this first script has actually surfaced, leading some to doubt its existence and the validity of Dalí’s claim to have written the first scenario at all. Buñuel later described the film’s origin as the product of two dreams – his about slicing an eye with a razor, and Dalí’s about a hand festering with ants.

In April 1929, Dalí convinced his father to give him the money to travel to Paris to assist Buñuel in realising their film. Buñuel hired a studio at Billancourt, a cameraman and two professional actors, Simone Mareuil, and the French silent movie star Pierre Batcheff. Shooting took two weeks, though Dalí was apparently present on the set for only one of the last days, when he spent most of his time preparing the two donkeys that would form one of the most memorable scenes.

Un Chien Andalou catapulted to become the most famous short ever made. As American film critic Roger Ebert notes, ‘[A]nyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times’,12 and in July 2006, Radio Times ranked it amongst the top 25 must-see movies for aspiring cinema buffs. It has become the stuff of pop culture, too: During his 1976 tour, rock star David Bowie screened Un Chien Andalou as his opening act (much to the audience’s bafflement), and it later inspired the Pixies’ 1989 song Debaser (‘Got me a movie / I want you to know / slicing up eyeballs / I want you to know / girlie so groovy / I want you to know / don’t know about you / but I am un chien andalusia’).

So, after all this pomp and praise, what is Un Chien Andalou about? That’s a difficult question, as the film eschews any lucid storyline. It opens with the idyllic fairy-tale cliché, ‘Once upon a time’. Against the background staccatos of an Argentinian tango, Buñuel is seen methodically sharpening a razorblade as he puffs at his cigar. He tests the blade on his thumb, then steps onto his balcony. When a thin cloud cuts across the full moon overhead, he returns inside and slits open Simone Mareuil’s left eye – in fact a calf’s eye, though the effect is startlingly effective.

Opening scene of Un Chien Andalou, 1929. Directed by Luis Buñuel; Produced by Luis Buñuel. ©Video Yesteryear/Photofest.

The attack against the eye – possibly inspired by Benjamin Péret’s 1928 poem Lesarômes de l’amour (‘What greater pleasure / than to make love / the body wrapped in cries / the eyes shut by razors’)13 – never fails to solicit gasps of horror from audiences, even today. Perhaps one imagines one’s own eyeball sliced open with horrific exactitude, or perhaps it is the unexpected impact the scene has without any development whatsoever. We are given no time to prepare: We don’t know anything about this woman’s past nor about what might have led Buñuel to dissect her eye, particularly in light of her non sequitur placidity. Further, nothing develops from this grotesque mutilation. The spectator cannot help fashioning a chronological continuity between the slashed eye and what follows, but this is a fallacy – indeed, her ostensibly unprovoked attacker never appears in the film again, and the next episode – introduced, ‘Eight years later’ – finds the heroine’s eye inexplicably intact. Almost as if it’s a different film, the script turns to Batcheff riding a bicycle down a Paris street. He is dressed in a dark suit, over which he wears feminine frilly cuffs and a skirt, a collar and a hat with large white wings that blow backwards as he rides; he has a strange box tied around his neck, which reappears throughout the film. Cut to Mareuil, who is sitting in her third-floor flat reading a book. Apparently struck by a sound outside, she throws down the book – which falls open to an illustration of Jan Vermeer’s painting, The Lacemaker – and goes to the window just in time to see Batcheff arrive and, without the least resistance, fall off his bicycle into the gutter.

Mareuil runs down to meet him. She kisses him passionately, then brings his garments upstairs (what has happened to him remains a mystery) and lays them out on her bed in the form of a body. She then sits down and concentrates on the clothes as if she expects something to manifest: The trick is effective and the man appears, though not on the bed but on the other side of the room. He is completely absorbed by a hole in the centre of his outstretched right hand that is leaking a colony of ants. From this, the scene dissolves into a hairy armpit, a spiny sea urchin, and a severed hand resting strangely on the ground amidst a bustling crowd viewed from above that gives it no notice, save a woman with a close-cropped hairstyle who pokes the hand curiously with a stick. A policeman approaches, puts the hand in the box formerly carried by Batcheff, and gives it to the woman; she clutches it closely to her breast in the middle of the road, seemingly uncertain of where to turn next, until she is struck dead by a passing automobile.

Batcheff and Mareuil have observed all this from their flat window. Strangely aroused, Batcheff begins chasing Mareuil around the room. As he caresses her, another sequence of dissolves is set in motion as her breasts become her buttocks, both clothed and bare. Batcheff’s eyes roll back into his head as if experiencing some sort of seizure or perhaps even a profound ecstasy; his mouth trickles blood and is transformed into an anus. Mareuil breaks away and attempts to fend off her assailant with a tennis racket. As Batcheff makes his way towards Mareuil, he takes up two ropes, each of which is tied to a cork followed by a melon, a Catholic priest and a grand piano containing the cadaver of a putrescent donkey, which Dalí took special care to prepare by removing the eyes and cutting back the lips so that the teeth would reflect the same whiteness as the piano keys. The woman rushes into the adjoining room but, as she closes the door, the man sticks his ant-infested hand through the frame. Suddenly the two are in the same room again: The man is lying quietly in bed.

Pierre Batcheff pulls two pianos, each containing a deceased donkey. Un Chien Andalou, 1929. Directed by Luis Buñuel; Produced by Luis Buñuel. ©Kino/Photofest.

The next caption reads ‘About three o’clock in the morning’, perpetuating the false chronology. An impatient stranger – also played by Batcheff and thus suggesting the heroic double to the frilly-frocked cyclist, or perhaps an older version of the character raging war against a less mature self – breaks into the room and throws the cyclist’s belongings out the window before ordering the cyclist to go stand in the corner.

Another caption appears – ‘Sixteen years earlier’ – but the scene returns to the two men, unchanged. The heroic Batcheff takes a pair of books from a school desk and hands them to the cyclist to hold in his outstretched arms like a crucifix to continue the punishment, but the books suddenly turn into pistols and the heroic Batcheff is shot dead by his doppelgänger. As the heroic Batcheff collapses face-down, a dissolve sends him to a sunny park; his hand grazes the naked back of a young woman sitting beside him. A small crowd gathers, and a group of male park-keepers carry him off in a funerary procession.

The camera returns to Mareuil sitting alone in her flat. She stares at a death’s head hawkmoth – a species of moth native to the Mediterranean and Middle East and a notorious symbol of bad luck thanks to the shape of a skull that appears on its thorax – on the opposite wall. Again, ‘evil Batcheff’ appears. He puts his hand to his face and, upon removing it, reveals an absent mouth, to which Mareuil responds by adorning her own mouth with lipstick. Batcheff’s mouth thence sprouts hair – apparently somehow stolen from Mareuil’s underarms. Exasperated, she sticks out her tongue, throws on a shawl and marches out through the door, which opens onto a windy beach. A new lover is there waiting for her. He motions at his watch, and Mareuil rushes towards him happily. It seems the new couple will live ‘happily ever after’, complementing the film’s opening, ‘Once upon a time’, but the final shot turns their fate sour: Following the caption, ‘In the spring’, the woman is shown buried up to her chest in sand. She is blinded, her clothes are tattered, and she is burned by the sun and plagued by insects; a man is there with her too, though it is unclear whether it is Batcheff or her mysterious lover. The film ends.

Un Chien Andalou indubitably offers much for would-be interpreters, though it is unclear whether meaning itself might be the film’s greatest ‘red herring’. Buñuel offered, ‘Nothing in the film symbolises anything’, adding that ‘[t]he only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis’14 – recalling that Breton later considered Dalí one of the most erudite Surrealists when it came to Freud. Psychoanalysis is indeed the lens most have applied towards understanding Un Chien Andalou, though many others have approached it from alternative directions as well. I will not add my own interpretation to this already hefty bibliography, but to highlight Roger Ebert’s observation that one struggles in vain to create a story out of Un ChienAndalou where one simply might not be present:

Countless analysts have applied Freudian, Marxist, and Jungian formulas to the film. Buñuel laughed at them all. Still, to look at the film is to learn how thoroughly we have been taught by other films to find meaning even when it isn’t there. Buñuel told an actress to look out the window at ‘anything — a military parade, perhaps.’ In fact, the next shot shows the transvestite falling dead off the bicycle. We naturally assume the actress is looking at the body on the sidewalk. It is alien to everything we know about the movies to conclude that the window shot and the sidewalk shot simply happen to follow one another without any connection. In the same way, we assume that the man pulls the pianos (with the priests, dead donkeys, etc.) across the room because his sexual advance has been rebuffed by the woman with the tennis racket. But Buñuel might argue the events have no connection — the man’s advance is rejected, and then, in an absolutely unrelated action, he picks up the ropes and starts to pull the pianos.15

This view that the scenes may only happen to suggest cause and effect is very Surrealist, indeed. It’s the enduring enigma of Un Chien Andalou: Is there meaning in the film’s ostensible – and purported – meaninglessness? Even its title is an enigma: In an early letter to his friend José ‘Pepín’ Bello, Buñuel wrote that this ‘stupendous scenario, quite without precedent in the history of cinema’ was to be titled La Marista de laBallesta (The Marist Sister with the Crossbow) – a name that was quickly scrapped in favour of Dangereux de se pencher en dedans (Dangerous to Lean Inside), a joke based on the notices beneath windows in French train compartments (‘Dangereux de se pencher en dehors’ [‘Dangerous to lean outside’]). Dalí and Buñuel would eventually settle on Un Chien Andalou, a title the two invented – reportedly to much laughter – for a book of poems Buñuel was planning to publish that conspicuously contained no ‘Andalusian dog’.16 The book never made it to press, and the title was given to the film instead, which, again, had no dog.

Buñuel justified that Un Chien Andalou was a title without meaning for a film without meaning, but Dalí and Buñuel’s former friend from the ‘Resi’, Federico García Lorca, thought otherwise. Lorca was indignant that the title and main character of the picture were veiled, derogatory references to him. Southerners at the Residencia were sometimes referred to jokingly as ‘Andalusian dogs’, and Lorca was the most famous Andalusian poet of the day. Ian Gibson also points out that certain scenes in Un Chien Andalou can be traced to Lorca’s writing: The image of the protagonist falling off his bicycle, for example, Gibson identifies as a reference to Lorca’s 1925 dialogue, ‘Buster Keaton’s Outing’.17

Buñuel famously reported that at the first screening of Un ChienAndalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl just in case the audience revolted; happily, this was not to be the case. Indeed, Un ChienAndalou was critically applauded and enjoyed a long run at Montmartre’s Studio 28. But this popularity was less a gift than a challenge: Whilst the film ushered in Dalí and Buñuel’s acceptance into the Surrealist group, it also meant that they would have to push the envelope further if they truly sought to shock their audience in the future. Un Chien Andalou had not scandalised the bourgeoisie like Dalí and Buñuel hoped it might: Next time, they would pull out all the stops.

L’Age d’Or, 1930

Following the surprising critical success of Un Chien Andalou, Dalí and Buñuel were encouraged to make a sequel – this time a longer picture that might capitalise on new technology and contain sound. Like its predecessor, this new film also went through some title changes: It was provisionally to be called La Bête andalouse (The Andalusian Beast), which it retained throughout shooting. Thereafter it changed to ¡abajo laConstitution! (‘Down with the Constitution!’) and eventually to L’Âged’Or (The Golden Age).