19 October 2010

"Un Chien Andalou"


This brief surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí is famous for several scenes...
The idea for the film actually began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script...

...in the notorious eyeball-slicing scene... Buñuel claimed that he had used a dead calf’s eye. Through intense lighting, Buñuel attempted to make the furred face of the animal appear as human skin.
As a long-time observer of "movie mistakes," I couldn't help noticing that the hand inserted through the door is a left hand with the palm toward the door, and the hand with the ants is a right hand with the palm toward the woman.

2 comments:

  1. Often used as an intro at Pixies shows.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I saw this many years ago--I still find it disturbing and would NOT watch it again.

    ReplyDelete

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