Why Dalí and Buñuel Made the Still-Shocking 'Un Chien Andalou' (1929)

A new Nerdwriter video analyzes why the 1929 surrealist short film 'Un Chien Andalou' by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel retains its visceral impact. The notorious eye-slicing scene gains power from preceding images: Buñuel sharpening a razor while gazing at the moon, and actress Simone Mareuil having her eye opened. The calf's eye used in close-up is not Mareuil's, but context makes it shocking. Dalí and Buñuel aimed to refuse any image with rational meaning, memory, or culture. The film includes a crowd poking a severed hand, a man dragging two Jesuit priests (one played by Dalí) and two pianos laden with decomposing donkeys, and a woman's armpit hair over a man's mouth. Buñuel believed mainstream cinema trapped itself in nineteenth-century novel conventions and insidious morality, limiting creative potential. The liberation sought was not meant to be pleasant. Nearly a century later, the film remains troubling, but most cinema still refuses to be freed.