Un chien andalou

Dali and Bunuel’s short film is hard to follow let alone comprehend, due to its series of bizarre and surreal images that the audience may have trouble with placing together.

The film begins with an unsettling image of a man sharpening a razor blade that he proceeds to use to slice open a woman’s eye while she sits motionlessly, setting the scene for the rest of the film’s peculiar events. We are then told that the narrative has progressed by eight years and see a cross-dressed man cycling his way through quiet city streets. The woman we saw in the previous sequence then watches as the man falls from his bike and slumps into a comatose state. Her subsequent distress at seeing the man this way allows us to link the two characters together and accept them as our central protagonists. The film then goes on to present us with a strange series of images of ants crawling from the man’s palm, a man prodding a disembodied hand in the street while a crowd looks on, a woman getting run down by a car much to our male protagonists delight, and pianos and dead cattle being dragged across a room.

Due to these odd images and the seeming lack of narrative or plot, this film appears to be more of an artistic creation used to challenge the audience rather than a story for us to follow and be entertained by.