AN ANDALUSIAN DOG
An Andalusian Dog is a short silent film made by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It is one of the most famous surrealist films of the French avant-garde of the 1920s. The film is a combination of separate sequences. It opens with an iconic scene in which a man cuts a girl’s eye with a razor after gazing at the clouds from the balcony. It’s been etched in the viewers’ memory for decades. The entire film abounds in absurd and surreal scenes. The authors stated that it is a record of their striking dreams, devoid of all rules and sense. An old Spanish saying ‘an Andalusian dog is howling — someone has died’ inspired the title.
LUIS BUÑUEL Portolés was a Spanish director and filmmaker born in 1900 in Aragon. He had a strict Jesuit education. While studying in Madrid, he made friends with Salvador Dalí, with whom he wrote the script for their first film in 1929. The second film The Golden Age was an assault on Catholicism and caused a bigger scandal than An Andalusian Dog. The right-wing press criticized it, while the police banned its distribution for fifty years. Upon his return to Spain, he shot the film Land Without Bread (1933), a documentary about the life of the peasantry during Francisco Franco’s rise to power. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began and Buñuel realized that he could no longer stay in fascist Spain. He died in New York in 1983.
AN ANDALUSIAN DOG (ff.)
DIRECTOR: Luis Buñuel
COUNTRY: France
YEAR: 1929.
RUNTIME: 17’
LANGUAGE: French
CAST: Simonne Mareuil, Pierre Batchef
PRODUCTION: Luis Buñuel
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LUIS BUÑUEL TRIBUTE