Similarities Between Un Chian Andalou

By the time Surrealism emerged as a recognized artistic movement, several influential film genres had begun their push into a global cinematic conscience. Such genre-defining films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) for German Expressionism, and Battleship Potemkin (1925) for Soviet Montage, were all released within a few years of Andre Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. But Surrealism itself would not see its first film with popular recognition until later in the decade with Un Chien Andalou (1929). It seems out of the ordinary that an emerging movement and a budding medium would have a such a gap in time before finding themselves commingled. And this consideration led to the question of whether or
Unlike how literature uses symbolic language, Un Chien Andalou presents a variety of symbolism that the viewer sees, interprets into words, and then uses the language’s pun and play to derive the film’s latent meaning. This is much like how one interprets a dream as described Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a psychological text revered by the Surrealists. This film takes benign objects like the moon and actions like cutting an eye and infuses it with new meaning through the French language’s many idioms and expressions. And because this dreamlike state filled with condensation and displacement is achieved, surreal form is found in
Risky content are characteristics integral to what Surrealism is, and this film is no exception. Un Chien Andalou contains many images that show the Surrealist values of being irreverent to the church, state, and any form of authority. But where mediums like literature can only be experienced by one person at a time, film has the benefit of being something that can be screened to multiple people in the same room simultaneously. A topic that may not offend an individual reading a book alone can create a reaction from the pressures of being a collective audience. Even at the film’s screening debut, Bunuel armed himself with a pocket of rocks in case a fight broke out in response to the film’s content. This makes a film’s screening a uniquely surreal experience, almost like running into a crowd, pistol in hand, and firing blindly like Breton’s second manifesto described. This gives Un Chien Andalou a uniquely surreal content that could only be achieved through