An Andalusian Dog 1928

An Andalusian dog, by Luis Buñuel, is a title that marked a before and after in the history of cinema. Let's go back no less than until 1929, year in which the creators were for the effort to break with conventional rationality and impose a logic subverted. There are many things that are widely known about An Andalusian dog. That it was possible to realize thanks to the 25,000 pesetas that the mother of Luis Buñuel contributed with; that the script was co-written by the director and by Salvador Dalí; that Federico García Lorca felt alluded to by the title of the film, to which Buñuel always responded by saying that he did not refer to the poet from Granada but that he corresponded to that of a book of his own poems; that the plot development of the film does not follow a logical order, in correspondence with the essential postulates of surrealism; that the soundtrack is composed of Argentine tangos and music by Richard Wagner ... But, perhaps, there is an element that seems to be only to make a brutal impact on the viewer but that makes full sense according to the characteristics of An Andalusian dog. Of course, we are talking about the first sequence, in which a razor cuts the eye of the protagonist. Apart from the sadistic component that the image shows, as a reflection of the destructive instincts that populate our unconscious, there is a second intention: to announce that An 

Andalusian Dog aims to take down our conventional gaze and discover a new form of film narration.

But, first of all, to be fair, An Andalusian Dog is not the first title that introduced the avant-garde into cinema. This honor corresponds to La Coquille et le Clergyman by the director Germaine Dulac, which was held a year earlier, in 1928. We cannot deny that the fact that Germaine Dulac was a woman meant that this background does not have the recognition it deserves. But it is no less true that Buñuel did achieve something that the short film by Dulac did not; while in La Coquille et le Clergyman the composition of the images was very important and that caused the film to have a certain static character, Buñuel ( thanks, especially to having been assistant director in several titles of Jean Epstein and Jacques Feyder) was able to give the film a dynamic character with an extremely intelligent use of editing and a masterful use of the cinematographic space (and flagrant violations of it) , which gave the short film an agile rhythm that, later, would be the hallmark of the Aragonese style.

An Andalusian dog (Un chien andalou) does not have any dog nor any Andalusian. It is believed that the title is a surrealist "homage" to Federico García Lorca, who was already at odds with the directors. The poet of course took it for granted. Buñuel was 29 years old (it was his first movie) and Dalí 25. They both decided to make an experimental cinema, emerged as directly as possible from the subconscious. Buñuel said: "We wrote the script in less than a week, following a very simple rule: not to accept an idea or image that could give rise to a rational, psychological or cultural explanation."

Indeed, everything in the film escapes logic. The script, written in six days, captured the first images that came to mind to the two young men, among them the famous razor in the eye.  Just in case, at the premiere, Buñuel stayed behind the stage armed with stones, smelling a lynching. The case is that An Andalusian dog became an indisputable cult film that marked thousands of filmmakers and other subsequent artists, from Magritte or Man Ray to David Lynch or the Pixies.

Imagine the bewilderment of the people when you saw the movie at the premiere. Not only because of the little knife scene ... Sex, violence and sacrilege are in almost all frames: putrefying Donkeys (a possible reference to "Platero and I", which both artists hated), hands with ants (a reference in Dalí's work), bishops dragged as a criticism to Catholicism.

The film aimed to bring the dreams that these artists had to a level of expression, so the images do not have much connection in terms of history, but in each of them you can highlight the elements of strangeness, irrationality, elements of a imaginary world where there is no sense, but that reflects a very real feeling, such as sexual desire, when a woman's breasts are seized, there is a rebellion to express her beliefs.