Un Chien Andalou (1928)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí

A woman sits calmly while her eye is slit open. A man crashes his bicycle while riding around in nunwear. The man stares at flies collecting on his hand. A woman pokes at a severed hand in the street as a crowd looks on in consternation. A man, frustrated at not getting sex, drags two pianos laden with dead mules across the floor, with ropes that are also tied to two priests. The man later wipes his own mouth right off his face. Then replaces it with his paramour's armpit hair! The woman takes a new paramour, and walks along a rocky beach with him, where they find the shattered remnants of their collective past.

I say, children, what does it all mean?

Un Chien Andalou is an intentionally flummoxing experience, dispatching a crazy series of unforgettable images with a falsely-proclaimed narrative structure that subverts every expectation you might have of a silent film. Is it supposed to be a dream? A shaggy-dog joke? A bleak statement on romantic entanglements?

It is not to be known, but rather just to be watched, and to find in it what you will whenever you return to it.

This time, I was mostly struck by how laugh-out-loud funny some of it is (particularly the cynical use of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," for maximum string-swell drama to accompany the absurd non-progression of events), and how much the main guy reminded me of John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, in appearance and mannerism. Perhaps a remake is in order, with Linnell and one of the Suicide Girls, and with a soundtrack provided, of course, by the reformed Pixies.

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Review by La Fée