Un Chien Andalou 1929/Luis Buñuel
In 1929, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí created a short film that would become one of the most radical statements of Surrealism. Un Chien Andalou, running just over fifteen minutes, deliberately breaks with conventional narrative codes. There is no linear story, no stable psychology; instead, the film unfolds through a sequence of images linked by dreamlike associations rather than logic.
From its opening moments, a now-infamous scene (a razor slicing through an eye) establishes an aesthetic of shock. The intention is unmistakable: to provoke, unsettle, and disrupt the viewer’s instinct to seek coherent meaning. Buñuel would later insist on a cinema freed from imposed interpretation, drawing on a form of automatic expression inspired by the workings of the unconscious.
Developed from dreams shared by the two artists, the film assembles fragmented visions: a hand swarming with ants, bodies drawn together and pushed apart, objects appearing without clear connection. This fluid structure echoes the ideas of Sigmund Freud, whose theories of dreams and the unconscious deeply influenced the European avant-garde at the time.
Premiering in Paris at the end of the 1920s, the film provoked both fascination and scandal. It quickly established itself as a foundational work, opening the way for an experimental cinema that privileges image, symbol, and sensation over narrative. Nearly a century later, its power to disturb remains undiminished.