The Use of Surrealism in “An Andalusian Dog” by Buñuel

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The primary goal of the surrealists was spiritual elevation and separation of the spirit from the material world. Therefore, one of the most important values was freedom and irrationality. The central concept of surrealism is the combination of dreams and reality (Cramer and Grant). For this, surrealists proposed absurd and contradictory mixing of realistic images through photomontage. Buñuel’s first movie, Andalusian Dog, is regarded as the clearest example of surrealist cinema (Taboada). The film must be interpreted through the prism of surrealist poetics. One can try to explain the film only in terms of specific scenes since, in its entirety, it does not carry any semantic weight as the authors intended it to.

The film contains allusions to the works of several writers of the time, including poems by Federico García Lorca and Juan Ramón Jimenez’s novel Platero and I. Buñuel and Dali wanted to avoid the rational components in their movie completely (Bazalgette). Indeed, in this case, the viewers’ interpretation of this short film would be of great importance. However, the images must not be unambiguous, and one should not see them as symbols because this will also make them meaningful. This approach suggests that this film should only be perceived in the context of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.

By creating a slight haze of formlessness in the film, Buñuel shows the precariousness and instability of the world. From this point of view, the film’s prologue can be considered a starting point from the geometric sphere to the sphere of the vague and unconscious (Kareem 4). In general, the whole movie is a kind of break, alienation, and death of the old culture and values; it is about destroying established paradigms. Moreover, this destruction occurs due to a breakdown of the usual way of thinking. Freud’s concept plays a unique role in understanding the film – the animal’s sexual impulse is held back by culture, religion, and moral norms.

The surrealists noted the similarity of their direction with the theater of shadows, the play of light and shadow. There is no single, genuinely correct point of view on this or that phenomenon. Surrealism strives in every possible way to attract attention to itself, while it is unimportant which methods to use (Ex). Surrealist theorists did not confine themselves to declaring randomness the aesthetic basis of artistic creation. Showing their works to humanity, surrealists urge to rely on intuition and their understanding of what they see. This explains the possibility of different interpretations of the content of the film.

At the same time, it is difficult to say that this movie has any clearly perceived and readable plot. The film’s scenes are bizarrely connected – the events are presented inconsistently, but the setting and characters remain the same. The laws of logic used in other films turn out to be inapplicable to the way Buñuel’s narrative is structured. The change of images in this film is due to the logic of sleep; many things happen irrationally and have a hidden meaning.

In dreams, events can occur both in the past and in the future. The same is true for the plot of the Andalusian Dog. Spanish creators were primarily guided by Freud’s works, especially those moments in his books devoted to dreams, sexuality, and vice (Rajeev). Moreover, the whole movie seems to be one big dream. The movie was deliberately constructed as a series of extravagant images, essentially irrational and defying any rational, psychological or cultural explanation. The dreamlike character of the film’s imagery brought it closer to the poetics of surrealism, which turned the unconscious into the central sphere of artistic research.

Instead of the traditional one that connects objects and concepts in meaning, another logic arises, for example, connecting things in their external likeness. The category of visible similarity becomes one of the central ones for surrealist poetics. Such a logic of joints is already declared in the prologue to the film. A cloud crossing the moon approaches a razor cutting an eye, precisely based on the external similarity of these actions (Bazalgette). In other cases, such logic works more indirectly and whimsically. Consider, for example, how Dali’s dream is included in the film, which impels the creation of An Andalusian Dog. In the frame, viewers see a palm from which ants crawl out. This frame is immediately followed by a whole chain of seemingly unrelated images: the hair under a man’s arm, a sea urchin on the sand, and a severed hand.

Ants crawling out of a wound in the palm of your hand are similar in appearance to blood. But ants can be associated with other themes, the theme of decay, for example. Outwardly, they are often compared in Dali’s paintings, for instance, to hair. Further, for the exact external resemblance to hair in the installation, the sea urchin is exposed, like other sea animals, which is interpreted as a symbol of metamorphosis in surrealism. The severed hand refers not only to the hand with ants but is also directly related to the sea animal (often, the palm was similar to a starfish). Thus, Dali’s dream is gradually immersed in the text, acquiring many associations and strange contexts based on transforming one phenomenon into another.

Each initial shot in the film appears as a burst of subconsciousness. Still, the connection of images obeys an unusual logic of interconnection, where each element can be replaced by its analog. This is how the chains of substitutions are built: hair – ants – blood, behind which two main themes of the film appear. These include death and eroticism, tabooed by classical European culture and therefore especially important for the surrealists.

In some religions, ants were used to recognize a witch, and one must admit that the main character could well turn out to be a witch; in some shots, her gaze looks especially frightening. Moreover, the ants climbed out of the man’s palm just after he touched the woman. Another symbolic representative of the fauna is a butterfly; there are many superstitions linking butterflies with the souls of the dead. This insect is closely related to the other world and the embodiment of the soul. Knowing this, one of the last frames seems a little less meaningless, especially after killing a few seconds before.

The scene with the dead donkeys is perhaps the most explicable part of the entire film. After the hero sees the death of the androgyne, lust awakens in him. He tries to rape a woman, but two grand pianos with two dead donkeys on them and two priests prevent him from getting to her. By this, Buñuel and Dali tried to show how religious prejudices, the bourgeoisie, and death interfere with the natural desires of man – sexual desire and desire to create art, as he wants and achieves his goals. Here the priests symbolize the church; the piano is the bourgeoisie, and dead donkeys are presented as death.

Donkeys may predict the death of heroes to what extent, who in the end will be buried in the sand without eyes and half-decayed. Very strikingly and vividly, this scene shows the likeness of a bared donkey’s jaw to the keyboard of a grand piano. In the future, Dali’s grand piano is often likened to a skull based on a distant similarity in shape and a bared row of teeth-keys. The grand piano is also interpreted as a coffin for a donkey. Hence, the strange form that distinguishes it from an ordinary coffin. It is challenging for an average viewer to understand this scene, abstracting from the image of the grand piano as a musical instrument. The donkeys are blind and rotting here, an allegory of the rotting customs of society, religion, and human stupidity. The fact that the hero drags them on himself shows the imposition of these frameworks by civilization.

Andalusian Dog is a surprisingly eloquent, aesthetically attractive painting, linked to the themes of death, lust, and religion, built on the sensual symbolism of dreams and fantasy. According to some critics, the general result of the experiment of the Spanish authors seems far from unambiguous. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Andalusian Dog remains one of the most radical experiments aimed at a revolutionary renewal of cinematic consciousness. This film, Buñuel’s first directorial work, was a sign of the emergence of a new great master of cinematography.

Works Cited

Bazalgette, Felix. “The Strange, Intoxicating Madness of Un Chien Andalou.” Little White Lies, 2017, Web.

Cramer, Charles, and Grant, Kim. “Surrealist Techniques: Subversive Realism.” Khan Academy, 2020, Web.

Ex, Sjare. “A Dream Collection – Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.”Bojimans, 2020, Web.

Kareem, Sayeed Shahjada Al. ” Analysis of the Film Un Chien Andalou.” Bangladesh Film Archive Journal, vol. 14, 2018, pp. 1-23, Web.

Rajeev, Mrinal. ” Surrealism and French Expressionism : Un Chien Andalou & Cœur fidèle.” Esthesia Magazine,2019, Web.

Taboada, Dévra. ” An Andalusian Dog – Surrealist Film of Dalí and Buñuel.” Daily Art Magazine, 2020, Web.

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The Use of Surrealism in “An Andalusian Dog” by Buñuel

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