UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928) is making its noteworthy debut on TCM September 17th in association with the 15-episode STORY OF FILM documentary currently airing every Monday and Tuesday night for the next three months. I was surprised to learn that UN CHIEN ANDALOU had never been shown on TCM before but I shouldn’t have been. It’s still somewhat of a taboo viewing experience that used to only be sought out by the most adventurous viewers and wasn’t always easy to track down. I can still remember having to make a trip to San Francisco in the ‘80s to rent the film from Naked Eye, an appropriately named cult video store in the Haight-Ashbury district, that was dedicated to distributing the most obscure and transgressive films. Today Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s silent Surrealist short is much more accessible and although the film is usually revered by critics and film scholars, the general moving-going public still isn’t all that interested in seeing an eye sliced open by a straight razor, dead donkey carcasses stuffed into pianos and severed hands on grotesque display. If that description sounds a bit shocking and horrifying you might want to avoid the movie. UN CHIEN ANDALOU isn’t a light-hearted romp although a black comedic streak runs through the disjointed narrative. But the somewhat lighter and more genial aspects of the film don’t particularly interest me. I appreciate the macabre qualities of this 16 minute masterpiece that brazenly gave life to our collective nightmares and unmasked some of our darkest fears.
When Buñuel used a straight razor to cut open an unflinching eye it was a violent action designed to shock and disturb audiences. The razor was attempting to slice through viewer expectations, disrupt early cinematic conventions and expose the ugly underbelly of our subconscious. Buñuel himself said his film was “a desperate impassioned cry for murder” and Dali called it a film of “adolescence and death” while authors such as Georges Bataille claimed it was an “extraordinary film . . . penetrating so deeply into horror” and Henry Miller described a showing he attended in riveting detail saying “The public shuddered, making their seats creak, when an enormous eye appeared on screen and was cut coldly by a razor, the drops of liquid from the iris leaping onto the metal. Hysterical shouts were heard.” Many filmmakers such as Georges Méliè, Louis Feuillade, F. W. Murnau, Robert Wiene, Jean Epstein, Rex Ingram and Paul Wegener (just to name a few) had created haunting and disturbing scenes that horrified audiences in the past but UN CHIEN ANDALOU was a unique viewing experience due to its blunt cerebral attack on the audience. Buñuel and Dali were artistic rebels using showman-like techniques to deliberately terrorize viewers and disrupt tradition but tradition eventually embraced their new vision. In turn, UN CHIEN ANDALOU has become one of the most influential and over-analyzed films in history. As Elza Adamowicz stated in Un Chien Andalou: French Film Guide, “Dali and Buñuel progressed from the enfants terribles of Surrealism to iconic figures of mainstream European culture.” The truth is that the fantastic images the film unveiled have been reappropriated so thoroughly into our modern cinema that they’re often taken for granted and barely recognized anymore. But Buñuel and Dali’s are still making the public shudder, theater seats creak and causing audiences to hysterically shout at movie screens because modern horror cinema, in all its gory, gruesome, frenzied and shocking beauty, continues to mine ideas from UN CHIEN ANDALOU. Here are just a few of my favorite examples.
Top: UN CHIEN ANDALOU Bottom: ZOMBI 2
Only a handful of things can make me really tremble but show me an eye being injured on screen and I’ll look away, at least for a brief moment, in an effort to avoid having my own eyes bear witness to the crime. The idea of having our eyes violently damaged or destroyed is a primal fear that we all share and in the decades following the release of UN CHIEN ANDALOU directors have continued to use eye related trauma and terror to horrify viewers in films such as HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959), BLACK SUNDAY (1960), THE BIRDS(1963), THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963), WITCH FINDER GENERAL (1968), HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971), SUSPIRIA (1977), HAUSU (1977) ZOMBI 2 (1979), NIGHTMARE CITY (1980), CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980), FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), THE BEYOND (1981), CANNIBAL FEROX (1981), EVIL DEAD(1981), DEAD & BURIED (1981), THE NEW YORK RIPPER (1982), THE THING (1982), DEMONS (1985),OPERA (1987), LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988), BLACK DEMONS (1991), AUDITION (1999), SESSION 9(2001), 28 DAYS LATER (2002), MAY (2002), HOSTEL (2005) and EASTERN PROMISES (2007). Eye trauma is arguably one of horror cinema’s most powerful (and overused) weapons and we can all thank Buñuel and Dali for that.
Top: UN CHIEN ANDALOU Bottom: THE NAKED JUNGLE
You know what else scares me? Bugs! Ants and insects of all types have become horror films staples and who doesn’t fear getting overpowered and consumed by creepy crawly creatures? This is another primal fear that we all share thanks to centuries of watching our beloved ancestors become food for worms. THE NAKED JUNGLE(1954), THEM! (1954), PHASE IV (1974) and EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) are a few films that specifically terrorized audiences with ants but many other horror films such as TARANTULA (1955), THE DEADLY MANTIS(1957), THE FLY (1958), THE DEADLY BEES (1966), KILLER BEES (1974), DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), THE SWARM (1978), ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990), MIMIC (1997), STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997), BUG (2006) andTHE MIST (2007) have continued to exploit our fear of insects.
Top: UN CHIEN ANDALOU Bottom: THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS
I’m also strangely fearful of severed hands. This fear probably stems from a childhood viewing of THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946), featuring the one and only Peter Lorre being tormented by a disembodied hand. But that’s not the only horror film that has used severed hands—both independent of the body and reattached—to frighten audiences. The first film that tapped into this all too human fear was THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924) but UN CHIEN ANDALOU carried it forward. Some other movies in the same bloody vein includeMAD LOVE (1935), HANDS OF A STRANGER (1962), THE CRAWLING HAND (1963), HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964), DR. TERRORS HOUSE OF HORROR (1965), ASYLUM (1972), AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973), THE HAND (1981), THE EVIL DEAD (1981), RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD(1985), SANTA SANGRE (1989) and BODY PARTS (1991).
Violent accidents, mysterious doppelgangers and animal as well as human corpses are just a few more of the genre defining images that link UN CHIEN ANDALOU to modern horror cinema but don’t take my word for it. Tune into TCM on September 17th and see this disquieting silent short for yourself. Buñuel and Dali were Surrealists who spoke the language of dreams but they also knew the language of our nightmares.