"Un Chien Andalou means "an Andalusian dog," though the much-studied 1929 short film of that title contains no dogs at all, from Andalusia or anywhere else. In fact, it alludes to a Spanish expression about how the howling of an Andalusian signals that someone has died. And indeed, there is death in Un Chien Andalou, as well as sex, albeit death and sex as processed through the unconscious minds of the young filmmaker Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí, whose collaboration on this enduringly strange movie did much to make their names."
"Less than two minutes into the picture, a man - played by the stocky, unmissable figure of Buñuel himself - stands on a balcony, gazing wolfishly at the moon. Cut to the face of a woman. Cut back to the moon; a thin slice of cloud drifts across its face. Cut to an eye; a razor blade knifes neatly and without hesitation across the eyeball, whose contents well and spill like an outsized tear. Cut. At this point, if you are of a nervous disposition, you faint."
Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 surrealist short film whose title literally means "an Andalusian dog," though the film contains no dogs and refers instead to a Spanish omen of death. The film stages death and sex through the unconscious minds of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, producing a sequence of striking, dream-derived images such as a hand crawling with ants and a razor slicing what appears to be an eye. A famous early scene juxtaposes a man gazing at the moon with a woman’s eye being cut, creating visceral shock. Buñuel described the film as "a desperate and passionate appeal to murder" and favored surrealist techniques over direct political art to advocate societal destruction.
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