Un Chien Andalou

Review by Giovanni Varazzani

If I have to listen to my instinct, I would like to write this review in the same way as the narrative in “Un Chien Andalou”, and probably I will, with an illogic narrative. It will make the logic vulcanian Spock really upset.
“Un Chien Andalou” is a short film, about sixteen minutes, written by Salvador Dalí, probably the icon of the surrealist movement, and Luis Buñuel, psychologist and Dalí’s friend, it follows the surrealism idea thus to make surprise into the audience with unexpected ideas and outcomes. In this short there isn’t a flowing narrative. At the first impact, each scene has nothing to do with the next one but those scenes edited all together make a really powerful result even seventy years later. This was the exact outcome that Dalí and Buñuel were looking for. Thanks to the masters of the surrealist style, the surprised and shocked audience is forced to get deep into the film by asking questions and try to understand the meaning of the film, which, in the end, can have a meaning for each person that watch the film.
The “small” details that makes the difference is definitely the rule to break all the other rules that the audience usually recognize as normal, thus to have all of those feeling that the surrealist movement own.
My favourite scene, as a gory fan, is definitely when the man purposefully passes his blade over the pupil of the open-eyed woman seated calmly in front of him.