Book - Un Chien Andalou

In the library, I picked up a book which goes in to more depth about the script, relationships between male and female characters, use of figure and surrealism.

Considering the scenario (pg. x & xi)

• 'Bunuel characterizes the avant-garde as typically directed 'exclusively to the artistic sensibility and to the reason of the spectator, with its play of light and shadow, its photographic effect, its pre-occupation with rhythmic montage and technical research, and at times in the direction of the display of a perfectly conventional and reasonable mood''.
• 'Un Chien Andalou is to a certain extent a narrative dream. We can read it as a romantic and melodramatic tragicomedy, or a satiric version of the Surrealist amour fou. It is a tale of frustrated male desire based on the encounter between a determined 'hero' and a reluctant 'heroine' together with subsidiary dramatic characters.'

Un Chien Andalou: Surrealist Text (pg. xv)

• 'It's textual orientations are ambiguous and fluid. It has 'characters' of sorts who are involved together in some kind of 'story', but in a fictional world of Bunuel and Dali they are of little more importance than the surreally grotesque and absurd cinematic signs upon which the film equally depends for its spectacle and its effects.'

Character Relations (pg. xvii & xviii)

• 'The film depends upon a male-female relationship, played out by its two named stars, but their characters do not have names, are hardly ever seen to speak and are psychologically and physiologically inconsistent.'
• 'While the relationship between the two main characters centres on the female protagonist's resistance to the male protagonist's ministrations and attempted seduction, the sexual progress of the narrative is initiated obliquely'.

Character, Figure, Body (pg. xviii)

• 'In a film where identities appear to merge and are sometimes difficult to distinguish, it is in any case a conclusion whose narrative surprise is further inflected by the more than momentary and crucial difficulty posed, by the nature of the concluding shot, in recognizing the male figure as the 'main' protagonist rather than the 'new' lover of the previous segment. The female protagonist, throughout, has no such difficulties for recognition'.
• 'These quasi-magical abilities are linked to the film's obsessive blurring and destruction of the human form.'
• 'The film's discontinuous vision of the human body is thus connected to its overall explosion of psychological-dramatic logic and coherence in the cinema.'

The blurb of the book reads:

Un Chien Andalou, the most influential of all surrealist films, has shocked, provoked and puzzled audiences and critics since its release in 1929.

Luis Bunuel's first film was a collaboration with his fellow Spaniard, the twenty-four-year-old Salvador Dali. They aimed to expunge from their script any 'idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation'. The result is a film that alludes and disturbs but stubbornly resists a definitive meaning.