Un Chien Andalou (1929)

There are films that tell stories, and there are films that declare war on the very idea of storytelling. Un Chien Andalou, the seventeen-minute short produced at Billancourt Studios in 1929, belongs firmly in the second category. Co-created by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and the painter Salvador Dalí, it arrived in Paris at a moment when the Surrealist movement was at its most confrontational, actively hostile to bourgeois convention, rational thought, and the tidy cause-and-effect logic that mainstream cinema had already settled into. The film was not made to be enjoyed in any conventional sense. It was made to disturb, to disorient, and to operate on the audience's subconscious the way a dream (or a nightmare) does, without apology or explanation.

Buñuel was still in the early stages of a career that would eventually stretch across five decades and several countries. The films he made in later years, from the short, unsettling documentary Land Without Bread to the dry, absurdist comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, each carry traces of the same anarchic sensibility first announced here. Un Chien Andalou is where that sensibility was born in public, raw and unfiltered. The screenplay, if you can call it that, was developed by Buñuel and Dalí through a process of deliberate irrationality: any image that could be explained logically was rejected. What remained was a collision of non-sequiturs, disturbing tableaux, and free-associative visual leaps that owe more to Freud than to any established film grammar. The following year, Buñuel and Dalí collaborated again on L'Âge d'or, which pushed many of the same provocations further into feature-length territory, and proved the partnership was no fluke.

The cast is small and largely anonymous by design. Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff occupy the central roles, such as they are, with Buñuel himself appearing briefly on screen alongside Dalí. There are no characters to speak of in any meaningful sense, no relationships that develop, no motivations the viewer is invited to follow. Mareuil and Batcheff function less as performers and more as figures in a waking dream, present and then absent, acting and then acted upon, subject to the film's relentless visual logic (or anti-logic). It was a peculiar context in which to be working, even by the standards of late silent cinema. Compare it to something like The Cameraman, also from 1928, and the distance between mainstream filmmaking and what Buñuel and Dalí were attempting becomes immediately clear. The short screened to Parisian audiences who reportedly included members of the Surrealist group itself, and it has never really left the cultural conversation since.

https://youtu.be/9TWte4WjtUU?si=T24BXINUY5EEi6xk Un Chien Andalou (1929), the infamous short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, is less a movie and more a 16-minute punch to the face of logic, narrative, and good taste, and that’s kind of the point. It’s surrealism at its most raw, designed to shock, confuse, and provoke. And it does, especially with that opening shot: a razor slicing through a woman’s eyeball. That image alone is so bold, so grotesquely unforgettable, it guarantees the film will never be forgotten. Technically, it’s impressive for its time, dreamlike editing, striking visuals, a total rejection of reason. But beyond the shock value, it’s just a series of bizarre, disconnected images, and armpit hair. There’s no story, no character, no arc. Just dream logic run amok. You can read into it (repressed desire, religious decay, Freudian nightmare), but it feels less like deep symbolism and more like two young artists saying, “What if we made something totally random and disturbing?” As arthouse cinema goes, it’s a landmark, no doubt. It broke rules, challenged audiences, and inspired generations of experimental filmmakers. But judged as an actual viewing experience it’s pretentious, cold, and emotionally empty. The eyeball scene shocks, sure, but the rest mostly just… happens. Impressive as a statement, exhausting as a film. A museum piece dressed as art. Not for me.

And honestly, that tension between respecting something as a cultural artefact and actually enjoying it as a film is one I come back to more often than I'd like. There's real value in knowing Un Chien Andalou exists, in understanding what it meant and what it broke open. But sitting with it for seventeen minutes is a different proposition entirely, and I think it's worth being straight about that distinction rather than hiding behind reverence. Some things earn their place in the canon for reasons that have very little to do with whether they're a good watch on a Tuesday evening. This is probably one of them.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1929  | Watched: 2025-09-22

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Un Chien Andalou (1929) on YouTube

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Luis Buñuel: Land Without Bread (1933) · Simon of the Desert (1965) · L'Âge d'or (1930) · The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1920s: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928) · A Throw of Dice (1929)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)