Cinema was a new art form still to be experimented with: Buñuel and Dalí knew they would produce something different, with the purpose of attracting attention. Simply following the logical sequence that words can be poetic and an image is worth a thousand words, and that poetry can be abstract, thus so can images, and if they move, then better still.
Un Chien andalou was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 for a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
The film has no narrative, in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason.
The idea for the film actually began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.
Un Chien andalou was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 for a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
The film has no narrative, in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason.
The idea for the film actually began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.
3 comments:
hey your blog design is very nice, clean and fresh and with updated content, make people feel peace and I always like browsing your site.
- Thomas
I am doing research for my university thesis, thanks for your helpful points, now I am acting on a sudden impulse.
- Kris
I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you post more on this subject?
Post a Comment