music for dead donkeys
by Douglas Messerli
Salvador
Dalí and Luis Buñuel (scenario), Luis Buñuel (director) Un chien Andalou / 1929
The
well-known 1929 experimental short film, Un
chien Andalou, might almost be described as a purposeful shocker. Eschewing
most normative narrative devices, and purposefully selecting disconnected scenes
based on dreams involving “no idea or image that might lend itself to a
rational explanation,” the film’s two creators, Dalí and Buñuel—so legend has
it—turned up on opening night with rocks in their pockets, expecting the
audience to negatively react. When the audience responded rather calmly, the
artists were disappointed. In fact the film’s run, planned for only a limited
period, had to be extended to eight months!
The growing popularity of Freudian
psychology as well as, what I have commented on elsewhere, the innate
conservatism of Surrealism probably accounted for the film’s success. And more
than anything else, what the film does show us is that there no such thing
which the human brain does not instinctively attempt to link to narrative, even
if the work of art does not pretend to tell a story. We think in narrative,
even when we encounter something seemingly disjunctive, and particularly when
it comes to dream imagery—the brain struggles against the notion of unrelated
images to bring them into more coherent patterns.
Rather that relating the sequence of this
16-minute film’s events—this is a film that demands being seen more than being
talked about—I shall recount the kind
of events that occur in this film to explain what I mean. One might suggest
that the scenes in this picture to fall into at least six categories, some
images relating to more than one: religion, social or cultural institutions,
sex (both heterosexual and homosexual, including variations of gender), nature,
violence, and death.

Relating to the religious category is the
man bicycling down the street with the nun’s habit over his suit. When he is
later prevented from attacking the young woman, he picks up a rope to which are
tied stone plates of the Ten Commandents and two grand pianos containing the
corpses of dead donkeys, all hooked up to two shocked Seminarists (Dalí and
Jaume Miravitilles). One might even describe the very first scene, with the
influence of the full moon, as suggesting an archetypal religious/sacrificial
event.
Natural imagery appears in the very first
scene in the image of the moon, and reappears several times when the young male
lover’s hand becomes infested with ants. A death-head’s moth prevails over some
of the final scenes, as does the idyllic meadow in which a man dies and the
final stroll of a seemingly happy couple by the sea. Even their embedment in
sand suggests the forces of nature.

Death of course is the end of many of
these events. The ants plaguing the hand of the man who has fallen from his
bicycle certainly suggests the result of any burial. The woman who is struck by
the automobile apparently dies. So too does the man whom the cross-dressed man
shoots, his death being more thoroughly revealed in his second collapse in a
meadow. The death-head’s moth clearly calls up the skull of a dead man. And the
half buried couple suggests a kind
of
perfect Beckettian-like end’s game.

We might even go so far as to describe Un chien Andalou as being a kind of imaginary
movie, a film less interested as defining the genre of cinema than it is
interested in creating a large mulligan stew of the subterranean relationships
between sex, culture, religion, society, nature, and death. It is no accident
that Buñuel called for Wagner’s finale to Tristan
and Isolde and a variation of a tango as the music to accompany this
love-and-death dominated work of art.
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