Luis Bunuel
Un Chien Andalou

deConstruction_

Oniric delirium: avant-garde short film, 16m, b/w. Liebestod, Wagner. &cc.

PLOT (focus on) a couple in symbiosis thanks to a violent sexual connection.///////////DADAist images\\\ atemporality <-- captions that fix predetermined moments in an eternal past. THE SURREALIST IMPORTS EXALT THE ANTI-CLERICAL AND ANTI-BOURGEOIS PROCLIVITY OF THE SCREENWRITERS. The initial shot is a close-up (CU) of a hand sharpening the razor on the strop, followed by a sudden cut to a gentleman with a cigarette in his mouth, then back to the razor, whose blade is tested on the gentleman's nail. The strop is placed on a door knob with a wooden frame, which turns out to be leading to a terrace bordered by an iron railing with arabesque details and decorated with a plant. It's night, and the gentleman, leaning on the railing with his fingertips, meditatively observes the full white moon. He seems annoyed when a sinister grin distorts his face. A swift focus on his left hand (holding the remaining cigarette butt with little tobacco left), which opens the eyelids of a woman in extreme close-up (XCU), a gentlewoman with a disturbed and frightened expression, as one might imagine of someone about to undergo dental surgery and glimpses, moments before the anesthesia, a stainless steel tray holding intimidating tools. Hair tied back. Right cheek brushing the man's striped tie. The razor is raised and positioned parallel to the gentlewoman's eye, and for a moment, she is stripped of her disturbance. A thin, ethereal cloud rapidly crosses the moon – flashback of what the man saw before the analepsis, then a return to the RAZOR/EYE scene, an XCU of the razor slicing the pupil, releasing a gelatinous liquid. It's said a cow's eye was used, but the scene, laden with symbolism, both evokes the typical work of a director (the actor playing the gentleman is the director himself), who in the editing phase sees and critically cuts parts of the film, and leads the viewer to a total vision of unheard-of things, with the limit lying in the cathartic pain of the pupil's cut, yet the scene has its brutal effect not so much for the cut itself but for what this play seems to have evoked (the cloud against the moon) and the woman's expression, no longer troubled when the fingertips touch her. The next scene, introduced by the caption HUIT ANS APRÈS and played through various filming techniques, almost marking as a divertissement or pure self-referential artifice, follows a second man (dressed unusually) pedaling along an anonymous road: first seen from behind, then a quick glimpse from an angle and a very bright CU foreshadowing the complete focus on the man – the camera morphs with him, the screen becoming his field of vision. He has a strange rectangular gadget around his neck, hanging down his chest. Filmed from behind, it's as if he's swimming in darkness. Fade to black on the escape. Arrived. the camera lingers on the box, in front of which a tiny golden lock conceals; the wooden box has a crosshatched texture, with warmer colors than the shelf. The scene change is claustrophobic. A woman reading. Seated with crossed legs in a room flooded by a burst of white light that inundates and soaks the floor. The rest is black. Present in the room are the following objects. A single bed. A lamp above a nightstand. The nightstand. Another chair. A table. (On which some undefined objects rest.) The woman-humanized arch is complicated by metalwork and wood in multiple dimensions, and everything seems to intersect. In the center of the room, the light – the only natural element. At the back, the bed, whose corner is in shadow. The book she is reading is gargantuan in size, bound. The woman is the same whose eye was cut by the director, and her first action is to slightly lift her head and arch her eyebrows, furrowing her brow, moving her eyes towards the eye that had been cut: the camera, eye-shaped, frames the man on the bike. Abruptly, she closes the book. And throws it. Vermeer’s Lace Maker, enhancing the matronly femininity previously characterizing her. The accelerated movements of: her getting up, her going to the window, her drawing the curtain, her watching the man falling near the door. The woman pronounces something incomprehensible even with lip-reading. Is she irritated by the man? Curses him. But when she descends, having seen him fall, she kisses his face all over. She takes possession of the striped box, opens it and finds the striped tie the gentleman/director wore in the initial scene. Then something very strange happens. On the bed, the woman, modestly dressed, recreates the figure of the man on the bicycle with the clothes and sits beside, with hands joined on the knees. Close-up of the bed. Close-up of the woman's face. A bunch of adjectives could suit her, so many that one would cancel the other – simply, she's absorbed. Emerging from her ataraxia, she notices the man in the room. A hairless, skeletal type examining his hand at first glance for no particular reason except perhaps some screws loose. But in the hand are black ants, and the woman approaches, stunned at the sight of the hole in the man's hand from which [hole] the ants emerge. The two look at each other and look again... at what? (This image stems from one of the scriptwriters' dreams, and the employee knows because he has studied the film repeatedly, knowing full well the next scene is an analogy between a hairy armpit – leading him to the sexual theme – and a sea urchin.) The hand, the hole or the ants. The ants seem to go crazy. In another scene, at the sidewalk center, an androgyne is surrounded by a crowd kept at bay by a diligent policeman, busy keeping the thronged curious crowd at bay eager to see the show of this androgyne tormenting the severed hand with a stick, the same invaded by ants, everyone wants to see, and his parting is slicked; a couple looks out the window and the man wears women's shoes. No one believes what they're seeing when finally the policeman, resembling a de Gaulle-like general, authoritative, finally doesn't introduce himself to the man (the man's face has feminine features and lipstick), talks to him, and steals the hand, dispersing the crowd. The androgyne isn't disturbed, but looks compassionately and detachedly as all dissipates. Remaining alone in the street, the music swells, cars flow, the couple continues watching from the window, lingering first on the box, the androgyne holds it, and then the car that hits him. The man of the couple closes the curtain and turns toward the girl. Squeezes her breasts. She recoils. He advances menacingly, either seized by a rapture or possessed. His gaze grim and ravenous. Could he have been aroused by the suffering androgyne? Anyway, the woman remains the one with the calf eye. The tango frames the woman's attempted escape and the man's continual approaches, as if the rape were moving to the rhythm of dance. Another squeeze. The indignant woman, supplicating... surrenders, and the man caresses her chest, keeping hands above her dress. Drool drips from his chin, while brief frames show flashes of the nudity the dress covers – breasts and buttocks – and the man is astonished, his mug contorted in a shout of fatal and at once demonic orgasm until the woman pushes him away and escapes. Escapes through the room, taking refuge in a corner. (SELF-DEFENSE: On the adjacent wall, there’s the racket she'll use as an improvised weapon.) The man initially desists, but reconsiders and advances with his usual perverse air towards her. Only he seems tired, he seems unable: the sight of the breasts rising and falling in sync with her heavy breathing gives him the motivation to approach her after shouldering two ropes, at the front ends of which are the tablets of the Ten Commandments, at the back ends two pianos. On the pianos are placed rotting donkey carcasses, two in total. The donkeys’ ocular bulbs are absent in the orbits, filled with wax. Also tied are two priests, contrasting the erotic atmosphere of the story but perfect for a rape scene (though, in this case, the potential victim is an adult). For a few frames, a priest is played not by an actor but by the screenwriter. Meanwhile, as the man with difficulty approaches, she escapes through a doorless exit that she presses against the arm of the potential rapist who flounders and cries his pain into the ears of the woman deafened by his pain. The priests wear a pilgrim fathers' headdress. The pain in the arm must be as excruciating as her fear, peaking on seeing the man's hand, the only part to have crossed the door, covered in black ants. Emerging from a hole. While the hand writhes in agony. She remembers the man lying on the bed, sick. There's a quick flashback to the memory, then back to her, who becomes enlightened (metaphorically), then again to his face looking around, lost, but also grinning mockingly and boisterously as the thwarted villain. The sick man receives a visit. The new arrival, fully dressed, rings the bell (a brief image shows two hands shaking a shaker, thus referring to the bell sound) and the sick man turns towards the entrance. (Still the shaker.) But it's she who goes to open. The man literally storms into the bedroom, threatening the sick man on whose chest – it turns out – lies the horizontally lined box. The sick man is in trouble. This is understandable from his lost look, not one of fear but of confusion: the man before him is identical to him, now shaking him and now tearing away the box and now lifting him from the bed – what does he do? – strips him and throws his accessories out the window. The predator turning into prey. The alter-ego points to the wall from which the racket hangs and he follows direction, in punishment; the alter-ego removes his hat, then exits and [TIME INDICATION] returns, hands the sick man two books that turn into guns killing the alter-ego at the door. But the man doesn't die in the room, but in a field while trying to cling to the familiar woman's back. Several people rush, examine the corpse and, transforming into an impromptu hearse, escort the alter-ego out of the scene. The music returns to the previous tango. The protagonist finds herself in front of the Acherontia atropos, a moth better known as the death's-head hawkmoth for the skull pattern on its back due to narrative works referencing it, not least Poe’s The Sphinx, José Saramago's Death at Intervals, and The Silence of the Lambs movie/poster. A magnifying glass-like focus on the skull and a pause on the Acherontia atropos until the well-endowed protagonist confronts her assailant who suddenly widens his eyes and covers the mouth he no longer has. Mockingly, she renews her lipstick on her voluptuous lips. In place of his mouth, armpit hair rapidly sprouts, compared earlier to a sea urchin, and she is astounded not so much by the alchemy but at discovering her armpit hair's disappearance. She scolds him. Puts on a scarf. Mocks him. Closes the door behind her, but not before slightly reopening it and giving further mocking gestures. The wind blows her silky scarf, which she manages to bring back along the median line between her breasts. There's wind because they are on a beach. Before her, a man watches the sea. She joyfully greets him and rushes towards him. The man – who is always the same, i.e., the sick man and his alter-ego, the assailant etc. – is dressed foolishly, with puffy pants and a tacky short-sleeved sweatshirt. He seems dazed as she approaches, something she doesn’t mind. She runs to him and clings to his arm. His head turns the other way. In real life, the actor playing this man would commit suicide a few months after shooting. He offers his clenched hand, but she opens it downwards and smiles at him, sensually, with those new lipstick and sweet lips: they make up and kiss, walking arm in arm away, then moving towards the lens, which now examines their feet on pebbles, rocks, shells, trash, sand. The final scene, preceded by the caption AU PRINTEMPS, shows them too distant to touch, their bodies buried up to the chest in the beach sand.