Un Chien Andalou Review

Un chien andalou in english An Andalusian Dog is one of the more surreal classic films I have seen, others like vertigo and Psycho are not so surreal and actually have a plot as opposed to this one which seems to make no sense in any of its many seemingly changing plots.

So anyway onto evaluating this mess of a film, I have only seen it once but have heard a lot about it in the past, it was revered as one of the great films of its time in filmmaking and breaking the rules and delving into new areas of film that have not been explored previously. An example of this would be when the womans eyeball gets cut in half with a knife, this was a relatively new thing at the time, to shock the audience, which I think at this point the film does rather well. The rest of the film however tries to shock the audience in less obvious ways and it doesnt really seem to do a good job of it, this is probably why the main part of this films fame is at the very start.

The director Luis Bunuel was said to have taken dreams he had and used them for inspiration for the film, which would explain a little as to why it is so unorganised and makes next to no sense, dream state films have a very unusual feel to them and completely explains why this film is so strange and jumps around in time alot.

With the fact that it is also Luis's first film the viewer can give the film a little leeway in saying that a filmmaker almost never makes the film that is going to make them famous in their first go, but in this case this is not true, so it can be said instead that in the personal opinion of the viewers of a film it may not always be the case that a filmmakers first film is always a 'good' one.

As for the rest of the film and the relevance of the name of the film, it may just be the ignorance of modern culture and people or it may be the fact that the film is so poorly made and overrated that it is just impossible to comprehend but from the views that have been expressed by normal viewers of it as opposed to the reviews of the professionals that seem to think they uinderstand it there is a large margin, therefore it is simply at the viewers discression to either choose to try and understand and like the film or to just accept it as what it is or even just enjoy it for what it is and not try at all to anylise and comprehend it.