Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff

In a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye is slit open--juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obsucuring the moon moving in the same direction as the knife through the eye--to grab the audience's att...( read more  read more... )ention. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally. A man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey towards the woman he's itching to kill. A shot of differently striped objects is repeatedly used to connect scenes in this early French short.

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87% liked it

17,858 ratings

Unrated, 16 min.

Directed by: Luis Buñuel

Release Date: June 6, 1929

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DVD Release Date: December 28, 2004

Stats: 1,266 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (1,266)


  • November 6, 2009
    Beautifully disturbing, surreal art. Some fantastic imagery that is yet to be replicated since. It's harsh, disturbing, confusing and utterly compelling. After all the Saw's and Hostels, nothing can match the eye-slitting for "What the fuck" grossness. Yet, it's combination with ...( read more)the shot of the moon, also makes it calming. For 15 minutes of something different, you should really check this out.
  • October 2, 2009
    Pure celluloid art! Dali & Bunuel collaborate to create one of cinemas greatest experimental films. The scene with the eye ball and the moon is pure brilliance!
  • August 4, 2009
    This sixteen-minute cinematic taste of surrealism is definitely an escape from conventional motion picture. In an irrational string of events, verristic surrealists Dali and Bunuel present eerie images, usually read as symbolisms, that are bound to leave its viewers thirsting for...( read more) a lucid sense of significance. It is, however, virtually impossible to provide one definitive explanation for a movie like this, which is created in the name of the queerness of Freudian psychoanalysis.

    Regardless of the moot quality of this dreamlike movie, it is one that every film aficionado must experience. Black and white images of eyeball incisions, a severed hand getting nudged by a stick on the street, ants crawling out of a human hand, and a dead donkey strapped onto a piano being dragged by a man may not exactly look appealing to the conscious mind, but an artwork as incredibly mystifying as this must not be left unseen.
  • November 4, 2008
    As with any other human being, the first time I watched An Andalusian Dog it haunted me. It was haunting not in a sense of horror or a thought-provoking way, but it introduced me to an area of cinema that did not exist in my perception earlier. Prior to this film my only e...( read more)xposure to 'surrealism' in cinema was in certain art house films or the work of filmmakers like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet. It was the first time I watched a completely surreal film and it was an experience that I'm still not quite sure what to think of.

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    The infamous eyeball-slitting opening scene was a shocker. It took me by surprise and laid the foundation to be watchful and expect the unexpected. But unlike what I had imagined, the narrative of the film strays far away from conventional storytelling. With the continuous under-running of erotic undertones and murdering desire shown by the two protagonists, the film becomes more of a symbolic representation of everything than an actual narration.

    Buñuel himself claimed that the film was deliberately made to not make any sort of sense and called everyone who enjoyed it as "that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful and poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder." Maybe Buñuel was just having fun by doing things in this film that hadn't been seen before and thereby making the most of camera trickery, prosthetics and other effects available to a filmmaker in 1929. If this was the case, then Buñuel was the perfect man to do something like that.

    Maybe this film is a lesson which tells us that there is more to what meets the eye (ironic reference intended) and that perhaps reason and logic must be abandoned every once in a while to enable us to experience things that we would normally not have. Watching this film is one of those very experiences and I would recommend anyone who is going to watch it for the first time to abandon any level of reason and logic and perhaps even emotion. The film reminds me much of a dream and the structure is definitely built around a dream-like logic. The emotions of the characters involved change almost at the drop of a hat and never let us build a certain idea of what they represent. Buñuel made sure nothing makes sense.

    I personally would like to look at An Andalusian Dog as an important piece of what cinema is capable of representing. It is an abstract painting done by a true artist who explored certain terrains beyond the fencing of normal logic where no one dared to tread. Thus, the film finds its importance in the contemporary world as a document of the movement of surrealism in cinema in the late 1920s. You cannot call this film "good" or "bad" because there is no competing reference to measure it against. It's just art, and art isn't made to be good or bad, pretty or ugly... it's made to make us feel something.
  • June 1, 2008
    Completely dreamlike and irrational short film featuring the infamous eyeball slitting scene. Enormously important historical document, and at only 17 minutes it never grows tiresome; everyone with even a passing interest in the art of film should take time out to see this.
  • November 16, 2009
    wow this is totally different perspective in watching movie, i mean i have had seen surrealist movie, but i never seen quite like this before.,
    at first i try to understand it, but later i realize there's nothing to be understood.,
    this is eerie, strange, irrational, this is prob...( read more)ably the most unique cinematic experience i ever had, and probably one of the most important movie in history and that makes bunuel one of the most important director in history too..
  • November 13, 2009
    Vraiment interessant!
  • November 11, 2009
    oh... difficult to say anything...
  • November 4, 2009
    A great master pice not only on cinema field, on all art disciplines!
  • September 23, 2009
    Surrealism in film has become a widely-accepted trend, and various artists love to use it to portray difficult emotions that have no logical interpretation on screen and on the canvas. But it all started waaaay back in 1929 with a short film directed by aspiring director Luis Buñ...( read more)uel and the already known surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. It was called "Un Chien Andalou", and it shocked the world.

    Buñuel and Dalí wanted to prove that cinema shouldn't be reserved only to attract and please the masses, but that it should also displease them and portray images that are emotionally close to the author and dream-like in sequence. The film they created sparked immediate controversy upon its screening (as I believe any modern and revolutionary artistic current does) and popular movie lore will have us know that, upon the first screening of his film, Buñuel packed stones and hid behind the theater preparing to protect himself from the angry mob that might come after him. Yes, it was that controversial.

    But as time changed and people became more open-minded, the film's shock and controversy diminished, and now it is not only regarded as the utmost pioneer in surrealistic cinema, but as one of the best films in history. The film is, simply, a collection of various images: it begins with the uber-famous scene where a woman has her eye slashed open juxtaposed to the image of a cloud slashing the moon in half. Other images are paraded for a total of sixteen minutes before us, like a transvestite riding a bycicle, a woman being sexually harassed, a man dragging a piano with two men and some dead animals (monkeys?) lying on top, a funeral, a man being killed by his own image, two life-like statues buried half-way through beach sand, etc... These images are full of emotion and have an absolute dream-like quality that entrances the viewer but that have no meaning (and are supposed to never be interpreted) and are meant merely for reflection.

    I should know. I watched the film countless times, pausing on each scene and image trying to find some meaning or hidden poetry in each of them. I even went as far as trying to join the images to form a believable and sensible plot. But as Roger Ebert and every single other critic had me know, it's only laughable to try and find some meaning behind the film. This is not just a film, it's like an unconscious recording of someone's dreams and nightmares, with nothing to bind them and nothing to explain their point, but full of emotion and wonder to behold. This was a film that a young and aspiring artist decided to make, and he injected all of his soul and vitality into it.

    This was also, I've come to understand, one of the first hadmade films ever, with no budget and no studio sponsoring. Buñuel met with Dalí once and told him about a dream he had about a cloud slicing the moon in half; Dalí, in turn, told Buñuel about a dream where a hand was crawling with ants. From these two strange and inexplicable dreams surfaced what we have all come to hail nowadays as an unforgettable film. And, in fact, both Buñuel and Dalí agreed that no single scene that might seem rational or that might have a logical explanation would ever figure in the film.

    Films just don't get any more difficult to review. But unlike other reviews where one researches, analyses and focuses on each and every aspect of the film, this short film should be observed only through one's emotions. There's a mix of anger, comedy, shock and horror you experience while watching. And by the time it ends, you feel frustrated and amazed, simultaneously. You feel cheated at having found no gain in a film who's only conceivable point is to appal audiences and to make no point at all, but you also feel lucky at having witnessed these images and at having been entreated to such a melange of emotions that few other films manage to do.

    But after all, like most surrealist artists say, why should a form of art record life through a specific pattern and following certain conventions? Why should it admit restrictions? "Un Chien Andalou" is pure cinematic freedom and artistic revelation. It shows us the mind, hopes and fears of its creators and it also unconsciously our own. See it! You won't be disappointed.

    Rating: 3 stars and a half out of 4!!

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