Un Chien Andalou Essay

“Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” Luis Buñel had this to say about his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), made during the heart of the surrealist period. It was a film that toyed with the corruption of reality, time, and symbolism (Turvey, 2011). There are various marks though out the film that Buñel acts out, including the slicing of an eye, the reveal of ants crawling out of the palm, the mother’s armpit and the hint of the moth. Upon repeat viewings, one begins to see that this entire film represents a dream in the mind of real-life, modern-day Oedipus (Stead, 2011).
The short film starts off with “once upon a time,” and a man played by Bruñel whetting his straight razor. He stares blankly at the moon, to see a thin cloud slicing across its surface. Just as the audience is seemingly spared the gruesomeness of the actual event by this visual metaphor, the razor slices the eye in close-up, spilling its jelly-like contents. The emblematic
Freud introduces the Oedipal Complex, or the Oedipus drama in his works. Little boys undergo such excitement and seek love for their mothers, alluding to Oedipus. Since he perceives that his mother already has his father, he desires to kill his father and obtain sexual relations with his own mother. Buñel then cross-cuts to a hand lying in the street, representing the protagonist’s hand, which is the source of his masturbatory shame. When he beings to sexually assault his mother, she resists at first, then gradually gives in, showing the aggressive-submissive nature of human sexual relationships in general. “As his eyes roll back in his head, symbolizing both the blindness aspect of the Oedipal myth and the more modern myth that masturbation causes blindness” (Stead, 2011). The opening scene of the eye slicing foreshadows to