What is there to say about Buñuel and Dalí’s timeless film that hasn’t already been said? It’s one of the primary Surrealist documents and something that everyone should see at least once. Cyril Connolly attended the Paris premiere in 1929:
The picture was received with shouts and boos and when a pale young man tried to make a speech, hats and sticks were flung at the screen. In one corner a woman was chanting, “Salopes, salopes, salopes!” and soon the audience began to join in. With the impression of having witnessed some infinitely ancient horror, Saturn swallowing his sons, we made our way out into the cold of February, 1929, that unique and dazzling cold…
Why does this strong impression still persist? Because Un Chien Andalou brought out the grandeur of the conflict inherent in romantic love, the truth that the heart is made to be broken, and after it has mended, to be broken again. For romantic love, the supreme intoxication of which we are capable, is more than an intensifying of life; it is a defiance of it and belongs to those evasions of reality through excessive stimulus which Spinoza called “titivations.” By the law of diminishing returns our desperate century forfeits the chance of being happy and, because it finds happiness insipid, our world is regressing to chaos.
The film comes and goes on YouTube so serious viewers are directed to the BFI DVD/Blu-ray release which comes twinned with Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair
