Un Chien Andalou (1929) –a sixteen-minute surrealist film made in France in 1929 by Spanish writer and director Luis Buñuel and Spanish artist Salvador Dalí– one of the best-known surrealist films of the French avant-garde film movement of the 1920s. It is also considered one of the most prominent films in Spanish Surrealism. Buñuel said that the only rule for the writing of the script was that “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted… Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything.” (Buñuel, Luis (1983). My Last Sigh, Abigail Israel (trans), New York: Knopf.) (Un Chien Andalou-note) This film is in the public domain, and freely available on the Internet Archives.
This video refuses to load for me… I think I’ll try again later.
This film is a prime example of a surrealist film. Surrealism in the 1920s wasn’t often recognized as a legitimate form of art because it explored avant-garde ideas and showed some “explicit” material (that at the time is equivilent to an R or even an X rated movie today).
I like Surrealist films because the director encorporates different seemingly unrelated scenes and allows the viewer to look at them in a new way. This video could have been banned at the time simply because of the unusualness of it or possibly because of the graphic content (such as the scene where the man is fondling the woman).
I think this film would have been banned due to the explicit portrayal or suggestion of elements of the human body that society at the time deemed offensive or disgusting, in this film death, dismemberment, and human sexuality. All three of those are common themes in Dali’s work and probably why much of his work has been censored.
Kelly & Brodie,
Do you have the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player installed on your computer? To check, go to this website here.
i downloaded it as well and tried on a friends computer and i still haven’t gotten it to work yet…
I tried to downoad it too and its not working for me either.
I can’t see it either…
I thought this film was really strange and almost disturbing for even this time period. I can definitely understand why it would have been censored during the 1920s. The deaths as well as the sexual harrassment along with the abnormal things that happen to the characters are really almost shocking, at least to me. I think seeing things like that are much more normal now (and with words) than silent with music in the background that sets you up for what could happen.
I also agree with Marina that those three aspects of the film were definitely reasons the film was censored or banned. (time period is also an issue)
well i finally got it to work. i couldn’t tel you what that was about for the life of me, however, the only rational reason i can think of as to why that would be banned is simply be cause it was surreal. Dali was looked down upon for his art work and this is a perfect example as to how unique and perhaps even weird his art is. I thought it was really cool, could i tell you why, probably not. It may just be because it is so different, so unusual. The only thing even remotely explicit is the scene where the man is groping the woman, we are numb to that today but in the 1920’s that was most likely a huge deal.
If you are having problems viewing this video on the class blog, try the link tp the internet archive in the post above. There is the original version there. Alternatively, do a search in YouTube for Un chien andalou, you will find it there as well.
Best,
Jim
I was definitely surprised by some of the things on the video, and I can definitely see why it would have been banned back in the twenties. A lot of things that happen in the film are not too explicit by today’s standards, but keeping in mind the time, were probably very inappropriate. On top of that, the film itself is very strange and artistic, and a lot of times that is enough to get something banned.
This film would seem shocking in the 20s and perhaps even today to a few people. It reminds me of Eraserhead because of the lack of color and bizarre symbolism. I am not surprised that salvador dali had a hand in this movie
i downloaded adobe and it still won’t load for me….
I can understand why this film as banned in 1929(sexual references, dead horses on pianos, eyes being sliced open, etc.) but, when viewed unde oday’sstadards, it’s mild and harmless, and the aspects that can’t even be overlooked by our generation (possibly the eye-operation) are easily swept under the catagory of “being artsy” and forgotten. Today, it’s harmless.
Ew this movie grossed me out, I hate peoples eyes being cut up, so in goodie for it being banned. I really dont understand the whole movie at all, what is the point?
This vidoe is STILL giving me creepy little few-second nightmares.
When challenged to begin a dialogue between my class, Video Art, and this class on the censorship of art, it was clear from the onset which of the artists we have studied it would be most appropriate to blog about; Czechoslovakian puppeteer and video artist Jan Švankmajer. We spent a while in class discussing his body of work and the artists subsequently influenced by him—among them Tim Burton and the Brothers Quay—but did not spend a great deal of time discussing the censorship of his work. Thus I needed to do a bit of independent research in order to provide a thoughtful synopsis of this obstacle’s impact on his work and life. Early in his career and during his studies at the Institute of Applied Arts in Prague and during his time at the State Puppet Theater he was quite successful—with critics and also in the sense of being free to explore his innate artistic urges. He proved to be a rising star when he took first prize for his film Johannes Doktor Faust at the Venice Film Festival in 1959. After making another successful film, Cislice, Švankmajer joined the Czechoslovakian surrealist group in 1970, but harder times were ahead. He went on to make the film Ossuary later that year. This film showcases, as its name suggests, a building in which the skeletal remains of humans are stored, and in the case of the famous Sedlec Ossuary filmed by Švankmajer, it is done in an elaborate and baroque fashion. In the original film, a tour guide gives commentary to Švankmajer’s images, but when the authorities in power after the Soviet Invasion of 1968 came to dislike the film, he was ordered to remove this commentary from the film robbing it of much of its intended content. Again in 1972 Švankmajer was faced with censorship when his film Leonardo’s Diary, which presented starkly unappealing images of daily life in communist Czechoslovakia, enraged authorities who consequently banned Švankmajer from filmmaking for seven years. When allowed to return to film making, he was limited to creating films that focused on classic literature, but the disturbing and typically Švankmajer theme of darkness found a fitting home in his filmic experimentations inspired by Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher in 1979. In 1982, Švankmajer released the short Dimensions of Dialogue, which was much lauded by film critics of the international community, but was met with much hostility from Czech authorities who claimed it was the embodiment of the very kind of filmmaking they were attempting to eradicate. In an interview, Švankmajer explains that during this period of his career he was forced to make many short films, as it was harder for the administration, which had a monopoly on filmmaking, to control than a feature film. After this, Švankmajer escaped to the more remote eastern portion of Czechoslovakia to continue his filmmaking. As we’re all well aware, the communist régime responsible for attempting to silence Švankmajer fell in the famed Velvet Revolution of 1989. However, communist nations were not the only ones in which Švankmajer’s work were censored. His film Conspirators of Pleasure, was never released in the United Kingdom for its racy content featuring, among other things, a specially constructed masturbation machine. To this end—i.e. that censorship is alive and well in Democracies and in many forms—Švankmajer has, in interviews met post-1989 Czechoslovakian capitalism and lack of overt censorship with a skepticism and jaded humor, saying:
While there is no censorship of thought, there is censorship of money because, with films like mine, it is very difficult to find money. So now the situation is as if you’ve got gloves on, meaning that the censorship is not as simple and primitive as it used to be. It’s more sophisticated, let’s say that.
Švankmajer expounds upon this his only political film, The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia, where the viewer watches as hands perform a cesarean section on a bust of Stalin by slicing open his face (filled with entrails) thereby giving birth to a bust of a Czech totalitarian which is then spanked begins crying. The film from this point outlines the history of Czechoslovakia up until the time of the Velvet Revolution. There the film climaxes and ends when Švankmajer returns to this birth metaphor by painting the flag of the new Czech Republic onto the bust of Stalin and performing another cesarean section. This time, however, the screen fades to black before the viewer sees what emerges from its depths, but as the credits begin, one hears a slap and the ominous scream of a new born child.
This was not something I was expecting Švankmajer to have expressed. Surely he, of all people, I thought, having dealt with the censorship-happy policies of a totalitarian regime would have immediately embraced the influx of a western-style democracy and the freedoms that we often think come with it. As an American—and I think many of us, even the most open-minded of us, fall victim to this sort of thinking on occasion—I assume that the way that things are done here in America is the way everyone in the world wants to and should want to do things. Although many things in our lives remind us that this is not so (War in Iraq?), self-criticism, introspection and the thoughtful consideration of other lifestyles and practices seems something—pardon the pun—foreign to us. This tendency must be and can only be eliminated through the encouragement of and participation in open dialogues that illuminate varying perspectives like cautious Švankmajer’s. Thus I am excited by the hope that umwblogs.org will prove to be exactly such a dynamic forum where the synthesis of ideas between the members of our community, faculty and students alike, and the sharing information and viewpoints on important topics that are pertinent to all of us can occur.