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Un chien andalou

Un Chien Andalou
(An Andalusian Dog)
Unchienandalouposter.jpg
French poster
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Produced by Luis Buñuel
Pierre Braunberger
Written by Luis Buñuel
Salvador Dalí
Starring Pierre Batcheff
Simone Mareuil
Luis Buñuel
Salvador Dalí
Jaime Miravilles
Music by Richard Wagner
Cinematography Albert Dubergen
Jimmy Berliet (uncredited)
Edited by Luis Buñuel
Distributed by Les Grands Films Classiques (France)
Release date
  • 6 June 1929 (1929-06-06) (France)
Running time
21 minutes
Language Silent film
(French intertitles)
Budget < 100,000 francs

Un Chien Andalou (French pronunciation: ​[œ̃ ʃjɛ̃ ɑ̃dalu], An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.

Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

The film opens with a title card reading "Once upon a time". A middle-aged man (Luis Buñuel) sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman (Simone Mareuil) being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead. Another cut occurs to the moon being overcome by the cloud, then a cut to a close up of a hand slitting the eye of an animal with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it.

The subsequent title card reads "eight years later". A slim young man (Pierre Batcheff) bicycles down a calm urban street wearing what appears to be a nun's habit and a striped box with a strap around his neck. A cut occurs to the young woman from the first scene, who has been reading in a sparingly furnished upstairs apartment. She hears the young man approaching on his bicycle and casts aside the book she was reading (revealing a reproduction of Vermeer's The Lacemaker). She goes to the window and sees the young man lying on the curb, his bicycle on the ground. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive the young man.


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