Assault in Un Chien Andalou Sophie Bucci

In the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, the startling opening visual of an unnamed man cutting open an unflinching womans eye serves as a metaphor for viewers aesthetic experience of the films disquieting stills, obscene shots, and insane scenes. By assaulting our eye with these confusing and offensive images, Bunuel and Dali seek to obliterate rational thought and thereby heighten the pure emotional impact of their portrayals of lust, fear, and anger. In an adept parallel to those used to experiencing the world normatively and unimpulsively, we are introduced to the main male character carefully sharpening his knife and looking out from his balcony at the moon and a faint bisecting cloud. Although he appears deep in thought, his leisurely cigar smoking also indicates indifference. Earlier, when he cut himself and took a sharp but restrained intake of breath, he couldnt feel as strongly as he could eight years later, just as we cant initially experience our inner psychoanalytic thought as acutely before we are shocked into acknowledging the pinnacle of the film, the long and sexually aggressive scene which culminates with the priests and the piano, as well as its precursors. As a primer to the same male character (played by an older actor) sexually assaulting the woman, we receive several other images designed to (productively) confuse us: a close-up backside shot of the man wiggling

inappropriately while dressed in an effeminate white skirt and ruffled caplet, the ants in the mans hand merging with a hairy armpit, an intimate body part though not a sexually charged one, and an androgynous female-bodied individual prodding at a severed hand, perhaps meant to represent a castrated appendage, with a pole (the two objects together initially look like a dog on a leash, as the title of the film would suggest it featured). These encounters are necessarily disorienting, and they serve to cleanse our palettes of pragmatic sensibilities and memories of other films in preparation for exposure to unadulterated motive. Indeed, gone is the thoughtful pre-eye-slicing man of the earlier scene. Something triggers in him as he sees (even while seeming to respond neutrally to) the person with the hand and box being run over by a car. We dont get to see this action itself, just as the camera cuts away from the man cutting his own finger and the damage done in the shooting sixteen years earlier the violence Bunel and Dali choose to showcase is drawn-out, like the measured incision into the eye, or tends to invoke a dull ache in the viewer based on so-called higher emotions (our discomfort during the molestation scene plays out differently than our possible alternate reactions to physical violence). Although many sections of the film appear allergic to subtlety, one important clue is available only to the socially cultured French viewer: ants in the palm are a colloquialism for itching to kill.

The anger of this desire, directed towards no one specific or perhaps the world at large, is taken out on the women through sexual subordination. This is an unexpected form of indirect violence, and manifests itself abruptly as the man grabs the womans breasts after seeing the accident in the street. His later actions disquiet mainly because of his speed: In the section where he follows the woman along the wall, switching positions at one point to corner her, viewers feel the threat of his unpredictability acutely this fear is mirrored in the womans need to keep him in sight even as she flees. The conflation of lust and anger, shown in through the assault, the ants in the palm, the woman with the tennis racket, the man with the gun, and the happy couple with stakes through their heads at the beach, is juxtaposed with such fear in a near-profound combination our evercompartmentalizing minds are usually not apt to accept. Aside from being prepared for such an experience beforehand, the mans ecstatic, vampiric face during his subconscious imaginings of extended contact with the women adds further momentum to our understanding of his depravity. When Bunuel and Dali further connect the viewer and the man by featuring a surprised shot of him with his mouth open in reaction to her, an expression we wear in our own minds as a response to his behavior, they suggest that these types of self-compounding emotions could be present within ourselves. This is an uncomfortable conclusion we couldnt have come to ourselves or without the continued presence of situations that are just different enough from realistic experience to not frighten us toward levels of insecurity where we can no longer

introspect successfully. Just as the cut of the eye in the first scene is even and precise, Un Chien Andalous makers change our perceptions of the world artfully, using surrealist and seemingly nonsensical methods and images for anything but random purposes.