Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Un Chien Andalou is an European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
Un Chien Andalou is one of cinema's most radical and singular achievements in surrealism, deliberately defying conventional narrative logic — its 'plot' is intentionally incoherent dreamlike imagery, so traditional story structure rates low. Acting is functional but secondary to the visual conception. The cinematography, however, is genuinely exceptional for 1929, with iconic images (the sliced eye, the crawling ants, the donkeys on pianos) that remain striking nearly a century later. Novelty is an unambiguous 4 — this short film essentially invented the language of cinematic surrealism and remains utterly one-of-a-kind. The ending is abrupt and arbitrary by design, which is true to its surrealist aims but leaves the film without a satisfying close on any traditional or even unconventional level.