Un Chien Andalou (1929)

No quote, unless "wtf?!" counts.

Got me a movie, I want you to know. Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know. Don't know about you, but this is beautiful. Also weird. But good weird.

It's rather hard to say much about the surrealism, or indeed to get any kind of grip on a film that isn't really a narrative at all. When you're looking at a movement based on Freudianism and free association it's rather hard to find anything much beyond "a bit random, innit?" to say about the various weird scenes. The captions denoting that it's "eight years later" or "sixteen years earlier" are presumably supposed to indicate the random way time passes in dreams, much like cutting between scenes in a film, so I suppose that's a bit metatextual. The man's unexpected assault on the woman's boobs is probably supposed to be some sort of illustration of how the id is let loose within dreams- Freud and all that- but I'm otherwise wary to use phrases like "supposed to be" at all. I have pretty much the same attitude about Salvador Dali's paintings. What do you say about them beyond "Ooh, a bit Freudian, dreamlike and therefore random"?

What matters for the surrealism to work is that the film should look gorgeous and be creatively shot. Thanks to extraordinary work from Luis Buñuel, it does and it is. The use of light, camera angles and dissolves makes the whole thing look gorgeous and appropriately weird. It helps, from a 2012 perspective, that it all now looks so charmingly period, with the look of the cars, the relative lack of them and, yes, the clothes. The flapper looks gorgeous. The hats look cool. The beachwear is, er, less so. Tanktops, on the beach? Really?

I'm glad I've seen this film though- it really is beautiful and, although I'm sure the makers wouldn't thank me for saying so, a charming document of intellectual thought between the wars. You should see it too; it's on YouTube, and it's only sixteen minutes. Go on.