"How were Surrealists' interests in dreams and the unconscious reflected in the aesthetic and stylistic features of Un Chien andalou?"

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Question 7: “How were Surrealists’ interests in dreams and the unconscious reflected in the aesthetic and stylistic features of Un Chien andalou?”

Largely free of production constraints, short, experimental and deliberately shocking, Un Chien andalou is considered by many to be one of the most notorious expressions of surrealism on film in the last century. At its most radical, the surrealist movement asked us to rethink fundamentally our preconceptions about cinema; to challenge and subvert. The film allowed the rapid entry of its two young directors, Luis Buňuel and Salvador Dali, into the Surrealist movement. Films of this movement had been unsuccessful (for example, those of Man Ray and Antoine Arnaud) up until this point; Robert Short explaining that ‘Part of the trouble was that Surrealism meant automatism – absolute fidelity to the voice of the unconscious unsullied by rational intentionality. And filmmaking cannot do without forethought, rehearsal and a certain technical expertise.’  Buňuel himself clarifies that the film’s plot is the result of a “conscious psychic automatism’, and, to that extent, it does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams.’

The surrealists were greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis. They were especially receptive to his distinction between the ‘ego’ and the ‘id’—that is, between our primal instincts/desires (the ‘id’) and our more rational patterns of behavior (the ‘ego’). Since our primal urges are often unsuitable/ inappropriate in terms of social expectations, Freud concluded that in a repressive world, we are unable to share our dreams consciously and push them into the unconscious part of our minds. He believed that individuals must bring their hidden desires to the awareness of the conscious mind. Freud felt that despite the overwhelming urge to repress desires, the unconscious still reveals itself—particularly when the conscious mind relaxes its hold—in dreams, myths, odd patterns of behavior, accidents, and art. Through the film’s disturbing succession of images and surrealist imagery, Buňuel and Dali were able to visualise the surrealist fascination with the reality of the unconscious: the concept that the ‘real’ is to be found beyond the surface, in concealed dimensions of the psyche. Buňuel believed that through visualising unconscious impulses, he would ‘shatter the optimism of the bourgeois world, and force the reader (or spectator) to question the permanency of the prevailing order’. 

Cinema, as Short puts it, ‘permitted the superimposition of dreams and everyday reality; their suture in a seameless visual experience.’ The ambience of the film creates a mental state halfway between dream and reality, an almost conscious hallucination. Both Dali and Buňuel took inspiration when creating the film from the psychoanalytical practice of remembering their own dreams (the former recounting one of ants eating at his hand, and Buňuel’s being the image of a tapering cloud bisecting the moon). They dispensed with the restraints of rationality, reason and established attitudes (moral, social and artistic), using images and ideas that would surprise and provoke the spectator, in order to create an ‘autonomous’ world. By obscuring the realist vision and idealist aesthetic the final images imparted dream-like states and represented ‘the unconscious feelings and desires of man’- both principal preoccupations of Surrealism that aimed to shock spectators into a new awareness of themselves. The surrealist technique used by the filmmakers for the first time in cinema as a way of eliciting the unconscious is known as ‘automatism’: this consisted of allowing the mind to wander without any interference from the conscious mind. The resulting findings would not be random or meaningless, but would be guided at every point by the functioning of the artist’s unconscious mind, and not by rational thought or artistic training. The film is full of surreal images we remain unprepared for- an example is the metamorphosis of the female protagonist’s armpit with a sea-urchin accompanied by a single human footprint or the male protagonist’s strange burden of donkeys, pianos and other paraphernalia.

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Buňuel reflected the significance of unconscious emotions in Un Chien andalou principally through the facial expressions and body movements of his characters, as visuals were a vital part of the silent film’s language.  We are able to decipher/ gauge the feelings of the male and female protagonist as they observe a girl in the street below their window- their faces depict a sense of euphoria/ elation and delight/rhapsody (rapture?). Similarly, the excitement of the young man’s feelings and erotic nature of his thoughts are conveyed to us by a series of highly expressive images. The aggressive, urgent look on ...

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