I’ve been
thinking about Andalusian Dog (Le Chien Andalou), the 1917 film that Buñuel and
Dalí collaborated on. The most famous image, one that Buñuel dreamed, is of
the cloud passing before the moon jump-cut to the woman’s eye being seared open
by a razor (done, by the way, to a dead cow; notice how close the eyebrow is to
the eye!).
Dalí’s contribution was the image of the ants crawling out of the
palm of his hand. But for my money, the more disturbing and Andalusian of shots
is right at the end, after the couple are shown kissing and walking along the
beach. Then it is spring and we see their heads and shoulders, the rest of them
buried as though straight up in the sand. A knife in the back of the man.
Presumably both dead.
Shades of Beckett. Or, rather, Beckett was shades of Buñuel and Dalí. That paralysis is what strikes me as the thing Buñuel and Lorca both fought against in Andalusian culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6LkL3ycNUg
I just finished reading Buñuel’s memoir, The Last Sigh. What an amazing life. And it made me hate Dalí, the Fascist sympathizer who Breton labeled “Avida Dollars,”all the more. It seems that when Buñuel got a job working at MOMA in the early Forties, he lost the job because Dali denounced him as an atheist in his memoirs. Being an atheist at the time was tantamount to being a pariah. Word got out and appeared in a magazine and Buñuel felt pressured into resigning. And then, of course, when word of his Communist sympathies came out, Buñuel was completely blacklisted from working in the States for decades!
One of my favorite anecdotes from the book was when he was in Hollywood and Chaplin invited him for Christmas dinner. Everyone was supposed to bring a gift to be hung on the tree. At a certain moment Buñuel arranged with another Surrealist to get up and stomp on all the presents. The next year, Buñuel was invited back and Chaplin said to him, “Why don’t you go just ahead and stomp on the presents and get it over with now.”
And then, when he met Breton in New York, in the Forties, Breton shook his head wearily and said, “You can’t shock anyone anymore,” which of course was the Surrealist project, among other things. That’s a statement worth pondering by all artists with a political/social dimension to their work.
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