1929 was a year in which movie cameras around the world did not stop rolling. They wanted to tell stories, they were many and very diverse, they all responded to highly dissimilar social, political and cultural contexts. In Chile, “La calle del ensueño”, a film directed by Jorge Délano (Coke), receives its first awards (Best Spanish-speaking film) at the Seville International Fair.
That same year, in the red lands of the Soviet Union, the father of the Ojo Cinema, the Kinoki, Dzíga Vertov, made an impact with one of his great works, the experimental production, “The Man with the Camera”. In the United States, in contrast to the economic depression and their classic Black Tuesday, the Marx Brothers and their insane comedy were able to take over the troubled smiles of Anglo-Saxon cinema. In Europe in that same period, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí worked on the technical script for “An Andalusian Dog,” a film that never knew about dogs or Andalusians, but did know about the surrealist movement at its maximum expression.
The surrealists, inspired by the Dadaist magazine Littérature, and strengthened by Andrè Bretòn’s manifesto (1924), set out to experiment with “psychic automatism.” This automatism sought from a “mechanical writing” to liberate the will of the individual, in this way the irrationality of the subconscious became the source of expression of a turbulent time. Humor, horror, eroticism, dreams and madness were the workhorses of this avant-garde imagery. At that time, psychoanalysis, already expanding, along with the revolutionary theories of the post-14 war, were the aesthetic ideals to be implemented.
The intellectuals of this era looked for the wonderful, the unusual, the incongruous motifs in foreign contexts. They did not want to make art, but rather explore possibilities. Bretòn said that this “automatism” had no control whatsoever by reason, nor by aesthetic or moral evaluations. The French author also projected this worldview towards cinema by stating, “for us surrealists, cinema not only presents us with beings made of flesh and blood, but also with the dreams of these beings converted into flesh and blood.”
“An Andalusian Dog” was directed by Buñuel; Filming lasted fifteen days and production was reduced to two rolls of film. The premiere took place at the Studio des Ursulines cinema in Paris, and the reactions were immediate. More than one movie theater was burned with this film; Metaphorical images and a dreamlike speech were the perfect combination of this lethal cocktail. The script was written based on dreams, and absurd props were thought of. To disconcert, violate and criticize an era, that was the challenge. Each plane (decoupage) sought to alter the digestion of the calmest spirits. Buñuel, the director of it, always maintained that the objective of this film was to make a desperate and passionate call for the annihilation of the bourgeois culture of the time.
A razor in very close-up cuts a woman’s eye, making an analogy with a cloud crossing the moon; A lover wants to hug his beloved, but he is tied up, he only wants to touch her; a grand piano loaded with rotten donkeys is tied to two virginal priests; an amputated hand is observed overhead by the crowd on the street… the music invites confusion, and “An Andalusian Dog” is already on the screen. George Sadoul, film historian, suggests that it was love and sex (the hero’s passion); the difficulties of the time (the strings); religious prejudices (seminarians) and a bourgeois culture in decline (the piano and donkeys), some of the topics addressed by Luis Buñuel.
“An Andalusian Dog”, a disconcerting film essay, which to a certain extent had a lot of the primitive concept of Eisentein’s Cinema of Attraction, was also a reading from the pens of Freud, Lautrémont, Marx, Sade, among others. To this we must add the experiments of Man Ray, the Picasso of photography; Marcel Duchamp and his famous rotoreliefs and rotating spheres, and the classic reflections of Artaud who stated: “I love cinema, I love any genre of film, but all genres have yet to be invented.”
Antonio Bonet, a surrealist researcher, faced with this topic and stated that it was a reality to affirm that the surrealists turned cinema into a concern, rather than a field for realizing their own avant-garde dreams. This assessment is demonstrated by Bretòn when he states, “it is in cinema where the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated,” to which Phillipe Soupaul concludes: “cinema is a superhuman eye, much richer than the unfaithful retina of the human eye.” .
“An Andalusian Dog”, the surrealists and their followers, understood that psychic automatism would have to be put into practice for the rest of their lives, and that dynamiting the tranquil reality, disrupting it and reinventing it was the mission of every surrealist. Convinced of this worldview, one day the author of the Surrealist Manifesto (Bretòn) shouted from the rooftops: “And do not forget that for us surrealists, in this era, it is reality that is at stake.”