Few films have ever been so rarely watched in their entirety, while being so universally famous for one scene. And this despite the fact that Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), is only about 17 minutes long.

The famous scene is the opening scene, in which a close up shows a women’s eye being sliced in half by a razor wielded by Buñuel himself. Buñuel’s intention with this scene, which was added at the last minute, was to create a strong impact on the audience, so as to free them from any associations with conventional ideas, and to prepare them for the new audiovisual language they would encounter in the film, whose plot was not governed by the rules of logic.

The idea of making a Surrealist film arose when Dalí told Buñuel about a dream he had had, in which ants came out of the palm of his hand. Buñuel told Dalí about another dream, in which a cloud passed over the moon and a razor sliced an eye in two. Once the creative process had begun, Buñuel’s mother had to lend him the twelve thousand pesetas he needed in order to start filming.

Un Chien Andalou is the Surrealist film par excellence. It was shot in a fortnight in 1929. Buñuel and Dalí had met at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the university hall of residence in Madrid where they were lodged along with García Lorca and other key members of the cultural “Silver Age” of Spanish art that was known as the “Generation of 27”.

(c) (R) 2012, MUSMon com S.L.