Un Chien Andalou, directed by Luis Buñuel, is a very interesting and bizarre short film. This was my second time watching it and it still continues to confuse and shock me. Both times I have watched this film I have felt a feeling of anxiety and perplexity. We talked about in class how we felt the film is meant to evoke certain emotions from the viewer and not necessarily make sense. If this is true, then the film is excellent because I did have strong reactions to some of the images displayed, such as the slicing of the eye, the dragging of the dead bodies behind the piano and the hand being poked by a stick on the floor. The main reason why I really enjoy this film is because I love Salvador Dali’s work. I find it very unique and creative. The fact that Dali helped with this film, and some imagery from his paintings such as the ants and the reference to time appears in the film makes watching Un Chien Andalou, fun for me.
Reading Sigmund Freud’s ‘On Dreams’ was very interesting, because a lot of connections can be made to Un Chien Andalou, because of the films dream like sequences. Sigmund Freud said, “The content of dreams, however, does not consist entirely of situations, but also includes disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of unmodified thoughts.” 21 This instantly made me think of the film because of how the film does not consist of shots put together to create one cohesive story. This film contains “disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and bits of unmodified thoughts.” It almost works like a collage, a mix of completely different thoughts and ideas.
Displacement-Freud’s idea of displacement is that if the dreamer has a real life urge or want, this thing that the dreamer wishes for can appear in a different form in a dream. For example, if I was very mad with someone and wanted to do something bad to him or her, I might have a dream that something bad occurs to the person. In my dream, I physically didn’t have anything to do with that person having bad luck. That desire or want is covered up and disguised as a random happening. In the film, there is a lot of images having to do with desire. The one example I thought of that reminded me of displacement was when the main man in the film starts touching the main woman. He is grabbing her breasts and drools in delight. His emotions show that he wishes he was touching her naked body, but only gets to touch over the clothes. The viewer of the film is shown nudity but in reality, he does not get to see this. This reminded me of displacement because his desires are covered up.
Condensation-Freud’s idea of condensation is when the dreamer hides an urge or emotion by condensing it into a short dream image. Most of the time we do not know why these images are condensed because we cannot “discover or recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion.” What came to mind were the films short flashes of images. I thought of the cutting of the eye segment and the image of the moth, all which are very short and seem to be randomly placed. Also, the whole film can be seen as an example of condensation. We cannot understand what is really going on because all the images and the plot are condensed. We only see short segments places together, making it hard to figure out what it all means.
Dreams as pictorial situations-Freud said that dreams consist of pictorial situations. Dreams take our thoughts and emotions and put them into images and or situations. He also states that many times these pictorial situations show us our desires. Un Chien Andalou, as we discussed in class, has a lot to do with human desire. The main man desires to be with the main woman. He attacks her and even drags a piano across the room to get what he wants. When the main woman leaves the man in the room, she walks on to the beach. There is another man whom she clearly desires, as she tries to embrace him with a kiss. Perhaps, all of these images in the film show the woman what she desires and what she does not.
I found it very interesting when we tried to analyze the film in class. Most everyone was confused, trying to make every image mean something to us. As humans, we feel the need to make everything make sense. We try to decode things and make them have meaning. This is just like dreams. We have dream books and dream interpreters who can tell us what the images we saw in our sleep symbolize. With the film, however, I believe that we are not meant to decipher the meaning in every sequence. I believe the film is just about placing images that evoke emotion together in one short movie. It is about the art of the shots, not what they mean.
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2 comments:
Rachel- I thought it was really interesting how you commented on the humans need to make sense of images. We have grown up in a society where films are supposed to mean something to us, they are meant to reveal a new perspective or have emotional value. I also liked your comparison with this desire to find meaning with our dreams. As humans we are constantly trying to decipher our dreams and unconscious visions. Trying to find meaning in our latent thoughts. My interpretation of Un Chien Andalou is that the film is a sequence of dream images, inevitably making it very difficult for us as the viewer to make sense of someone else's latent or unconscious thoughts.
Your points about the pictorial situations is really interesting, especially in regards to your analysis of the film and the scene where the man is attacking the young woman. It really made the idea of Freud's pictorial situations more understandable for me in terms of the movie and how the movie relates to such a theory.
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