Un Chien Andalou is a trip and a half, to say the least. With no plot, an ambiguous meaning, and vivid imagery, it is a film that is sure to shock and provoke the audience into an existential conundrum. Freud's essay on dreams has some relevant ideas that can be applied to the film. Freud says that dream images reproduce logical connection by approximation in time and space so even though two corresponding objects may be very different from one another, there is still some "intimate connection" which relates the two. This idea is present in something like the scene where the man is dragging two pieces of wood, two missionaries, and a piano with a dead mule on top of it. Particularly his idea on repression and rejection seems to apply the most to the film.
The intentions of the film was influenced by a motive of shock and revulsion. This revulsion is particularly important to Freud's concept of repression. The obscurity of the dream-image, he believed, was important to prevent the dreamer from becoming to repulsed by his own self. During sleep, the censorship part of our brain becomes less powerful and the unconscious part tends to take advantage of the circumstance by trying to reveal itself. The need for obscuring the image is to prevent exposing those repressed images which Freud believed were universal. Therefore, these repressed thoughts and feelings are represented by metaphors and similes, things which are intended for interpretation. These metaphors are objects which relate to the objects around it. First we draw material for our dreams from recollections from our waking lives, specifically those which have made an impression on our life (excitement, trauma, etc). The ideas which are present in our dreams are repetitions of a theme. The collected material goes through a process of condensation and displacement. The recollections become condensed into fragmentations of images, speeches, or thoughts which effectively act as a representation for one idea. The act of displacement puts the images used for the metaphor through a selective process "in favor of those portions of it which are the most appropriate for the construction of situations". The images are then appropriately juxtaposed with other images that are associated with the same idea.
Comparing Un Chien Andalou to these dreams theories becomes difficult because of the intentions and motivations. Bunuel and Dali intentionally juxtaposed irrational images strictly to defy reason. One can interpret the film loosely based off of possible conjectures of what each image is supposed to represent. The problem I have with comparing dreams to the films is that a dream still pulls things from real life and implies a personal undercurrent between them. Dreams, in this way, are entirely personal things which reveal our unconscious selves. The filmmakers take away that relevance and instead insist that the viewer/interpreter comes up with it themselves. This does not create a substantial analysis for the individual because it is not based on their personal psyche's.
The film acceptably imitates a dream sequence but lacks the key element that gives the dream sequence any value: real, personal meaning. Therefore, the film can only succeed in making the viewer uncomfortable and this could be for any number of reasons. The objects are so general they leave themselves wide open for interpretation, but any interpretation will be automatically superficial because there is no depth to the film. The sequences which succeed in making the audience uncomfortable will most likely appeal to bad taste than to psychological repressions.
All in all the film is an amusing experiment and a fantastic short film with incredible imagery, but that is all it gets. This is a problem I get with a lot of Dali's work. It may be my own ignorance, but I feel like he is more concerned with superficial elements than of depth of meaning. The film rely's on superficial forms of repression and is met with superficial anxieties. We cringe at the slashing of the eyeball because we think about what it would feel like to have our eyeballs slashed and not, as Freud suggests, because it relates to some repressed memory or childhood anxiety.
I did not get particularly uncomfortable by this film for that very reason. I thought it was fun to try and interpret the various images and make up some meaning as to how they related, but I was not confronted by any anxieties or frustrations as a result of the images. This did not make me question my identity, as a true dream would. It is a successful imitation of the dream world but an ineffective reflection