Un Chien Andalou (1929)

The descriptive phrase for Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou "French surrealist silent film" seems like a repellent trifecta of adjectives to describe any cinematic experience. At one point or another in everyone's undergraduate experience, this avant-garde sixteen-minute free association movie gets inflicted on the classroom (twice for me), and there are always a couple of asshole students who go on and on about the "beauty" of images of rotting donkeys or ants crawling out of hands.

But of course, the most striking and famous image occurs within the first 45 seconds, making the list of Premiere magazine's "25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History." The husband draws a razor blade across the left eye of the calmly seated wife, with interspersed images of a thin cloud "slicing" over the moon.

As a special effect in 1929, this eyeball cutting comes across quite convincingly. I read that it was actually a cow eye, with heavy lighting and exposure changes to make the animal fur look like skin. The corneoscleral laceration is seen in close-up, along with the prolapsing vitreous (the "jelly" of the eyeball.)

Here's a teaching point on penetrating ocular trauma from an eMedicine article:

Predicting the visual outcome in patients with corneoscleral lacerations is difficult. The outcome is generally poor in patients who have poor visual acuity at presentation, in patients with delayed presentation, and in patients who sustain agricultural-related injuries.

We never get to see any actual outcome of the wife's unfortunate eye trauma, even in the scenes that are supposed to be eight years later (Huit ans apres.) She appears totally unaffected by the razor injury.

Check out this story of about the premiere of the movie, from the Wikipedia entry:

Given the general distaste for surrealism among the French public, Buñuel and Dalí carried sacks of rocks in their pockets on opening night as self-defense, expecting a negative response from the audience. They were disappointed when the audience enjoyed the film, making the evening "less exciting", according to Dalí.

I don't know if Un Chien Andalou made me quite angry enough to throw rocks. It is a mercifully brief movie, and captured an artistic movement in a way that is probably hard to fully grasp many years down the road. And again, the ocular special effects are quite impressive for the time period. In writing the script, Bunuel wrote "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted", and commenting on the imagery- "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything."

Grading the ungradable? I'll bite- this dog gets a C - .

But don't take my word for it- watch what Roger Ebert calls "the most famous short film ever made" online here!