In 1929 Dali and Bunuel produced a seventeen-minute film Un chien andalou. On its first screening, Georges Bataille referred to it as "that extraordinary film … penetrating so deeply into horror." Its script is said to be based on two dream images - a woman's eye slit by a razor, ants emerging from a hole in a man's hand, and the film shocked audiences. It continues to fascinate, provoke, attract and alienate its viewers - and to influence filmmakers.
Elza Adamowicz's lucid critical guide to this most enigmatic of works takes new approaches to the film. It reviews, for example, its openness to so many readings and interpretations; it reassesses Dali and Bunuel's account of the film as a model surrealist work and its reception by the surrealist group, and examines both the unresolved tensions within the film itself and the role of the viewer, as detective or dreamer?
