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Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David Lynch. --Ryan Boudinot

Product Description

Filmed in Paris in 1929, Un Chien Andalou is regarded as the first film produced purely from within the Surrealist movement and is a landmark in the history of cinema. Loving treatment to DVD includes, as bonus material, an interview/documentary with Juan Luis Bunuel (Luis' son), commentary by Surrealism expert Stephen Barber, excerpts from Luis Bunuel's 1953 address 'Mystery of Cinema', and beautiful illustrations by UK artist Dave McKean. NTSC, region 0. Transflux Films. 2004.

Additional Features

Since a 17-minute film on DVD is almost obligated to include featurettes, Un Chien Andalou includes interviews with Bunuel's son Juan-Luis, archival sketches, and some rather dreary commentary by author Stephen Barber. Most illuminating is Juan-Luis Bunuel's explanation of his father's and Dali's working methods in which any rational idea was left on the cutting room floor. Somewhat inappropriately, one of the extra features appears to be statement and portfolio by the fellow who designed the cover. Its inclusion defies rational explanation, but hey, maybe that's the point. --Ryan Boudinot, ISBN13: B0006IUE9I ISBN10: B0006IUE9I Material Type: dvd