Art Info / Item Details
Luis Bunuel, 1929
Featured in the In Your Face exhibition
Materials: Film still
Dimensions: 59 x 56 cm, 23.2 x 22 inches
This film still from Luis Buñuel's hugely influential film 'Un Chien Andalou', made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, captures the famous shot from the film's conclusion where a middle-aged man (played by Buñuel) holds a young woman (Simone Mareuil) while she calmly stares straight ahead. As a shot depicts the moon being overcome by cloud, the man slits the woman's eye with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it.
Famed for its surreal imagery and its alinear cinematic structure, 'Un Chien Andalou' was a film which separated filmic images from their narrative duties, and unveiled their dream potency; and in particular, the capacity for film, perhaps more than other art forms to convey the wandering, meandering, terrible and beautiful visions of the surreal mind, and the Freudian dreamer.
