Bridging the Abyss to Luis Buñuel

“Sometimes there’s a profound abyss between reality and my imagination”-Luis Bunuel, The Last Sigh

Luis Buñuel’s films have been called by some poetry on the screen. One writer goes so far as to say about Buñuel’s controversial film, Un Chien andalou (The Andalusan Dog) that it is “little more than filmed poetry” (Mellen 156). Actually, few people can watch the film without squirming in their seats as a woman’s eye is sliced open with a razor. Where is the meaning in this scene? What were its author’s intentions?

Was Luis Buñuel a madman or a poetic genius? Was he a man disgruntled with a bourgeoisie society or an artist portraying reality? Was he just a grown up child rebelling against his society’s institutions or was he part of a movement that exploded the art scene forever? Perhaps he was all of those things, but most certainly, he was a poet, with all the chaotic confusion that comes with that title.

To get at the genius that was Buñuel one must read, read, and read some more about Buñuel’s life and the era in which he came to filmmaking. Of course, one must also watch the films and to do so one needs to approach the mastery of the artist with the devotion that Buñuel himself created them. Many have tried to unmask the man and certainly every one of them has failed, including Buñuel himself.

In typical Buñuelian manner, the surrealist filmmaker quite often contradicts himself on the subject of how and why he made his films. He sometimes insists Un Chien andalou is poetry on the screen and other times he insists that the film means absolutely nothing. In fact, Buñuel has been quoted as remarking on the supposed ‘meaning’ in Un Chien andalou, “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis” (Mellen 153).

He also says that Un Chien andalou has nothing to do with dreams, yet in his autobiography, The Last Sigh, he specifically states that he and painter Salvador Dali began the film from dreams they had. “I made Un Chien andalou, which came from an encounter between two dreams” (Buñuel 103). The scene of the moon being sliced by a cloud was Buñuel’s and the ants marching from a hand were from a dream Dali had.