Un Chien Andalou 500 Word Review

Un Chien Andalou is a highly surreal film, a fact that is completely expected given it was a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. In the past I have studied the works of Dali (The Persistence of Memory and Metamorphosis of Narcissus being among my favourite artworks) which is one of the reasons I found the film interesting to begin with, and was wholly unsurprised by its disturbing qualities; Dali enjoyed throwing himself down the stairs, anything with his input is bound to be exceedingly surreal and often disturbing.
At its heart In Chien Andalou is an experimental film; not only does its themes belong to the avant-garde, but it also subverts all that is considered necessary to construct a film.
The exposition of the film is fairly a fairly disturbing series of shots that lead to the mutilation of an eye, in spite of this, it does raise an interesting point in regards to the film making process. This sequence cuts from the woman - whose eye you are led to believe is mutilated - to a shot of a cloud cutting through the moon, and finally to a close up of the razor slicing through the eyeball. By concluding with a close up of a pigs eyeball, Buñuel is stating that filmmakers are deceiving - cutting - what you see - this is further evidenced by the cloud cutting through the moon. This formal subversion, a key aspect of avant-garde, continues throughout the fifteen minutes that Buñuel and Dali hold our attention; a lack of any sense of time thanks to the misplaced time connectives. I find this formal subversion to be an intriguing facet of Un Chien Andalou and one of the reasons as to why it is amongst my favourite experimental films.
Another quality of avant-garde that is present within Un Chien Andalou is thematic nihilism (a general loss of faith in absolutes) - accepted social values and the like are essentially rejected. This concept is present within several points of the film, one example of this being what is perceived as the incorrect use of time frames. However this is not just Buñuel adding to the surrealism, although it does do that, instead he is challenging time, a concept that not only holds a prestigious place in our society, but also governs our lives. Buñuel and Dali are expressing the idea that time is man made and unnatural, something that can also be linked to the gender stereotype issue that is present (the androgyny of the girl with the stick).
Although the challenge to time is extremely  clever, what I find to be the most symbolic is the dead donkeys. The imagery of the man dragging the donkeys, pianos and priests as he attempts to reach the woman he desires is very powerful: he is dragging the weight of expectations caused by starting a relationship. The piano is a representation of the romantic expectations, the Priests are the religious, whereas the donkeys while dead can alternatively be seen as the dead weight of all these expectations.
Ultimately I view Un Chien Andalou as one of my favourite experimental films due to the surreal and artistic nature of the symbolism, but also as a result of the formal subversion of the norms in our culture that have become our reality.