Un Chien Andalou
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Marval, Pierre Batcheff, Robert Hommet, Salvador Dal?, Simone MareuilPrimary Contributor: Pierre Batcheff
Primary Contributor: Simone Mareuil
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language); French (Dubbed)
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Silent
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 55 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-12-26
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Transflux Films
Movie Reviews of Un Chien Andalou
Movie Review: More Is Less and More
Summary: 4 Stars
How does a company justify charging $15 for the DVD edition of a seventeen-minute short film, regardless of whether the movie in question is the quintessence of cinematic surrealism and one of the most influential films of all time? Well, they pad it with whatever supplemental material they can find and hope for the best.
No kidding, this disc has a scene selection menu for those who feel the need to navigate the film's five chapters.
Footage from Bu?uel's movies and an interview with his son, Juan-Luis, comprise the substance of two short featurettes. In the first of these, he discusses his father's life, career and death in some small detail; in the second, he provides details about the ugly, acrimonious split between Bu?uel and Dal?. The latter of these benefits from Bu?uel's objective perspective of Dal?'s erratic and cruel behavior, if only because it's rude to judge the demented, regardless of how inspired they are.
The commentary track is voiced by Stephen Barber, who writes books of varying quality about pivotal avant-garde figures. Barber should restrict his activities to the textual medium, because this is, without any doubt in my mind whatsoever, the single worst commentary track that I've heard, and I've listened to dozens of these. Barber's commentary is dull, halting and monotonous, and he has nothing profound or interesting to say about either the film or the surrealist movement.
The last of the disc's features is certainly the most ponderous: two surreal still images and a textual statement about "Un Chien Andalou" by illustrator/photographer/filmmaker Dave McKean. All that I can type of this is that "MirrorMask," McKean's collaboration with Neil Gaiman, is quite a lot of fun and certainly worth seeing, and that this portion of the DVD isn't interesting at all.
What "Un Chien Andalou" really needs is to be compiled on a $1 budget DVD edition with one or two other vintage avant-garde movies in the public domain and distributed via dollar stores and dedicated video retailers alike. This would make one of the greatest classics of film history accessible to a wide audience.
Summary of Un Chien Andalou
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 JuaUn 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
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