Un Chien Andalou

In 1929 Dali and Bunuel produced a seventeen-minute film ´Un chien andalou´. On its first screening, Georges Bataille referred to it as ´that extraordinary film ... penetrating so deeply into horror´. Its script is said to be based on two dream images - a woman´s eye slit by a razor, ants emerging from a hole in a man´s hand, and the film shocked audiences. It continues to fascinate, provoke, attract and alienate its viewers - and to influence filmmakers. Elza Adamowicz´s lucid critical guide to this most enigmatic of works takes new approaches to the film. It reviews, for example, its openness to so many readings and interpretations; it reassesses Dali and Bunuel´s account of the film as a model surrealist work and its reception by the surrealist group, and examines both the unresolved tensions within the film itself and the role of the viewer, as detective or dreamer?