An Andalusian dog: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and the “obscene and cruel” short film that went down in the great history of cinema

Enter the shooting of an Andalusian dogthe first film that Luis Bunuel was shot from a script written jointly with Salvador Dali, allows us to recognize the almost unrepeatable amalgamation between reality and myth, starting with the different versions of the origin of the film itself. But one thing is certain: the surreal short film that, within his postulates, attacks conventional family structures, was made thanks to the money that Buñuel got from his mother.

“My mother gave me the money rather out of her love for me than out of understanding my intention, which I had taken great care to explain to her”, said Buñuel about an idea to which Dalí endowed all his creative genius, although he also of his loquacity to detract from the work of his colleague. According to Buñuel, Dalí told him that he dreamed of ants walking on his hand and Buñuel dreamed of a razor blade that cut the moon in two; according to Dalí, the origin was the idea of ​​an animation of the sections of a newspaper that Buñuel told him about and that he bitterly described as “surprisingly mediocre”.

One thing is certain: the oneiric inspiration was so forceful that the script was written in a week and, at its premiere, an Andalusian dog It was enthroned as the great work of surrealist cinema, and thus Buñuel and Dalí achieved a place of reference in the hosts commanded by André Bretón. “The intuition of the film, the photogenic embryo, already throbs in that operation called découpage. Segmentation. Creation. Splitting of one thing to become another”, wrote Buñuel in Découpage or film segmentationa year before employing the analyzed techniques that will change the course of his life, and of a good part of cinema, forever.

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, in 1928Apic – Hulton Archive

Less well known than the trajectory of the film is that an Andalusian dog lent his name before to a book of poems that the future filmmaker was going to write under the protection of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and never saw the light of day, but which also meant a constant for the director, who since then participated in the writing of the scripts for all his films: “Even the bad ones”, as he jokingly liked to say. Likewise, the knowledge of this previous intention settled a long-standing discussion about the offense that the title generated in Federico García Lorca.

“When I was in New York in the 1930s, Ángel del Río told me that Federico, who had also been there, had told him: ‘Buñuel has done a little piece of shit called an Andalusian dog; and the Andalusian dog is me.’ There is none of that. an Andalusian dog it was the title of a book of poems that I wrote”, said Buñuel although forgetting that this is how they referred to all those who arrived from the south of Spain in the “Residencia de Estudiantes”. In addition, the short was originally going to be called The Marista of the crossbowalthough that enmity was stated in the director’s autobiography, my last breathwhere it said: “I have to confess here that the admiration that Lorca’s theater deserves in me is rather scarce. Her life and his personality far outstripped his work, which often strikes me as rhetorical and mannered.”.

Finally, on March 19, 1929, filming began at the Billancourt studios. an Andalusian dog. His dalliances can be followed from two fundamental texts: An Andalusian Dog: Eighty Years Later: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalíby Agustín Sánchez Vidal, one of the authors who is said to “know more about Buñuel than Buñuel himself”, and the iconic, the crossed out eye, by Jenaro Talens. Both analyze the transcendence, contexts and legacy of a key work of universal cinema, but also account for its contingencies, for example, Buñuel’s obsession with having everything he needs before filming begins and the commission he makes to Dalí. to send him from Spain the ants that were to appear in the film with a detailed explanation for their efficient transfer. Although Dalí will not fulfill the commission, it will ultimately be his friend Carlos Velo who sent him said insects from the Sierra de Guadarrama.

Regarding his participation in the shooting of the film, Dalí declared in Secret Life of Salvador Dali: “He also promised to take charge of the direction, the distribution of roles, the presentation, etc. But some time later I also went to Paris and was in close contact with the making of the film, and took part in its direction through conferences that we had every afternoon. Buñuel, automatically and without reply, accepted the slightest of my indications”. The director born in Calanda will not have the same memories when he asserts that Dalí arrived in Paris a few days before filming was to finish.

Pierre Batcheff, protagonist of the short film
Pierre Batcheff, protagonist of the short film

Dalí’s intervention in The dog… it is only the scene of the dragged priests” as he said in his autobiography The last sigh, although he conciliatorily stated that the film had come up with ideas from each of them in equal parts. They seem to agree on something, since Dalí recounts in great detail the elaboration of the scene of the pianos and the rotten donkeys that he prepared by pouring glue over them, emptying their eye sockets and adding several jaws to their mouths, and Buñuel acknowledges that participated in the most complex scenes.

But it will be the image of a woman’s eye cut that will remain in the great history of cinema and, together with its impact, will be the key to long psychoanalytic debates. Strictly speaking, the head of a cow was used for the eye, with its hair shaved to give the perfect simulation of the human eye. “To immerse the viewer in a state that allowed the free association of ideas, it was necessary to produce a traumatic shock at the very beginning of the film; That is why we started it with the plane of the sectioned eye, very effective”collects Sánchez Vidal about all the visual effects of the film that were made by hand on the same shoot.

On June 6 of that same year, it premiered with resounding success at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, in a program that focused on Man Ray’s short film Les Mysteres du Chateau du Dé and had Picasso, Le Corbusier, Cocteau as spectators. , Max Ernst, André Breton, George Auric, Magritte and Man Ray. Buñuel awaited the scandal behind the screen with stones in his pockets in case he was booed, but the success of an Andalusian dog it was immediate.

Jean Mauclair, founder of the mythical Studio 28, bought the film and spent eight months on the bill despite dozens of complaints at the local police station requesting its prohibition “because it was obscene and cruel.” More than three decades later, Buñuel will accentuate his intentions with the sound version of the film, which will feature fragments of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Argentine tango, just as the spectators who attended his night of entertainment had heard it coming from a phonograph. premiered in 1929, although in the restoration carried out by the Spanish Film Library in 2003 it was concluded that the tango that accompanied the sound version was not the one that had sounded on that mythical opening night because it had been published in the ’50s.

Pierre Batcheff and Simone Mareuil, its protagonists, entered the universe of a denied fame: Mareuil already had 18 jobs for the cinema, but he was never the star that fate seemed to have in store for him; Batcheff, with a similar number of appearances in the cinema, had already played General Lazare Hoche in the mythical Napoleon, by Abel Gance. Curiosities of destiny, both would commit suicide over the years.

Simone Mareuil, in a scene from An Andalusian Dog
Simone Mareuil, in a scene from An Andalusian Dog

In the Paris that bid farewell to the twenties, Buñuel is at the center of the scene and will obtain the support of the Viscount de Noailles to carry out The Golden Age. In the month of December, Federico García Lorca writes in New York the script for trip to the moona kind of answer to an Andalusian dog. Buñuel, disconcerted by the success of the short film, makes The Golden Age, a film that will finally make it the “stone of scandal” and that at its premiere generated a huge brawl in the room with broken seats, a destroyed exhibition in the hall and the Le Figaro newspaper asking for the banning of this cursed film. From then on, Buñuel’s creative but wandering stage will begin, which will take him to the United States, Spain and Mexico, no longer as a young promise of the seventh art, but as the name that had changed the meaning of cinema forever.

an Andalusian dog it is available on Xiclos.com and Qubit.tv; the cycle Bunuel in Mexico It will take place throughout September at Malba Cine.

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An Andalusian dog: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and the “obscene and cruel” short film that went down in the great history of cinema