The Film That Attacks You

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]What I'm about to show you is shocking.

[00:00:03]It was shocking when it was first seen in 1929. It's just as shocking today in 2026. And for an image to retain this quality for an entire century, especially this particular century, is well, shocking in itself. If you're squeamish, now is the time to click away.

[00:00:30]That is the very first image that the legendary Spanish and Mexican director Luis Bunwell ever put on film. An eyeball being sliced open. The man with the razor is Bunwell himself. And this short film is called Unchen Andeloo or an Andalusian dog. It's the first film to be officially accepted by the surrealist movement. And it's easy to see why. The whole thing, all 16 minutes of it, unfolds like a dream. And in fact, this short was the product of two real dreams. One by Bunwell and the other by his collaborator and close friend Salvador Dali.

[00:01:24]Bunwell met Deli a decade before in Madrid where they both lived at the famous residencia deurientes, a student dormatory and cultural hub which was a magnet for young Spanish intellectuals and artists. there. Bunwell Dali and Federrico Garcia Lurca the Spanish writer were thick as thieves partaking in all kinds of adventures, capers and pranks, challenging one another creatively and intellectually. They were enamored with the various avantgard movements springing up at the time like dadaism and surrealism. And with the radical work of artists like John Kakto, what many of these movements had in common was a forceful rejection of rational bourgeois consumerous thinking which they believe led to the needless carnage of World War I and to a general flattening and degradation of the human spirit. In 1925, Bunwell moved to Paris, the international nucleus of these movements. But he was still unsure about how exactly to make his mark. Dali had painting. Garcia Lorca had writing, but Bunwell didn't feel that he had a talent for either of these arts. He did, however, like movies, and in Paris, he saw lots of them. Of these, none made a greater impression than the films of Fritz Lang, the German expressionist, particularly Destiny from 1921 with its image of death in a widebrimmed black hat. In Paris, Bunwell insinuated himself into the French film industry, serving as assistant director on two movies by Jean Epstein and working as a film critic, too. He wanted to make something of his own, but wasn't interested in appealing to mainstream audiences. In fact, he wanted to do the exact opposite. He wanted to scandalize them. So, Bunwell and Dali hold themselves up in Delali's house for 7 days and wrote something that would do just that.

[00:03:28]It's something of a fool's errand to describe the plot of an Andolucian dog.

[00:03:32]The film is a succession of irrational dreamlike images. A crowd surrounding a man poking a severed hand with a stick.

[00:03:39]A man dragging two Jesuit priests, one played by Dali himself, as well as two pianos laden with two decomposing oozing donkeys. A woman's armpit hair suddenly appearing over a man's vanished mouth.

[00:03:55]These images are meant to frustrate our attempts to assign meaning to them.

[00:04:00]They're arranged in a way that rejects narrative logic. The intertitles underline that rejection. A woman gets her eyeball sliced open. Then a card says 8 years later. And when we see her again, her eye is miraculously whole. My favorite is a card that shows up between two shots that are clearly continuous, but it says 16 years before. It's also foolish to interpret these images as if Dali and Bunwell were carefully crafting symbolic messages, though many have tried to do that. Tried to analyze the depraved love story that seems to be playing out here. tried to read the film or its creators psychoanalytically. You can go down that road. Freud was certainly a big influence, but really these are images that just popped into their heads. That was the point. The making of this film resembles the foundational surrealist practice of psychic automatism. what Andre Bratton in his manifesto of surrealism describes as a dictation of thought in the absence of any control exercised by reason exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. Anybody can do automatic writing or drawing. Just grab a paper and pen and write or draw whatever comes to mind without reflecting on it. The aim is to let your unconscious emerge onto the page. The aim is to bypass and disrupt the patterns of everyday communication because those patterns can't help but encode and reproduce the bajgeois rationalist morality that the surrealists viewed as nefarious. An Andolucian dog was a kind of automatic filmmaking. Bunwell felt that mainstream cinema so concerned with recreating the conventions of the 19th century novel was trapping itself in the same insidious morality and limiting its creative potential. He and Dali sought to liberate the medium and the audience and that liberation was not designed to be pleasant. The film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator. Indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war. At the film's premiere, attended by Picasso Cockto, Breton, his surrealist crew, intellectuals, and aristocrats, Bunwell hid behind the screen with stones in his pockets, ready to launch them at the crowd when they inevitably revolted at his shocking images. But instead of revolt, there was applause. Lots of it.

[00:06:23]The Surrealists loved the film and promptly inducted Bunwell and Dali into their group. The rest of high society seemed to love it, too. It played for 8 months straight. Bunwell was, I think, a bit disappointed that the film didn't cause more of a scandal. But not to worry, his next surrealist film, The Age of Gold, did spark a riot and was subsequently banned for 50 years, and it wouldn't be the last film of his to get banned or denounced. Bunwell's deeper disappointment is the deeper disappointment of the Surrealist project in general, which ultimately didn't succeed in overthrowing bourgeoa rationalism. But that doesn't mean that the movement or the film were failures.

[00:07:02]Only that their successes, their impact was more subtle. A 100red years later, surrealism is still lurking in the cultural bloodstream, an insurgent force of irrationality. And an Andalucian dog is still very much in the cinematic bloodstream. You can see its influence all over the place. Luis Boonwell and Salvador Delali's short film sliced open the art form in its earliest decades, confronting the audience and directly challenging the way we see.

[00:07:32]Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. This episode was brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. To get started, you can use Blueprint AI, Squarespace's AI enhanced website builder to get a fully customized site in just a few steps, or choose from their library of professionally designed templates that are sleek and engaging.

[00:07:53]Every website you make will be optimized for SEO, so you'll show up more often in search results. And you can do so much within Squarespace, like creating membersonly content, videos, blogs, courses, creative work that you can monetize via one-time payments or subscriptions. The bottom line is that Squarespace is going to make a home for your products or your work that looks and feels professional, something that will impress your customers and fans.

[00:08:17]Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks, guys. I'll see you next time.