Previous art films had also played with objects - most famously in Léger's Ballet Mécanique - but it was abstract, unemotional. The opening sequence of Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou is scarcely that. It begins with a man sharpening his cut-throat razor. He looks at the night sky, where a long thin cloud approaches the white disc of the moon. A woman sits still while a man's hand holds a razor to her face. The thin cloud cuts across the moon. The razor slices through the woman's eyeball. No one can avoid flinching - it's such a basic attack on you, the viewer, watching in the dark with your eyes supposedly free to look, to see an eye destroyed, the jelly pouring out of it as its membrane is pierced.

To tell a story on screen, you create a physical world that serves your purpose. But in Un Chien Andalou, the physical world is thicker, more resistant, more alive (and more dead). Instead of smoothly setting off the characters' desires and fears, it becomes an opaque field of desire and terror in itself. The events that can happen in such a world are full of passion, comedy, horror; it's just that they never get resolved and tidied up by narrative explanations. There are people in the film, but it is not "about" them - it is about us, our reactions, our disgust and perversity.

It's the cloacal, bloody texture of this film that makes it utterly different from the ethereal unreality of Hollywood. And that also makes it different from the playful lightheartedness of earlier abstract films. A Spanish sense of the tragic and the extreme animates it. Perhaps there is as much tragedy as humour.

Without surrealist cinema, we wouldn't have the concept of weirdness as an aesthetic; that inexplicable vein of cinema in which the physical world is violent, erotic and so shocking that you don't need a coherent story. Lynch is Dalí's heir. But you also see this thickening of texture, this ripeness of things, in the trashiest horror, with its putrefying zombies and baths full of flesh soup.
(Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or are re-released on Friday.)

Source: The Guardian [1]