Un Chian Andalou

Most pieces of art have a deeper meaning than what is simply expressed on the surface. Through emotions, symbols, and motifs, an artist can portray a unique story; however, despite the use of creative symbols, distinct stories can show a similar theme. Two such examples are the short film Destino by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which share the common theme of “the struggle of obtaining dreams”. Based on what is shown in these works of art, it is a challenge to attain dreams.

‘There are…two kinds of film makers: one invents an imaginary reality; the other confronts an existing reality and attempts to understand it, criticise it…and finally, translate it into film’

On January 24, 1848, an American sawmill operator and carpenter by the name of James Marshall began his daily work at Sutter’s Mill in California. At the adjacent American River, Marshall made a shocking discovery. He saw not one, but multiple pieces of gold scattered around, flowing in the river. Excited by this discovery, Marshall ran back to the mill, and began to conduct various tests to see if the gold was real. This alarming discovery ended up starting what is now known as the California Gold Rush, a huge increase of people and immigrants to the California region, all vying for a result of fortune from the gold. Thousands of people began to leave their farms, or even completely abandon their families in order to potentially make

Film exists in layers of physical existence and reality. You have the layer the audience views of the film’s world - setting, characters, and plot - and then you have the layer the film production workers view of the film’s world - actors, the set, and the story. Like photography, film is able to establish a physical existence. However, unlike photography, film uses two very unique and different techniques in order to establish its physical existence. According to Siegfried Kracauer, film establishes its physical existence through representation of reality as it evolves through time and with the help of techniques and devices exclusive to cinema cameras (Kracauer 187). All the world is a stage for film, however Kracauer lists specific techniques of film he refers to as cinematic due to how these techniques are read on the cinematic medium. Although Kracauer wrote his theory on Establishment of Physical Existence in 1960, the 2015 movie Tangerine contains a fair amount of content that can be serviced as examples in order to support Kracauer’s theory. Using the 2010’s movie Tangerine directed by Sean S. Baker, modern cinema examples from various scenes of the film can be provided for examples on Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of Establishment of Physical Existence through cinema’s recording functions of nascent motion, cinema’s revealing function of transients, and cinema’s revealing function of blind spots of the

Developments in technology and the rise of the metropolis caused an immensely chaotic and fragmentary daily experience for 20th century society. Modernist artists and filmmakers reflected on this confusion and disarray by exploring its effect on the inner-self: the psyche and the unconscious mind. Symbols and motifs as well as the framing and layering of images were two primary approaches artists used to represent this experience, as exhibited in Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) and a clip from Fritz Lang’s M (1922).

Like Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick also began his career working outside the ‘talkie’ medium. He was a talented photographer at a young age, landing a job shooting for a magazine at only seventeen. Through his early experience with photography, Kubrick developed his infamous perfectionism and “the conscious wish to stage his shots, to deliberately shape reality” through his

One Catholic Social Teaching that was demonstrated within the movie “Flight”, was The Option for the Poor and the Vulnerable. This Catholic Social Teaching calls for Catholics to care for the less fortunates needs. This was demonstrated in the movie “Flight” when Captain. Whip Whitaker offers his assistance to Nicole a drug addict. Nicole in evicted from her housing unit, and she has no money or way of transportation.

Although Dali wasn’t a film director but an artist, in my opinion I think he implemented his work into Un Chien Andalou very well, taking pieces of his own work and creating it into film. Any fan of Dali’s work would know this film involved him and

The romantic idea of the auteur is described by film theoretician, André Bazin, observing the film form as an idealistic phenomenon. Through the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard reference, Bazin primarily refers to an essential literary and romantic conception of the artist as central. He considers the relationship between film aesthetics and reality more important than the director itself and places cinema above paintings. He described paintings as a similar ethical creation to film stating a director ‘can be valued according to its measurements and the celebrity of the signature, the objective quality of the work itself was formerly held in much higher esteem.’ (Bazin, 1967: 250). Bazin contemplates the historical and social aspects that indeed hinder a director’s retribution to their own personalised film, thus en-companying their own ideological judgement upon the world ‘more so in cinema where the sociological and historical cross-currents are countless.’ (Bazin, 1967: 256)

Most pieces of art has a deeper meaning than what is simply expressed on the surface. Through emotions, symbols, and motifs, an artist can show or tell a unique story; however, despite the usage of creative symbols, distinct stories can show a similar theme. Two such examples are the short film Destino by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald which share the common theme of “the struggle of obtaining dreams”. Based on what is shown in these works of art, it is a challenge to attain dreams.

Surrealism is a movement that built off of the burgeoning look into art, psychology, and the workings of the mind. Popularly associated with the works of Salvador Dali, Surrealist art takes imagery and ideology and creates correlation where there is none, creating new forms of art. In this essay I will look to explore the inception of the surrealist movement, including the Surrealist Manifesto, to stress the importance of these artists and their work in the 20th century and beyond. I also will look to films from our European Cinema course to express how films incorporate the influence of surrealism both intentionally and unintentionally.

Dali’s painting appears to be representative of mainly the subconscious mind because many of the elements in the painting express objects or ideas that are highly characteristic of memories, dreams, or even socially unacceptable elements. More importantly, The Museum of Modern Art explains that a year before this painting was made Dali began to undergo his “paranoiac-critical method” which stimulated

Gunning goes on to define the cinema of attraction as “a cinema that bases itself on the quality that Leger celebrated: its ability to show something. Contrasted to the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is an exhibitionist cinema,” (Gunning, 230). It’s a cinema before narrative where the focus lied in testing the boundaries of what was possible with the medium, much like avant-garde today. It’s a cinema where narrative was always second, if even there, to the spectacle of what was possible with the medium. Lumiere’s Demolition of a Wall displays some of the possibilities of the medium quite clearly in its later half when the reel is re-winded to create the effect of the wall rebuilding itself. As Gunning reminds us, we should never forget that “in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction,” (231). Cinema was defined by the machine instead of the films in this period, and thus the simple fact of being able to see moving pictures was itself astounding. Looking at Maxim Gorky’s first accounts of viewing a motion picture in his article The Kingdom of Shadows, he writes the “extraordinary impression it (cinema) creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances,” (Gorky 7). The people of the

Dali employs a “concrete irrationality” surrealist style giving us the illusion of realism. Design is precise, using symmetrical perspective employing a geometrical figure’s composition. The painting is well balanced. Presence of the light coming from the northeast gives a sense of a natural landscape. The light and shadow relationship “pops the elements out” and creates contrast. The pain of war is expressed by the grotesque mutating human body ripping itself apart with the anguishing facial expression.

Buz Luhrmann’s intention in making movies is to provide and entertaining, extravagantly beautiful film, and he succeded in the making of these two films.