Un Chien Andalou

This is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists sought to channel the unconscious to unlock the power of the imagination. They believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination. Artist’s images were outlandish and perplexing. It is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting imagery. Nature was a frequent imagery. Salvador Dali’s works often included ants or eggs. The Accommodations of Desire in 1929 was an important piece of art. It is a prime example of his ability to portray his vivid bizarre dreams. He developed a paranoid-critical method that involved irrational thought and self-induced paranoia to access his unconscious. It combined his usual hyper-realistic painting style with more experimental collage techniques.

Steinberg’s essay, “The Philosophical Brothel,” of 1972 was a new account of Picasso’s masterwork, Les Demoiselles d’Avignion [Fig. 13]. Steinberg roots his analysis of the painting in its relationship to the viewer. Steinberg extends the role of the viewer until it is he who completes the painting as the male solicitor of the women in the painting: “The picture is a tidal wave of female aggression; one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off. But the assault on the viewer is only half of the action, for the viewer, as the painting conceives him on this side of the picture plane, repays in kind.”98 The horizontality of the flatbed picture plane, and the new content it allows, makes the viewer’s role an active

The influence of surrealist art on society on the past centuries has been powerful, and artists like Salvador Dali contributed a lot to this form of art, in this research paper I piece together the career and life then by focusing on one of his remarkable artworks and trying to analyze it and how it affected the target audience of the culture and society and for all these topics which makes the main questions in my research paper I did a research to know more about them so that I can be able to link them together and understands how they affected the society.(1)

To begin, we will look at the ideals and influences that led to the formation of surrealist ideals,

The surrealist movement of the 1920s-1930s was largely based on the notion that excessive rational thought is a catalyst of conflict and war throughout the world. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence

Surrealism was one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th Century. André Breton consolidated Surrealism as a movement in the early 1920s, trying to achieve the “total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it[1]” through innovative and varied ideas. Surrealism deeply influenced the world in the era between the two world wars and played a big role in the diffusion and adoption of psychology worldwide. Surrealism faded after World War II, but its revolutionary genius has influenced every artistic movement ever since.

Surrealism is a movement in art and literature that occurred in the 20th century which influenced the incorporation of fact and fantasy in a piece. Tim O’ Brien uses surrealism in The Things They Carried to show how many war stories incorporate this idea of false and factual stories combined. He says that many of the things that occur on a daily basis are stories that are made up and the stories that no one believes are the ones that actually happen. The idea behind surrealism is to tap into the potential of the human mind. This incorporation of surrealism helps to enhance the plot of the book.

R.L Rutsky and Jeffery Geiger, editors of “Film Analysis: A Norton Reader”, stated that, “ Buñuel conflates succession and simultaneity (evolution and continuity) by having images paradoxically comingle and follow each other in succession.” The short film contains a total of five intertitles. After each intertitle, a new segment ensues. Each segment that follows contains surreal images. Starting with the first intertitle, which translates to “Once upon a time,” the male character is seen sharpening his razor, then he steps out onto the balcony to look up at the sky where there is a full moon with sharp like clouds approaching.

Un Chien Andalou Analysis: The film Un Chien Andalou, released in 1929, was the first attempt to create a surrealist movie, because films produced before were a reflection of the real world. It was collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. In this film messages are encoded by the producer which is to be decoded by the viewer. As Bunuel states, “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING”; if one breaks this sentence down: “NOTHING … SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING,” this means that people can bring their own interpretation of the film.

also incorporates multiple forms of editing such as the graphically relation between the two gifts that Kathryn receives from both the protagonist and antagonist, which implies that they both share similar feelings her or have the same intention to marry her. The films greatest achievement though is during the latter part of the film when the main character falls asleep and dreams that he can fix the problems that he has found himself in. By separating his dream self from his body, he can maniple time and space however he sees fit. Much of the film after he falls asleep is using grandiose graphically relations to shadow the original story in a different time and setting. These relations are of course overexaggerated but are used to enhance the plot by mirroring the real-life situation. In both the modern music video and short film from 1924, the use of editing allows for the manipulations of both space and time, mostly with the help of graphical relations that draw parallels for the viewer in a seamless way. The goal of editing is not to make the most elaborate cuts and shots, but is to immerse the viewer in a world and plot that is both thought-out but also

shows the concept of time as anything but persistent. The painting is presented in what can be assumed to be the landscape of a dream. In the middle of the landscape is a figure that resembles a person who is sleeping, further showing that the painting’s setting is within a dream. As he falls asleep, time has, (quite literally) melted away, as shown by the clock within the paintings that have melted away. On the left hand corner, we’re shown what seems to have been another clock that has turned into a pile of ants, which shows Dalí’s definitive surrealist style. These clocks show that time isn’t of any significance. Within this land, time slips away, and life moves forward. Dalí depicts time here as limitless. While we allow ourselves to be ruled by time, he shows that once we let that guard down (as we do when we are asleep), time becomes nothing but an illusion.

The surrealist artists believed the dream state and subconscious mind to be an untapped and very fertile creative fount of inspiration. The symbolism of dreams and the expressive images generated by the subconscious were far more thought provoking than the representational, logical images of the conscious mind. The surrealist artists were creating art out of what others thought to be garbled and unintelligible. They were in effect taking a concept created to heal and using it to create art instead. They were on to something with this. No matter what the medium or the style used, a bit of the self becomes visible and evident in the result. Art therapy is one of the modern descendants of this movement.

As Dali moved into his Surrealist years he became more interested in psychology and exploring his own fears and fantasies. Dali’s Surrealist period last from 1929-1940, in which years he joined the Surrealist Movement, and shortly after became a leader in this movement. In order to bring images from his “subconscious mind”, Dali began to use a method to find inspiration for his art; he would induce hallucinatory states in himself. As his work matured, and his fame grew

The surrealist movement holds emotional authenticity and social activism as the highest ideals. Influenced by the work of Freud and Jung, the arts are viewed as psychic manifestations that go deeper than external reality. Spontaneous techniques, like psychic automatism (i.e. automatic writing and drawing), generate images from the unconscious and result in content similar to dream experiences and contemplating these images provides a new experience of reality (McNiff, 2009).

As mentioned surrealism, like Dadaism, tried to distance itself from contemporary culture and sought to shock the familiarity of reality. Hence, the unconscious has a centrepiece in surrealist art and the underlying theme was to create images of such unconscious situation or universes. This was primarily achieved with the use of symbolism and the placing of objects in unfamiliar settings. This would revitalize and redefine such objects outside the conventional reality that is the adversary in surrealist art and hence create the desired conflict between the conventional and the unconscious (Waldberg 1997; Martin 1987).