Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali
17 min
France 1928

"[T]he most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times."
Roger Ebert

One of the seminal and most notorious films of the last century, Un Chien Andalou is the most fully realised Surrealist film. The first collaboration between Buñuel and Dali caused riots on its early screenings for its shocking imagery, its attack on narrative and bourgoise society. The dreamlike quality of the films development and the striking originality of the images combine to create a series of unforgettable metaphors; a razor slicing across an eyeball, dead donkeys trapped in grand pianos and ants crawling from the palm of a hand.

Luis Buñuel
(1900–83) Spain

Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, Spain, the eldest son of a wealthy family. He met Salvador Dali and the poet Lorca as a student in Madrid and moved to Paris in 1925 where he quickly became involved in Surrealist circles. Buñuel made an early impact with the scandalous success of Un Chien Andalou and his first feature L'Age d'Or both made with Dali. He returned to Spain to make a documentary, Land Without Bread before a period of fifteen years when he worked in a variety of film-related jobs without directing. He recaptured international attention with Los Olvidados in 1950. Seventeen films later, Viridiana (1961) won the Grand Prix in Cannes , amid strenuous protests from Franco and the Catholic church. Everything Buñuel made after that, from The Exterminating Angel (1962) to That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) was treated as a major event.

Salvador Dali
(1904–89) Spain

Salvador Dali played a vital part in defining the 20th Century's image of a ‘modern painter', as much by his uninhibited self-exposure and self-promotion as by the impact of his painting, which was inspired by idiosyncratic interpretations of Freud, Surrealism and Christianity. Although Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or are usually considered more Buñuel's, there is evidence that Dali, at least initially, was the more radical of the two in wanting to ‘revolutionise cinema'. After they parted, he wrote an unfilmed script, Babaouo (1932) and planned an abortive film, The Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad. In Hollywood he designed memorable dream sequences for Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). In 1949 he returned to Spain and his beloved Catalonia where he died in 1989.

Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou, 1929 © courtesy of the BFI, London