Un Chien Andalou, 1929 Director Luis Bunuel

The silent film was the era that lacked one of the senses but overcompensated itself with the language of the body. No one has devised this notion better than Luis Bunuel, especially in his collaboration with surrealist artist Salvador Dali. The film opens with the frantics of Simone Mareuil, who, while looking at a book of portraits, peers from her window and witnesses the fall of a man off of a bike that she may have loved, rushes out of her flat to go and attempt to aid him, not with lifesaving procedures but with kisses. Mareuil is then seen in the next scene obsessively arranging clothing on a bed, sitting by to watch its arrangements as though she is sure they will spring to life. The surrealism of Bunuel, of Dali are quickly apparent as a man watching ants spring from his palm while outside of the door, perhaps listening or perhaps too inclined to watch the colony from his palm.

Then there is the death of a woman standing in the road, perhaps the widow of the man who died on the bike, beckoning the quickly passing cars to hit her till one succumbs to her unlikely request. Meanwhile, Mareuil watches from the same window as she witness the accident, fighting off the man with the ants in his palms sexual advances. She gives into his frottage and in an instance, she is bare breasted as the man who advances on her is bleeding from his mouth, his eyes fallen to the back of his head as he enjoys the feel of Mareuil's manumission to his proclivities. Her clothes then are back on, back off, she faces a wall while he caresses her buttocks, blood is absent from his mouth and he seems again back from the dead. She finally awakens out of her submissions, fights him off and runs around the room, cornering herself behind a chair and pulls a clock from the wall to defend herself. It seems the threat has caused him to retreat, until he gets an  idea to pull both grand pianos in the room with all his might towards her, both of which holds the dead carcasses of two deer. Mareuil faces the wall as though unable to watch his struggle as two men then appear on the rope, causing his strength to decrease as he continues to pull. She runs from the room, he gives up his plight in order to give chase as she holds the door that his hand has been slammed in.

From his palm ants again appear, before she turns to see a man lying on the bed back from death. This is the sequence of Bunuel and Dali as surrealism makes it difficult to follow the film, else there is nothing truly to follow. Surrealism has proven through Bunuel's films, through Dali's paintings, to be a life that folds back onto itself. Timelines are compromised, life is all accidental, or better incidental, broken fragments, lost memories that demand nostalgic homage. It is in this very tale that confounds those unfamiliar with surrealism that scrapbooked images are formed, motioned, unleashed with all the fear humanity may possess.