The Film That Attacks You

What I'm about to show you is shocking. It was shocking when it was first seen in 1929. It's just as shocking today in 2026. And for an image to retain this quality for an entire century, especially this particular century, is well, shocking in itself. If you're squeamish, now is the time to click away.

That is the very first image that the legendary Spanish and Mexican director Luis Buñuel ever put on film, an eyeball being sliced open. The man with the razor is Buñuel himself, and this short film is called Un Chien Andalou, or An Andalusian Dog. It's the first film to be officially accepted by the surrealist

movement, and it's easy to see why. The whole thing, all 16 minutes of it, unfolds like a dream. And in fact, this short was the product of two real dreams, one by Buñuel, and the other by his collaborator and close friend Salvador Dalí.

Buñuel met Dalí a decade before in Madrid, where they both lived at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes, a student dormitory and cultural hub, which was a magnet for young Spanish intellectuals and artists. There, Buñuel, Dalí, and Federico García Lorca, the Spanish writer, were thick as

thieves, partaking in all kinds of adventures, capers, and pranks, challenging one another creatively and intellectually. They were enamored with the various avant-garde movements springing up at the time, like Dadaism and Surrealism, and with the radical work of artists like Jean Cocteau, what

many of these movements had in common was a forceful rejection of rational bourgeois consumerist thinking, which they believed led to the needless carnage of World War I and to a general flattening and degradation of the human spirit. In 1925, Buñuel moved to Paris, the international nucleus of these

movements, but he was still unsure about how exactly to make his mark. Dalí had painting, Garcia Lorca had writing, but Buñuel didn't feel that he had a talent for either of these arts. He did, however, like movies, and in Paris he saw lots of them. Of these, none made a greater impression than the films of

Fritz Lang, the German expressionist, particularly Destiny from 1921 with its image of death in a wide-brimmed black hat. In Paris, Buñuel insinuated himself into the French film industry, serving as assistant director on two movies by Jean Epstein and working as a film critic, too. He wanted to make something

of his own, but wasn't interested in appealing to mainstream audiences. In fact, he wanted to do the exact opposite. He wanted to scandalize them.

So, Buñuel and Dalí holed themselves up in Dalí's house for 7 days and wrote something that would do just that.

It's something of a fool's errand to describe the plot of Un Chien Andalou. The film is a succession of irrational, dream-like images. A crowd surrounding a man poking a severed hand with a stick.

A man dragging two Jesuit priests, one played by Dalí himself, as well as two pianos laden with two decomposing, oozing donkeys. A woman's armpit hair suddenly appearing over a man's vanished mouth. These images are meant to frustrate our attempts to assign meaning to them. They're arranged in a way that