Microcinema DVDs - Un Chien Andalou

2007-08-05 DVD Savant
By Glenn Erickson

Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is the key surrealist film from the 1920s, a masterpiece of promotion as much as it is a milestone in cinematic art. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel teamed with the painter Salvador Dalí to drop an artistic hand grenade into the bourgeois culture, and guaranteed the continuation of surrealism as one of the strongest art movements of the century.

The impish Buñuel takes the central ideas of the Surrealist Manifesto to heart. The seventeen-minute film is purposely anarchic, shockingly impudent and willfully irrational. Rejecting the notion that art leads us calmly to a humanistic set of ideals, Un chien andalou opens with a razor-wielding man (Buñuel himself) observing a thin cloud 'slicing' across the face of the moon. The man then turns his razor on a young woman with staring eyes.

The rest of the film continues with strange and often indefinable symbolic scenes and events. An odd man in the street rides a bicycle; he wears various aprons and frills associated with Catholic priests. He carries a striped box, which later becomes a repository for a severed hand. A concerned crowd gathers when the odd man falls onto the curb, but nobody pays attention when a young woman is run over a few moments later.

The film was reportedly collected from dreams remembered by Buñuel and Dalí, and images like a nest of ants living in the palm of a man's hand come straight from the famous artist. Sex is a major theme. As a libidinous young man rubs the breasts of a young woman, we dissolve from her clothed to her naked, and then to the man fondling her buttocks instead. A comic pursuit has disturbing moments, as when the man's mouth disappears, to be replaced by the woman's armpit hair! As if making fun of symbolism for its own sake, Buñuel shows the man struggling to pull two ropes across the room. The ropes are attached to two priests, who calmly allow themselves to be dragged across the floor. They in turn are tied to a pair of grand pianos, each with a dead, bleeding mule lying on top!

Other mysterious visuals are linked to nature. A sea urchin is associated with a woman's armpit, and we see Buñuel's first obsessive screen image of an insect, none other than a death's head moth.

The professed reason for the shocks is to shake up bourgeois sensibilities, undercutting the viewer's attachment to the givens of film in predigested commercial cinema. Buñuel would continue to explore the surreal for much of the rest of his career, as if in search of an elusive truth behind the 'false' respectability of civilized values. Although the film begs for interpretation it should be first acknowledged as purposeful provocation without object: just by disturbing us, Buñuel has done his job.

Much of what passes for surreal influence can be seen in Buñuel's images. Actions are displaced from their 'appropriate' emotions, and vice-versa. A man dies longing for love, and as he reaches for the object of his desire, a matched cut places him in a grassy field, touching the naked back of a woman as he falls. Titles nonsensically reject cause and effect: "EIGHT YEARS LATER"; "SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER." The little bits of melodrama that peek through the choppy continuity remind of the early surrealists' proposed pattern of proper film-going. André Breton claimed that he and his friends would go to a movie district, enter a picture in the middle, stay only a short while, and then rush to the next theater. The result was a surreal accident, a series of cinematic effects liberated from narrative logic. 1

It can be argued that simple film flashbacks often achieve this kind of narrative dislocation, at least until the story rights itself again. Oddball pictures like The Locket nest flashbacks inside flashbacks, effectively re-creating the old novels (like the one on which The Saragossa Manuscript is based) that helped inspire surrealism in the first place. Buster Keaton's crazy film tricks in Sherlock Jr. are at heart part of the surreal experience, as is much of the anarchic comedy of The Marx Brothers. 2

I've only seen one really good print of Un chien andalou. Transflux Films' DVD copy is better than many but still not particularly distinguished. The film is intact but the framing is tight on the top, and the contrast is rather high. Some shots momentarily wash out to white, harming dissolves and occasionally making it difficult to identify details ... Had I not already been aware of the 'dead mules on the pianos' scene, I'm not certain I'd know what I was looking at.

The print on view has a soundtrack of tangos and Wagner (Tristan und Isolde: Liebestod) that was synchronized with the film in 1960. Author Stephen Barber contributes a careful commentary, quoting liberally from important surrealist writings. He gets to the heart of Un chien andalou by relating it to the initial concept of film as a conduit to pure ideas, before movies became entertainment.

Exclusive to Transflux's DVD are two interviews with Buñuel's son Juan-Luis, who speaks perfect American English. Juan-Luis begins by talking about the director's background in a tiny Spanish town. He gives a good account of the process by which his father would develop dream images into potent filmic scenes. He describes the film's premiere and the violent reactionary reception given Buñuel's next film, L'Age d'Or. Juan-Luis's later stories of Buñuel in Hollywood and New York are also very interesting. The second intereview is about Luis Buñuel's rocky relationship with Salvador Dalí.

A text extra called Mystery of Cinema is an abridged transcript of a speech Buñuel gave in 1953.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Un chien Andalou rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Fair
Sound: Good
Supplements: Commentary by Stephen Barber, two interviews with Buñuel's son Juan-Luis, text speech by Buñuel.
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 5, 2007

Footnotes:

1. It's easy to do this now. Bored cable TV watchers do it all the time, just by clicking through channels sampling and searching for interesting content. By flipping between a few soap operas playing at the same time, one can create all kinds of 'accidental' harmonies.

2. Even the vaguely subversive TV cartoon show The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle has a subversive streak, challenging basic ideas about politics and reality. One of the show's commercial break bumpers shows Bullwinkle the Moose and Rocket J. Squirrel sprouting from the ground like plants, along with the rest of a patch of sunflowers ... looking remarkably similar to the final image of Un chien andalou.

2007-07-17 Slant Magazine
By Ed Gonzalez

Luis Buñuel spent the early 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, an institution that came to be recognized for the creative fertility of its residents. It was at the student residence where several members of La Generacion del 27 first met and Buñuel lived with friends Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca. 1929's Un Chien Andalou, a collaboration between Buñuel and Dali, may be the most outrageous debut by a master filmmaker. "Can there be any spectacle more terrible than the sight of a cloud obscuring the moon at its full? The prologue can hardly have one indifferent. It tells us that in this film we must see with a different eye," said director Jean Vigo (L'Atalante) of Un Chien Andalou in his 1930 review of the film for Vers un Cinéma Social. With Vigo's words in mind, it's easy to see why some think the film signals the birth of cinema.

The juxtaposition of visual, audio, and theoretical associations is immediately jarring in the film's nefarious "once upon a time" prologue. First, the opening chords of a romantic tango (though originally silent, Un Chien Andalou's famous images would later be cued to Richard Wagner's "Liebestod" from the opera "Tristan und Isolde"). A man, perhaps a barber (Buñuel himself), smokes a cigarette while sharpening the blade of a razor. He steps onto a balcony and stares at an unobscured moon before prying open woman's eyelid. A cloud slides across the face of the moon as Buñuel's razor cuts into the woman's eye. (Though an actual calf's eye was used, as noted by critic Roger Ebert, "legend has transformed it into a pig.") A confrontational Buñuel demands that we look at the world with what Vigo calls "a new set of eyes." Stop looking and you are coward.

"Un Chien Andalou was born of the encounter between my dreams and Dali's," said Buñuel in his autobiography. The film represents the purest form of autonomy in cinema. It is the quintessential surrealist primer and, not until Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, would a film so blazingly lead the way for a new cinematic language. Buñuel has said that Un Chien Andalou was the result of conscious automatism. And while it can be read as a mechanism analogous to a dream, the film itself is less a dream than an abstraction of a dream filtered through the logic of reality. Surrealists, at least the more successful ones, understand that they must disassociate their craft from that which is unreal, at least up until a certain point. (Indeed, would a film like Mulholland Drive mean anything if its heroine never woke up?).

If a dream is a system of accumulated symbols, it must be interpreted using logic culled from what is real. Though Un Chien Andalou is a rich composite of symbols, Buñuel refuses to allow his symbols to speak for themselves. This may place a heavy burden on the spectator, but surrealism, if anything, has come to represent a challenge to passive representations of truth with its violence against symbols and reality. "Surrealist cinema draws its inspiration less from the dominant conventions of the Hollywood text than from the free-form impetus of other expressive media, most notably poetry and painting in the era of high Modernism," says scholar Philip Drummond in his article "Surrealism and Un Chien Andalou."

Looking at Buñuel's autobiography and Dali's verbal art is to confirm that many of the film's images were a product of a shared consciousness. (Both men were born and raised in rural Spain and went on to become anti-clerical and pro-anarchist.) Still, one need only look at recurring images from their later works, not to mention incidents from their youth, to find individual authorship in any of the film's ideographic signs. Buñuel's fascination with Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (in which a woman's eye is savaged by a sabre) would explain Un Chien Andalou's razor-to-the-eye sequence. Dali was an anatomical surrealist fond of animal imagery. Consequently, one can connect the image of ants crawling on a man's hand to a five-year-old Dali having discovered ants crawling over the dead carcass of his pet bat. Ants would keep turning up in Dali's later, more necrophiliac work.

Buñuel discovered death in the town of Calanda. There, dead donkeys were a common sight. They'd rot away on the town's streets, their decaying flesh an open course for vultures and dogs. The town's citizens left the corpses untouched, believing that decaying flesh would nourish the land. "I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance," remembers Buñuel. In Un Chien Andalou, a man rubs his hands around a woman's breasts, picturing her naked form until his face slowly changes into a mask of death. The film's images are as confrontational as the film's intertextual narrative, which happened to share a broad relationship with other popular genres from the time. The film is many things: romance, comedy, tragicomedy, melodrama. In the end, though, it doesn't so much refuse classification as much as it refuses to cater to romantic ideals.

Though the film's nameless woman retains power throughout, it is the nameless man who exceeds what Drummond calls "the normal bounds of characterization." If Un Chien Andalou can be taken as a commentary on the elusiveness of desire it should be noted that a pessimistic Buñuel purposefully and maniacally thwarts that desire. The dying leap the man's alter ego makes from bedroom to park suggests that he remains as sexually frustrated in death as he does in life. And if Buñuel and Dali afford little room for love, a scene depicting a secondary character's death seems to provoke bourgeois sensibility. An androgynous woman tends to a severed hand, placing it in a mysterious box before being run down by a car. Taking a respite from their otherwise frivolous sex game, the nameless man and woman stare out a window, finding a kind of passive pleasure in someone else's death.

Un Chien Andalou more than confirms Buñuel's voluptuous obsession with sin, his infatuation with the link between sex and death and Catholicism's anti-pleasure crusades. After lusting for the woman, the man must simultaneously drag a piano, a pair of dead donkeys, and two priests across a room. Just as Jesus bore the burden of humanity when forced to carry a cross to Mount Cavalry (an image literalized in Buñuel and Dali's next collaboration, L'Age d'Or), the man in Un Chien Andalou suffers both for the sin of lust and for what Vigo calls "our pathetic sentimentality." More importantly, the man struggles with the weight of Buñuel's sentimental past.

image/sound
Having seen Un Chien Andalou projected a number of times, I can't say that it's ever looked as good as it does on this DVD edition by Transflux Films, which is impressive considering the film is older than my grandmother. The final shot of the buried lovers is still difficult to see (probably a problem with the original negative), but the goo that pours out of the woman's eye is clearer than ever. (There is a one second video glitch toward the end of the film, but I can't confirm if this is a disc error on my copy or if it will appear on all copies of the film.) The music Buñuel later added to the film in 1960 sounds primitive. Though no attempt has been made to remaster the track, Buñuel probably would have had it no other way. Chances are that Buñuel would have considered a remastered track entirely too bourgeois.

extras
Buñuel's son Juan-Luis discusses his father's life before Un Chien Andalou on the featurette "A Slice of Buñuel." Stranger than the black-and-white recreation footage used in spots are some of Juan-Luis's recollections, which seem to have been lifted straight from The Last Sigh, which makes sense, I suppose, since he wasn't born until five years after Un Chien Andalou was released. Post-Andalou, Juan-Luis clearly got all the gossip about his father's life firsthand, because the anecdotes about the demise of Buñuel and Dali's relationship and Buñuel's unfortunate encounter with a Christmas tree at Charlie Chaplin's house are insane. Also included here is a graphic design and statement by Dave McKean, an abridged transcript of a speech given by Buñuel in 1953, and an audio commentary by surrealist expert Stephen Barber, author of Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs, who out of respect to either the surrealist tradition or Buñuel and Dali's insistence that Un Chien Andalou's images not be interpreted, analyses the film rather generally, focusing mainly on the film's radical montage.

overall
17 minutes that forever changed the face of cinema, Un Chien Andalou finally makes it to DVD on this nice Transflux Films release.

2007-07-17 The Song Debaser
By Pixies

Got me a movie
I want you to know
Slicing up eyeballs
I want you to know
Girlie so groovy
I want you to know
Don't know about you
But I am un Chien Andalusia

2007-07-17 DVD Outsider
By Slarek

The Films

"Nothing in this film symbolises anything!" Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali once claimed in an attempt to silence the various critical readings of their first and most notorious film, Un Chien Andalou, made back in 1929 when cinema itself was in its relative infancy. You can certainly appreciate where they are coming from: constructed largely from from dream imagery without regard for narrative or character, it remains the purest cinematic expression of the spirit of surrealism, a celluloid representation Andre Breton's 'chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table'. But given the interpretive aspect of dreams themselves and the heavy Freudianism of much of Dali's own artwork, it is inevitable that the film would be the subject of so much study, and that successive generations of writers would attempt to join the Freudian dots. Which has always seemed to me to be missing the point. For many devotees of surrealist cinema it is precisely the disconnected, seemingly random nature of the structure that makes it such a thrilling and revolutionary work. This is the godfather of surrealist cinema, and without it later directors such as Lindsay Anderson, David Lynch and, yes, even Buñuel himself, would not have been able to make their mark in such distinctive fashion.

Un Chien Andalou has, of course, the single most shocking opening sequence in the history of cinema. As an Argentinean tango plays on the soundtrack, a man - actually Buñuel himself - sharpens a straight razor and steps out onto a balcony to look at the night sky. Back inside, he holds open the eye of a young girl and, as a cloud passes in front of the moon, slices her eyeball open in horrible, graphic close-up. It remains a seriously jarring image to this day, in part because a real eyeball was used (though that of a dead donkey rather than a live human) and in part because the obvious age of the film makes the inclusion of such a sequence, at least for the uninitiated, unthinkable. Imagine what it must have been like to catch it back in 1928... There seems little doubt that this was placed up front with the sole purpose of smacking the audience full in the mouth, which it does with grisly aplomb. Believe me, there will be few who sit through this moment and just shrug it off, and if you have a thing about eyes, as everyone here at Outsider has, then no matter how many times you see it, you wince.

Nothing in the rest of the film's sixteen minutes is as alarming, but the imagery and ideas come thick and fast and make for a film that is more authentically dream-like than anything even Buñuel has made since, and so much of the imagery has passed into film legend that it has become a critical tool in itself. Thus the opening of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, in which the face of a large wooden crucified Christ figure is seen to be crawling with ants, was seen as surrealistic on its release, reflecting as it does the sequence in Un Chien Andalou in which ants emerge from a hole in the lead character's hand and the surrealists' antagonistic attitude to religion.* Elsewhere the connection has been more deliberate: in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Beaumont finds a discarded human ear crawling with ants, and Dali even recalled the open eye-slicing during the dream sequence he created for Hitchcock's Spellbound in 1945, in which large curtains bearing a repeated eye motif are sliced apart (along the line of one of the eyes) with oversized scissors.

Un Chien Andalou remains a delicious, dangerous and exciting montage of dream imagery, a Freudian assault on the senses that repeatedly hints at narratives that never unfold, reflecting the desire of the film-makers to create a work in which no single scene or image can be rationally explained. From its misleadingly playful fairy-tale opening title card to its frank celebration of sexual desire, amusing pot-shots at the church and wonderfully absurdist comic moments, it is sixteen minutes of pure surrealist delight. Funny, shocking, richly imaginative and confrontational, this is still THE surrealist film, and possibly the most potent example of avante-garde moving image the cinema has ever seen.

If Un Chien Andalou was a collaborative work between Buñuel and Dali, L'Age D'Or saw Dali taking something of a creative back seat, allowing Buñuel to find his feet as a director. By now part of the surrealist movement, Buñuel seemed to be spoiling for a fight, and at the sixth public screening he got one when (in a move organised by right-wing agitators) the screen was attacked and the cinema trashed, prompting police intervention and the official banning of the film. What on earth could prompt such an extreme reaction? What could be more offensive than the graphic slicing of an eyeball? Well here's a clue: some years later the film was withdrawn from distribution by its own producer, Vicomte de Noailles, following his conversion to Catholicism. Yep, in 1930 Buñuel did the unthinkable - he loaded his cinematic guns and aimed them squarely at what were to become two of his favourite targets, the bourgeoisie and the Catholic church.

As with Un Chien Andalou, L'Age D'Or kicks off in deliberately misleading fashion, with several minutes of nature documentary footage featuring scorpions battling with each other and an unfortunate rat, while title cards inform us of their physical make-up and anti-social nature. This seemingly irrelevant opening actually lays the foundations for much that follows, a story of a man who rejects all aspects of the society in which he reluctantly moves, and one with a splendid sting in its tale.

The pace is more sedate than that of the earlier film and the narrative more structured, though to suggest that it tells a story in the traditional sense would be way off the mark. Essentially a tale of the power and frustrations of desire, there are plenty of well-aimed pot-shots taken at the clergy, the family unit and middle class values, to name but three, often executed with an unflinching directness and wit that still prompts admiration and, at times, out-loud laughter. It also openly celebrates sexual desire and fetishism - itself a subversive move in 1930 - with the almost uncontrollable urges of the two leads being repeatedly frustrated, twice by the same group of visiting Majorcans in different locations. All of this reaches a peak in one of the film's most justifiably famous scenes, where the pair meet in a corner of an ornamental garden and, with engaging clumsiness, attempt unsuccessfully to consummate their passion, one embrace being broken when the male half of this duo becomes fixated on the toes of a white statue that, on his temporary departure, the woman effectively goes down on. This remains one of the most erotically charged scenes in cinema history, an open celebration of forbidden sexual longing that if it were made now would no doubt have the Daily Mail in an uproar of disgusted disapproval.

As a surrealist film, it delivers on all levels, reflecting the movement's revolutionary politics and attitude to organised religion in its content, and continuing Un Chien Andalou's dream-like kick against realism. This involves a fair number of delightfully bizarre non sequiturs - the man walking with a rock on his head (passing a statue with a rock on its head); a title card that announces "Sometimes on Sundays" followed by the explosive destruction of a number of buildings; the man kicking a violin along a street before stamping on it and walking on - but just as many are integrated, however strangely, into a longer scene. Thus when the leading lady walks into her bedroom and irritatedly shifts a cow from her bed, it feels only a couple of steps away from reality because she behaves as if it were a disobedient dog. The actions are recognisably normal, it's just the animal itself that throws the scene into the dream world.

Several sequences foreshadow memorable scenes in later Buñuel works, the maid killed by a kitchen fire yet ignored by the wealthy party-goers having its less drastic equivalent in The Exterminating Angel, and the gamekeeper who shoots dead his young son for playfully snatching his father's tobacco has echoes throughout the director's filmography, from the violent blasting of a butterfly in Diary of a Chambermaid, to the priest who calmly uses a shotgun on a man whose last confession he has just taken in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

But it's in the final scene that Buñuel really throws caution to the wind, to the degree that if it were made today it would still cause an uproar. A long textual introduction (based on De Sade's 120 days of Sodom) outlines the appalling depravities inflicted by "four godless and unprincipled scoundrels" at the Château de Selliny on "eight lovely adolescent girls," culminating in the introduction of their leader, the monstrous Duc de Blangis, who turns out to be Jesus. Weary from the 120 day long orgy, he still has the energy to return to the Château to finish off a girl who survived the depravities and, in a particularly bizarre joke, get his beard ripped off. The final image of a crucifix adorned with female scalps, accompanied by jovial music, comes across almost as a cheerful declaration of war on Christianity in general.

If L'Age D'Or lacks the fired-up energy of Un Chien Andalou, it nevertheless remains a marvelous slice of surrealist cinema, brimming with invention and revolutionary daring, and a clear pointer to the direction Buñuel's cinema was to take in the years to come. As cinematic companion pieces they are virtually without peer, and remain two of the most influential, exciting and enjoyable examples of avante garde cinema at its most ferociously potent.

Sound and Vision

Oh well. First up, it should be recognised that both films are over seventy years old and and finding a source print that is even close to pristine is a no-hoper. But given the sort of restoration work done by Eureka on films like M and The Last Laugh, the transfers here leave an lot to be desired.

Un Chien Andalou definitely comes off worst - scratches, dust spots and other film damage are plentiful throughout, contrast is average at best and black levels are, well, dark grey. Though much of this is undoubtedly down to the available source print, there has clearly been little attempt to clean this up digitally, and in the process of the transfer, four small dots appear to have been actually added to the on-screen distractions (you can tell they are not film damage as they sit rock solidly throughout, while the film itself is subject to some frame jitter). Perhaps most frustratingly, the extracts of the film included in the documentary on this disk, A Propósito de Buñuel, are noticeably superior in contrast, sharpness and stability. As a silent film with music 'as directed by Luis Buñuel', the only subtitles are those accompanying the title cards, and these are burnt in. The music is as originally recorded for early sound prints, complete with slight distortion and sudden editing jumps.

L'Age D'Or fares a little better, especially on the contrast and black levels (the contrast does vary at times, but this is doubtless due to the the condition of the source print). It still has more than its share of dust spots and film damage, though given that there was an attempt to destroy all prints following its banning this is at least understandable. Again no visible restoration work appears to have been carried out, but some scenes have survived rather well and have a pleasing look to them, despite the damage. The sound shows its age, with music and sound effects sometimes coming across as distorted, but this was one of the first sound films and cannot be expected to be crystal clear. The subtitles here are removable and very clearly done, though have been specifically translated for UK viewers, as can be witnessed in the early scene with the peasant soldiers, one of whom says to the other, "Bollocks."

Extras

Though limited in number, the extras on offer here do at first glance appear to be very well focused. Of course, as with other aspects of this box set, it ain't that simple, but one at least is first rate, so I'll save that until last. Most of the extras revolve around Robert Short, author of the books Dada and Surrealism and Surrealist Cinema, and this proves something of a mixed blessing. He knows his subject, certainly, but his delivery is as dry and overly analytical as a particularly heavy-going university lecture.

First up is an Introduction by Robert Short, which runs for a most unexpected 25 minutes and consists of a direct-to-camera address by Short outlining the background to and production of the two films. Despite Short's delivery, this is actually pretty interesting, packing quite a bit of information into the running time and despite my long-standing love of the two films there were a few facts I was unaware of and enjoyed hearing (Buñuel filling his pocket with stones for the premiere of Un Chien Andalou to throw at the audience in case of a hostile reception, for example). When I say it's interesting, I mean it's interesting to listen to - visually it's deadly stuff, with Short, dressed in a shiny black jacket, talking straight to camera, uninterrupted by stills or film extracts, the mid-shot intermittently (and sometimes jarringly) jumping to a close-up and back in a feeble attempt to liven things up. Ignore the screen and listen while you're reading the included booklet, which really is rather nice and gives plenty of background to the film, including film notes from Buñuel himself.

Short also provides a commentary for each film, though both differ from standard commentaries in specific ways. In Un Chien Andalou Short looks at the notorious opening in detail, and in order for him to do so the film stops and the opening sequence is repeated, making this one of the only commentaries that is actually longer than the film it is discussing. On L'Age D'Or the reverse is true, and the film is edited down to allow Short to concentrate on key sequences only, running for just half the length of the film. As for the content...well therin lies the rub. While a good part of the commentary on L'Age D'Or focuses on the construction of the scenes under examination, the one accompanying Un Chien Andalou over-analyses the film to such a degree that twice I actually lost track of what Short was talking about, and my interest and patience were frequently taxed. Sounding at times as if he's swallowed a whole set of volumes on Freud, Short tones this down a bit on L'Age D'Or, though still kicks off with some thematically baffling musings on the opposing forces of gold and shit.

The final extra, located on the Un Chien Andalou disk, is the best by far, the Spanish/Mexican documentary A Propósito de Buñuel. Rather than an exhaustive study of Buñuel's cinema, it concentrates on Buñuel the man: his childhood in Spain, his religious education, his friendships, his long-standing marriage to Jeanne Rucar, his seemingly puritanical attitude to on-screen sex, his love of martinis and his sense of humour. Of course, his films are dealt with in some detail, but more often than not on a personal and anecdotal level. Running a handsome 98 minutes, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging production, but does have one surprising omission - absolutely none of the participants are identified by name through caption or voice-over, and though you can work who some of them are from what is said or shown, a fair number remain frustratingly anonymous. I'm guessing that all concerned are familiar enough to the programme's original target audience for this not to be an issue for them, but a little help here would have been nice. Shot on video and framed at 1.66:1 (non-anamorphic), the transfer is first-rate, though the quality of included film clips varies wildly. As mentioned before, the clips from Un Chien Andalou are actually superior to the print included on this very disk.

Summary

Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or are the two most important works in the history of avant garde cinema and were the founding fathers of surrealist film. Both still have the power, over seventy bloody years later, to shock and astound. What film now will be able to say that as far into the future?

It's wonderful to see the two films released on DVD, but with the restoration work being carried out on other films from this period the quality of the transfers here can't help but come across as a disappointment. The inclusion of commentaries is welcome, but ones that actually told you about the making of the films rather than disappearing up an analytical arsehole would have been preferable. The inclusion of the documentary A Propósito de Buñuel is the real selling point, though I have to take issue with the retail price of of £30, making this two-disk package more expensive than most Criterion sets (and that includes the cost of importing them), which almost always benefit from extensive restoration work and a bucketload of classy extras. Putting the whole set in a fancy, oversized box fails to convince me - it doesn't fit on the shelf with my other disks - and so while the films come wholeheartedly recommended, the DVDs are probably for determined (or rich) devotees only, unless you can find them in a sale.