Un Chien Andalou: Middle Class Sensibilities & Sexual Imagery

The following analysis was submitted for an informal film journal assignment Junior year.

Un chien Andalou’s Antagonization of Pious Middle Class Sensibilities

Luis Buñuel was a member of the feudal gentry, aiming to disturb the Catholic bourgeoisie in Spain. The film contains religious imagery, such as cut eyeballs and a man riding a bike with what looks to be a nun hat on his head, nodding to the film’s intentional commentary on religion in Spain. Buñuel also includes shots of Spain and impoverished, downtrodden civilians, perhaps in an attempt to create and then destabilize familiar images to the middle class audience. Furthermore, images like the eyeball or the black insects crawling all over the man’s hand are palpably disturbing and unexpected. It is almost a form of body trauma, centering the body as something violated and grotesque. It seems Buñuel almost attempted to capture a scandal, stitching together images to garner a disturbed reaction from the pious middle class. The film inserts rapists, sexual assault, Freudian sexual imagery, and cross-dressing individuals in a rejection of piety. These images likely unsettled and shocked the Catholic bourgeoise. 

Sexual Imagery as a Motivator for Human Behavior

Un Chien Andalou plays with sexual identity in a manner reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalytics. In thinking about psychoanalytic imagery in the film, one might look to the inclusion of phallic imagery, or images that suggest castration, repressed desires, and struggles with masculinity. One moment that might suggest a “castration” in identity is the image of the androgynously dressed individual on a bicycle. Superficially, it appears the individual is a man (a gender assigned at birth) choosing to dress in more feminine clothing, which might suggest a castration of their masculinity. This might be an attempt to emasculate the individual but, regardless, this scene plays with sex and gender identity. Furthermore, there are images of a man salivating and sexually assaulting a woman despite her push back. In a Freudian lens, this might be an instance of a man acting impulsively on repressed sexual desires. In a sensical lens, this is a violent sexual image. Also, I found it interesting that the film concludes with the man and woman buried to their waist in the sand. In other words, their genital regions are not visible in the shot. This might suggest a failed fulfillment of sexual desire or an ultimate denial of sexuality despite the sexually-aggravated images throughout the rest of the film.