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Abstract
Although Buñuel said the goal of Surrealism was to destroy bourgeois society by attacking its stultifying excess of cultural baggage, in Un Chien andalou we find, surprisingly, an aesthetic of erudition comparable to Góngorás culteranismo. This article examines the traces of a strong Spanish baroque heritage in this film made by Luis Buñuel with help from Salvador Dalí, near the beginning of their careers. Although the film is a paragon of Surrealist filmmaking, it also contains a complex interweaving of intertexts taken from the discourses of Freudian psychoanalysis, Greek mythology, baroque painting and poetry, and entomology. The film is, therefore, not so much an example of automatic writing, as its makers preferred to claim, but rather an avant-garde text crafted with recourse to the rich erudition of Spaińs baroque tradition, what we might call a ‘Surrealist culteranismo’.
Notes
* I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the Dirección de Superación Académica de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (DSA-SEP) of Mexico for their support via the Film Studies Network (‘Red CACINE’); the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores of Mexico; the Lannan Center of Georgetown University; José María Prado of the Filmoteca Española; my mentors Robert Alter, Anne Nesbet, Francine Masiello, and Eric Naiman; and the exceptionally helpful feedback of Jo Evans.
1 I offer three expressions of this goal spanning Buñuel’s career. First, in his foreword to the 15 December 1929 publication of the scenario of Un Chien andalou, he reaffirms his ‘complete adherence to surrealist thought and activity’, and then mocks the film's bourgeois admirers as those who ‘seek every novelty, even if that novelty outrages their most profoundly held convictions’ and as an ‘imbecilic crowd that has found beautiful or poetic that which, at heart, is nothing other than a desperate, impassioned call for murder’ (Luis Buñuel, ‘Un Chien andalou’ [1st ed. 1929], An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, foreword by Jean-Claude Carrière, trans. Garrett White [Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: Univ. of California Press, 2000], 162–69; italics in original). Second, according to David Weir, Buñuel used a quotation whenever he was asked to explain the politics of his art, including in his 1958 address, ‘Cinema As an Instrument of Poetry’: ‘I will let Friedrich Engels speak for me. He defines the function of the novelist (and here read filmmaker) thus: “The novelist will have acquitted himself honorably of his task when, by means of an accurate portrait of authentic social relations, he will have destroyed the conventional view of the nature of those relations, have shattered the optimism of the bourgeois world, and forced the reader to question the permanency of the prevailing order, and this even if the author does not offer us any solutions, even if he does not clearly take sides” ’ (David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1997], 250). And third, in his 1982 autobiography, Buñuel writes: ‘The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself’ (Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003 (1st ed. 1982)], 107). The most recent biography of Buñuel is Ian Gibson's, Luis Buñuel: la forja de un cineasta universal, 1900–1938 (Madrid: Aguilar, 2013).
2 Elza Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929 (London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 63.
3 Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 68–69. For other studies linking Buñuel to the Spanish literary canon, see: Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, trans. & ed. David Robinson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975); Sidney Donnell, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on the Baroque in Luis Buñuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz’, in Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literatures, ed. Barbara A. Simerka & Christopher B. Weimer (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2000), 74–97; Julie Jones, ‘The Picaro in Paris: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the Picaresque Tradition’, Journal of Film and Video, 51:1 (1999), 42–55; and Javier Herrera Navarro, ‘Buñuel en el valle de la muerte: Las Hurdes y la tradición realista española’, Goya, 275 (2000), 97–108.
4 For origins of the term ‘culteranismo’, see for example: Ariadna García García, Poesía española de los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2009); Pedro Aullón de Haro, Barroco (Madrid: Verbum/Conde Duque, 2004); and Andrée Collard, Nueva poesía: conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1967). There is no translation of ‘culteranismo’ into English, nor could a translation do justice to its internal wordplay on the Spanish culto, meaning ‘erudite’ and luterano, meaning ‘Lutheran’, which connoted ‘apostate’ or ‘subversive’ in Góngora's historical situation. I have therefore preferred not to italicize the words culteranismo or culterano in this article in the hope that it may begin to become a loan word for English, similar to technical terms for music, like concerto, aria, allegro, soprano and opera, for which italics are no longer used.
5 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed. (Madrid: Espasa: 2001): ‘culteranismo, m. Estilo literario desarrollado en España desde finales del siglo XVI y a lo largo del siglo XVII, caracterizado, entre otros rasgos, por la riqueza abusiva de metáforas sorprendentes, el uso exagerado de cultismos y la complejidad sintáctica’ (482).
6 Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006), 294–95.
7 Aranda, Luis Buñuel, trans. & ed. Robinson, 56.
8 Regarding Buñuel's cinema in general and Un Chien andalou in particular, Linda Williams provided a useful overview in 1986 of four roughly consecutive ‘critical schools’ of Buñuel scholarship, ‘each of which has constructed a different “Buñuel” ’ and all of which, save the second, include psychoanalytic approaches: the ‘Surrealist Buñuel’, the ‘realist Buñuel’, the ‘auteur Buñuel', and the ‘Semiotic and Lacanian Buñuel’ (Linda Williams, ‘The Critical Grasp: Buñuelian Cinema and its Critics’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli [New York: Willis Locker and Owen, 1987], 199–206). In 1998, Phil Powrie gave an updated summary of the critical literature, adding further reflections on psychoanalytic and feminist readings of the film, as well as his own emphasis on the film's ‘drama of constantly frustrated male desire’ (Phil Powrie, ‘Masculinity in the Shadow of the Slashed Eye: Surrealist Film Criticism at the Crossroads’, Screen, 39:2 [1998], 153–63 [p. 163]). The most recent comprehensive discussion of previous psychoanalytic readings is in Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 44–53. To date, Williams herself offers perhaps the most respected psychoanalytic reading of the film in Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981), 53–105; other readings of this type include: Mondragon, ‘Comment j’ai compris un chien andalou’, Revue de Ciné-Club, 8–9 (1949), 9; François Piazza, ‘Considerations psychanalytiques sur Le [sic] chien andalou de Louis [sic] Buñuel et Salvador Dalí’, Psyche, 27–28 (1949), 147–56; Pierre Renaud, ‘Symbolisme au second degré: Un chien andalou’, Etudes Cinématographiques, 22–23 (1963), 147–57; Raymond Durgnat, Luis Buñuel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968); Fernando Césarman, El ojo de Buñuel: psicoanálisis desde una butaca (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1976); Maurice Drouzy, Luis Buñuel: architecte du rêve (Paris: L’Herminier, 1978); Gwynne Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel: A Reading of His Films (London: Marion Boyars, 1982); Andrew Webber, ‘Cut and Laced: Traumatism and Fetishism in Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou’, in Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema, ed. & intro by Andrea Sabbadini (Hove/New York: Routledge, 2007), 92–101.
9 Aranda, Luis Buñuel, trans. & ed. Robinson, 56. Buñuel composed this text in English for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938, but it was not published until Aranda's book appeared in Spanish in 1969, and then again in the original English in 1975 (see Aranda, Luis Buñuel, trans & ed. Robinson, 12 n.).
10 Luis Buñuel, ‘Notes on the Making of Un Chien Andalou’, in The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism, ed. Joan Mellen (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 151–53 (p. 152).
11 Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel, 13.
12 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, 53.
13 Aranda writes: ‘His passion for insects is reflected in all his films. Insects played a great part in Spanish literature at that period, in the work of Lorca, Dámaso Alonso and others […]. Buñuel's use of big close-ups of insects, interpolated in the action of his films, has been attacked as affected and pretentious; but those who make this criticism fail to recognize the expressive origins of such images. Although they come from entirely personal sources, their use is never simply gratuitous: they always have an additional purpose, as shock images, as methods of transition between sequences, as a reminder to the spectator of the other dramas that are played out on the sidelines of the main theme. As well as symbols of unbalanced states of mind, too, there is an element of objective vision, a gesture of curiosity and affection towards these other living creatures’ (Aranda, Luis Buñuel, trans. & ed. Robinson, 25).
14 Paul Begin, ‘Entomology As Anthropology in the Films of Luis Buñuel’, Screen, 48:4 (2007), 425–42 (p. 441).
15 Begin, ‘Entomology As Anthropology’, 432.
16 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
17 Williams, Figures of Desire; Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 54.
18 See Note 5.
19 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, 217.
20 Jean-Henri Fabre, Social Life in the Insect World, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 124. Like most of Fabre's writings on insects, this book is part of Souvenirs entomologiques and was probably read by Buñuel since, as Edwards and Begin note, Buñuel shared Fabre's fascination with insect life, and in particular, its social aspects (Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel, 13; Begin, ‘Entomology as Anthropology’, 22).
21 This hallucination is evocative of a common clinical symptom of schizophrenia and other mental disorders, as well as opioid withdrawal symptoms, known as ‘delusional parasitosis’, in which the sufferer imagines his body to be infested with insects, often under the skin.
22 As Adamowicz notes (‘Un chien andalou’, 67), Dalí writes in a 1929 poem, ‘Why after going around picking up cork crumbs from the ground, did I end up with a hole in the middle of my hand, filled with a compact and teeming anthill that I try to scoop out with a spoon?’ (Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution. Writings 1927 to 1933 by Salvador Dalí, trans. & with an intro. by Yvonne Shafir [Boston: Exact Change, 1998], 81). Moreover, Mikhail Iampolski notes that from 1929, many of Dalí's paintings depict ants, linking them to images of pubic hair and masturbation: see, Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film (Berkeley, Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 54.
23 All images from Un Chien andalou are reproduced by kind permission of the heirs of Luis Buñuel.
24 Begin, ‘Entomology As Anthropology’, 432.
25 The possible association with Christian stigmata has been noticed by others including Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 65 and Powrie, ‘Masculinity in the Shadow of the Slashed Eye’, 163.
26 Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí, ‘Guión’, photographic reproduction of original shooting script, with handwritten notes by Luis Buñuel, in a booklet included with the DVD set: Un Chien andalou/Un perro andaluz, 2 DVDs (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura de España/Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales/Filmoteca Española/Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2009), 63–72 (p. 72).
27 Ado Kyrou, Luis Buñuel: An Introduction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 114–15.
28 Paul Begin, ‘Mutilation, Misogyny, and Murder: Surrealist Violence or Torture Porn?’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. & intro. by Robert Stone & Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 537–553 (p. 541).
29 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
30 Williams, Figures of Desire, 84.
31 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. James Strachey, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961), 14. Though not translated into French or Spanish until after 1929, the Robson Scott translation was first published in London by Hogarth Press in 1928, and would probably have been available in Paris.
32 For relevant discussions of misogyny in Buñuel's work, see: Paul Julian Smith, ‘Shocks and Prejudices: The Importance of Buñuel’, Sight and Sound, 5:8 (1995), 24–26; Carmen Rabalska, ‘The Grotesque Mirror: Deformity, Mutilation and Transgression’, in Buñuel, Siglo XXI, ed. Isabel Santaolalla (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004), 419–28; Rachael Johnson, ‘Marvellous Mutilations: Acknowledging Buñuel's Legacy of Surreal Violence’, in Buñuel, Siglo XXI, ed. Santaolalla 257–64; Begin, ‘Mutilation, Misogyny, and Murder’.
33 Begin also provides pertinent biographical context for the choice of this particular animal here: ‘The sea urchin motif is important for understanding the relationship between Dalí and Buñuel and is also linked to their obsession with Saint Sebastian. In 1929 Dalí had an argument with his father, prompting him to shave his head. Buñuel then took a photo of Dalí in a pose that recalls Saint Sebastian (as well as William Tell, with the sea urchin replacing the apple), as he is depicted in religious iconography, with a sea urchin atop his head. The sea urchin, in this case, refers back to Dalí's father—it was his favorite food’ (Begin, ‘Entomology As Anthropology’, 438 n). It is also considered an aphrodisiac in Spain.
34 Williams, Figures of Desire, 86.
35 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
36 In addition to Williams’ reading of the amputated hand as a fetish object that ‘arises from the fear of castration’ (Figures of Desire, 83), Peter Evans sees in it (and in the androgyne) a veiled reference to Federico García Lorca's homosexuality (see Peter W. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 91); and Carola Moresche sees in it a ‘literal fracturing of body parts by cinematic means’ signifying ‘sexual obsession and haptic sensations’ (see Carola Moresche, ‘Haptic Close-Ups and Montage: Surrealist Desire in Erich von Stroheim's Greed and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien andalou’, in The Visual Culture of Modernism, ed. & intro. by Deborah L. Madsen & Mario Klarer [Tübingen: Narr, 2011], 197–207 [p. 204]).
37 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
38 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
39 Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 12.
40 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 164.
41 Stuart Liebman, ‘Un chien andalou: The Talking Cure’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Kuenzli, 143–58 (p. 152 & p. 157, n. 28). Durgnat, Luis Buñuel, 27, argues that since the French expression ‘avoir des fourmis’ (‘to have ants’) means ‘to have pins and needles’, the appearance of ants here signifies the awakening of a hand that was dead. Aranda also mentions the same play on ‘hormigeo’ in Spanish, in Luis Buñuel, trans. & ed. Robinson, 67.
42 Begin, ‘Entomology As Anthropology’, 441.
43 Others who have commented on the high-angle shot from the window are: Aranda, Luis Buñuel, trans. & ed. Robinson, 64; Phillip Drummond in 'Introduction', ‘Un chien andalou’: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, transcription & intro. by Phillip Drummond, foreword by Jean Vigo (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), v–xxiii (p. xxii); Moresche, ‘Haptic Close-Ups’, 204; and Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 36.
44 Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. Scott, 12.
45 Williams, Figures of Desire, 95.
46 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, 53.
47 See Note 5.
48 Examples include: Mondragon, ‘Comment j’ai compris un chien andalou’; Piazza, ‘Considerations psychanalytiques’; Renaud, ‘Symbolisme au second degré; Durgnat, Luis Buñuel; Cesarman, El ojo de Buñuel; Drouzy, Luis Buñuel: Architecte du rêve; Williams, Figures of Desire; Edwards, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel; and Webber, ‘Cut and Laced’.
49 Adamowicz devotes much of her second chapter to readings of this scene and sums them up well: ‘The opening sequence has been read both as a violation to the eye and the ritualistic opening of the eye onto new ways of seeing’ (‘Un chien andalou’, 69).
50 A familiar example of Lachesis presented as the designer of destinies appears in Plato's Republic, in which she holds ‘the lots and patterns of lives’ in her ‘lap’ (Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey [Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1942], 505).
51 Williams, Figures of Desire, 76.
52 Webber attributes great importance to this painting: ‘The Lacemaker picture can be said to function as mise-en-abyme, an emblematic internal reflection of and upon the film's disposition’ (‘Cut and Laced’, 98). Dalí would later reveal himself to be obsessed with Vermeer's painting, a copy of which had hung in his father's study. He made a copy of it in the Louvre in 1954, and based several other paintings and a peculiar short film-cum-publicity stunt, starring himself and a puzzled rhinoceros. It should also be mentioned that Jenaro Talens reads this image as a ‘metaphorical translation of the Penelope myth’ (The Branded Eye: Buñuel's ‘Un chien andalou’ [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993], 50), although this does not seem to correlate with anything else in the film. He also observes, however, that, ‘[i]n Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire [1977], the image of the lacemaker appears explicitly in the film's final sequence, the last one the director shot before his death’ (Talens, The Branded Eye, 176 n). Since Buñuel planned to retire after making that film, the metacinematic reading would be that his life's own long ‘Lachesis’ stage, which had begun with Un Chien andalou, was coming to the end of its generously apportioned thread.
53 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 163. The original Spanish reads, ‘Téngase en cuenta que la lluvia, la caja, el papel de seda y la caja han de estar o se han de presentar con rayas oblicuas cuya sola anchura es lo que varía’ (Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Guión’, 64).
54 Several critics have speculated that the stripes were inspired by a zebra pattern on the stockings of one of the female characters in Federico García Lorca's play El paseo de Buster Keaton (1925). However, the brief play does not call for stockings, but rather for the woman's legs to tremble like two dying zebras: ‘Sus piernas a listas tiemblan en el césped como dos cebras agonizantes’ (see Obras completas, recopilación, cronología, bibliografía & notas de Arturo del Hoyo, 2 vols [Madrid: Aguilar, 1973, II, 233–36 [p. 236]). See also: Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 195–96; Gwynne Edwards, A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005), 25; and Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 73.
55 Fabre makes at least two references to A. atropos, one in The Story-Book of Science, trans. Florence Constable Bicknell (New York: The Century Co., 1917), 120, and the other, in which Fabre relates that he has ‘tried to rear her caterpillar on various plants’, in More Beetles, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922), 225.
56 In the original, ‘una mariposa de la muerte’ (Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Guión’, 71).
57 Iampolski writes: ‘Clearly the Atropos moth in Un chien andalou has a vast surrealist intertext, one that connects it unambiguously to the theme of metamorphosis’ (The Memory of Tiresias, 52); however, he does not take this line of analysis much further.
58 Italics in the original: Lord Auch [Georges Bataille], Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1987), 34. See also: James Lastra, ‘Buñuel, Bataille, and Buster, Or, the Surrealist Life of Things’, Critical Quarterly 51:2 (2009), 16–38 (p. 34); Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 70. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla has also argued for Bataille's influence on Buñuel in Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 164, and also in his Introduction, co-written with Rob Stone, to A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Stone & Gutiérrez-Albilla, 1–58 (p. 11). Bataille himself was enthralled by the film, publishing one of the first essays on it, ‘L’Oeil: Friandise cannibale’ in Documents, I-4 (June 1929), 215–20. Other possible intertexts for this scene have been noted; see, for example, Aranda, Luis Buñuel, ed. Robinson, 67.
59 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 220. Jay (256–62) also gives an important discussion of affinities between Histoire de l’oeil and Un Chien andalou, but erroneously dates the film to 1928, the same year the novel was published, and perhaps therefore misses this possible intertext (220).
60 As mentioned in Note 40, Durgnat and Liebman discuss the French/Spanish wordplay associated with ‘avoir des fourmis’; Liebman, in his above-cited essay, also discusses wordplay on the French term ‘coup d’oeil’ (147–48). Studies of sadism and masochism in the film include: Williams (Figures of Desire), Jay (Downcast Eyes), Evans (The Films of Luis Buñuel), Powrie (‘Masculinity in the Shadow of the Slashed Eye’), Gutiérrez-Albilla (A Companion to Luis Buñuel) and Begin (‘Mutilation, Misogyny, and Murder’).
61 Lastra, ‘Buñuel, Bataille, and Buster’, 34. It may also be noteworthy that the female protagonist in the novella is named Simone, corresponding to the name of the female lead chosen for the film, Simone Mareuil.
62 In response to a question about this eye, Buñuel later said it was, ‘A calf's. With the hairs removed and made up’ (see José de la Colina & Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel, ed. & trans. Paul Lenti [New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1986], 16).
63 See Note 5.
64 This is first fully expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920); see The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 621; this book was first translated into Spanish in Sigmund Freud, Obras completas, trans. Luis López-Ballesteros y de Torres (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1922–1934), II (1923).
65 See ‘Un chien andalou’: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, transcription & intro. by Drummond, 156–58.
66 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 168.
67 Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Guión’, 71.
68 See Ferran Alberich, ‘La construcción del azar’, in booklet included with DVD set: Un Chien andalou/Un perro andaluz: 2 DVDs, 5–22 (p. 16), and Torben Sangild, ‘Buñuel's Liebestod—Wagner's Tristan in Luis Buñuel's Early Films: Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or’, JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning, 13 (2014–2015), 20–59 (p. 21). Williams also comments on the functioning of the Liebestod as an ironic ‘love-death’ reference (Figures of Desire, 87).
69 See Note 5.
70 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Plain Label Books, 1911), 234; this book was first translated into Spanish in Freud, Obras completas, trans. López-Ballesteros y de Torres, VI–VII (1923).
71 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Brill, 234.
72 As Adamowicz (‘Un chien andalou’, 45), notes, Marueil has even been interpreted as the main character: Jacques Demeure, ‘Luis Buñuel—poète de la cruauté’, Positif, 2:10 (1954), 41–44.
73 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 169.
74 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 169. The ending of the original typescript of the scenario is crossed out and in Buñuel's hand is written: ‘Todo ha cambiado. Ahora es un desierto sin horizonte. Clavados en el centro, enterrados por la arena hasta el pecho aparecen el personaje principal y la muchacha, sin ojos, desgarradas las vestiduras, comidos por un enjambre de rayos del sol y de insectos’ (Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Guión’, 72).
75 Agustín Sánchez Vidal assumes the buried man is Batcheff in Luis Buñuel: obra cinematográfica (Madrid: Ediciones J.C., 1984), 53, as does Talens, The Branded Eye, 57. Some critics leave the identity of the buried man unspecified, in line with the French publication of the scenario by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, ‘Un chien andalou’, La Révolution Surréaliste, 12, 15 December 1929, pp. 34–37 (p. 35); see Steven Kovács, From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U. P., 1980), 204; and Adamowicz, ‘Un chien andalou’, 99 (see also, pp. 33–34).
76 Williams, Figures of Desire, 99.
77 Williams, Figures of Desire, 99 n.
78 It says simply ‘on voit le personnage et la jeune fille’ (Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Un chien andalou’, 35), instead of giving the full and proper translation from Buñuel's hand-corrected Spanish shooting script, which would have been ‘on voit le personnage principal et la jeune fille’.
79 Aranda writes: ‘it is necessary here only to give a synopsis of the action. The first scenario and the finished film differ in such slight details that it is clear that the plan of the film was little altered in the shooting’ (Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, ed. Robinson, 60). Buñuel's many handwritten emendations to the Spanish shooting script refute this claim; see Buñuel & Dalí, ‘Guión’, 63–72.
80 Williams, Figures of Desire, 53–54 n. At that time, the only other extant English translation of the scenario was Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, ‘L’Âge d’Or’ and ‘Un chien andalou’, trans. Marianne Alexander (Letchworth: Lorrimer Publishing, 1968); but like the French version, it leaves the identity of the man in the tableau unclear (92).
81 Aranda's description of the last scene reads as follows: ‘The desert. The man from the beach and the girl are buried alive up to their chests, ragged and blinded, “being eaten alive by the sun and by swarms of insects” ’ (Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, ed. Robinson, 63). The latter phrase is the only quotation Aranda uses in his synopsis of the film, so I believe the text outside of his quotation marks simply conveys his perceptions of the film (in which he jumps to the conclusions that it is ‘the man from the beach’ and that the characters are ‘alive’); the text inside the quotation marks is unsourced, but matches exactly Lorrimer's English translation from the French that he mentions earlier (60); he might have used this quotation because it includes mention of the insects that he could not clearly see in the 1960 restoration print.
82 Williams, Figures of Desire, 99.
83 Williams, Figures of Desire, 99 n.
84 See Un Chien andalou/Un perro andaluz: 2 DVDs (full details in Note 25). This DVD version can also be viewed online at <www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/un-perro-andaluz/perro-andaluz/1570997/> (last accessed 25 March 2016); although this version is exquisitely restored, it is not available in a high resolution format. The 1960 restoration, however, can be seen at relatively high resolution on Blu-Ray as a special feature in L’Âge d’Or, A Film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: Dual Format Edition (London: British Film Institute, 2011).
85 Source: personal email correspondence with Ferran Alberich.
86 There may be a scorpion, a tarantula and several beetles, but to be sure, one would need to view under magnification a thoroughly restored ultra-high-resolution digital transfer of the scene: something not currently available.
87 For example, ‘all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation’, Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1990) 10.
88 Williams, Figures of Desire, 99–100.
89 Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal, trans. White, 125. Others who have commented on the importance of Buñuel's early theoretical writings include: Paul Begin, ‘Buñuel, Eisenstein, and the “Montage of Attractions”: An Approach to Film in Theory and Practice’, BSS, LXXXIII:8 (2006), 1113–32; Sarah Cooper, ‘Surreal Souls: Un chien andalou and Early French Film Theory’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Stone & Gutiérrez-Albilla, 141–55; and Tom Conley, ‘Buñuel Entomographer: From Las Hurdes to Robinson Crusoe’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Stone & Gutiérrez-Albilla, 188–201.
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