Tangos for Buñuel

EYE
Tuesday 6 October
19:15 –

Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuels masterpiece from 1929 with tango music by Natalio Sued and Oscar Jan Hoogland.

Natalio Sued voice and clarinet
Oscar Jan Hoogland piano

Surrealism in Mexico

It’s an annual treat in EYE on Art’s Masters of the Avantgarde series: the screening of the first surrealist film, Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece of 1929 which he co-scripted with Salvador Dalí. A special detail: surrealist leader André Breton showed the film as he was touring Mexico, where he also encountered Leon Trotsky.

Almost eight decades after its premiere, Un chien andalou is still regarded as one of the absolute highlights of surrealism. The film is a supreme example of the ‘automatic writing’ favoured by the surrealists, resulting in a nightmarish dream full of images that are shocking, absurd and laden with symbolism: a razor blade slices through an eye, priests are dragging a piano covered by rotting donkey cadavers.

As he was touring Mexico in 1938, André Breton showed Un chien andalou in a programme of Hollywood films that included Jack Conway’s Viva Villa (1934), a dramatized biography of revolutionary leader Pancho Villa.

In Mexico – a country that held a great fascination for the avant-garde because of its irrational focus on life (in the Mexican perception there is no sharp distinction between dream and reality) – Breton also collaborated on one of the manifestoes of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who had fled to Mexico.

Soviet director Eisenstein had preceded Buñuel by going to Mexico (1931-1932) to film the native Dances of the Dead while Buñuel would later follow him to make films like Los Olvidados (1950), Simon of the Desert (1965) and The Exterminating Angel (1962), films that are strongly related to surrealism.