"Un Chien Andalou" - "In a Lonely Place"
* The article was published in 2018
in the online magazine Art and Crime
of the Criminal Law Department of the Law School
of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Crime itself is not logically something that should concern a creator, an artist. Crime pertains to society and its respective laws. It therefore concerns science and those who study the functioning of society.
Most movies or novels dealing with crimes do nothing but offer a realistic recording of police investigation procedures or a criminal trial with a few dramatized dialogues added. This is why they are commonly referred to as detective movies and novels.
Crime becomes interesting to the creator when it is connected to the inner moral world of people and when it reveals the explosion of emotions that caused it. For example, if a crime causes a death and the cause is love, the creator is interested in the death and the love, not the crime as an act.
In the two films mentioned below, crime exists as an excuse, as a pretext among others to build a cinematic world and to formulate an artistic proposal.
In the case of Luis Buñuel, his freedom is unlimited. He owns the production. He operates in the intellectual milieu of interwar Paris and addresses a specialized art-loving audience. He is therefore free to play and engage with the foundation of film language, which is narration. Buñuel goes beyond narration and arbitrarily presents elements of reality, leaving the viewer the responsibility (and possibly the joy) to wander in the area where dreams tend to become reality.
Two decades later, Nicholas Ray, a great admirer of Buñuel, made an equally wonderful film, only he operated within the narrow confines of the entertainment industry and addressed a broad audience, from art lovers and connoisseurs to ordinary people seeking quality entertainment, albeit accessible. Constraints often are not the enemy of the artist. And the need to communicate with a broader audience does not necessarily constitute an unacceptable or prohibitive limitation. In this case, Ray chose to maintain the logical sequence of narration but to shift the core of interest from the plot itself to the emotional conflicts. Of course, the film was not a commercial success. Otherwise, we would be living in a different world.
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), 1929
Director: Luis Buñuel
Script: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí
Director of Photography: Albert Duverger
Production: Luis Buñuel
Cast: Pierre Batcheff (the man), Simòne Mareuil (the girl), Luis Buñuel (the man with the razor), Fano Mesan (the woman who observes the severed hand)
The great Luis Buñuel, the most important Spanish director, at the age of 29 in Paris, made his first cinematic attempt with a short film, 17 minutes long. And thus was born one of the most brilliant masterpieces of cinema.
A series of unrelated scenes without reference to metaphors, symbolism, or analogies form a poetic whole that reveals all the subsequent obsessions of the director: love, death, violence, crime, religion, education, even his love for insects. Any attempt to interpret the scenes will be in vain.
The listing of the script elements in the following paragraph shows that it is not about a plot but about a montage of scenes, a listing of moments, which emerged associatively from the subconscious of the director and are almost automatically recomposed through the presence of the viewer:
A man with a razor on a balcony. The razor cuts the eyeball of a girl, at the same moment a cloud slices through the full moon. A man rides a bicycle holding a box and falls on the sidewalk. A woman reading a book about Vermeer runs to lift him. The woman represents the image of the man with his clothes on an empty bed. Another man looks at ants coming out of his palm. Another woman on the street looks at a severed hand surrounded by a crowd. A car passes by and kills her in the middle of the road. The scene is watched from the window by the previous man and the previous woman. The man attacks the woman erotically. She grabs a tennis racket to defend herself. He drags two ropes, a grand piano, two live monks, and two dead donkeys. The man who was killed with the bicycle rises from the bed. Another man is in the room and puts the first man in the corner for punishment. The first man holds two books in his hands that transform into pistols with which he kills the second man. He falls dead on a statue in a meadow. The police come to investigate the crime scene. Back in the room, the woman is erotically attacked by the man who caresses her naked. The woman is on a beach with the man. Both of them are suddenly buried up to the waist in the sand. Intertitles specify the timing of the action, complicating it ("Once upon a time", "Eight years later", "At three in the morning", "Sixteen years ago", "In the spring").
In a later equally important film of his ("The Exterminating Angel"), the director had placed the following phrase, which could characterize all his work and could accompany "An Andalusian Dog":
"If the film you are about to see confuses or even disturbs you, it happens because ultimately this is also how life is. The creator states that he did not want to present any symbol, or at least not consciously. Just like in life, this film has some repetitions and is open to various interpretations and just as we relive or rebuild pieces of life, so do parts of our history reappear. The best interpretation of this film is that from the standpoint of pure logic, there is no interpretation."
In "An Andalusian Dog", there is crime, there is an erotic relationship, there is tenderness and violence, there are almost all the themes that have nurtured the history of cinema, to prove that the themes are nothing but the occasion, the framework, through which the transformation of a recognizable reality emerges, a transformation that owes its existence to the handling of the artistic language of cinema and not to the narration, which in this case recedes in front of the presentation of images. The narrative is open to the viewer's reactions.
The idea for the film started from discussions between Buñuel and his then friend, Dalí. Specifically, from a dream of the latter about ants sprouting from his palm and another dream of the former about a razor that slit his mother's eye. This pushed them to design a film without a beginning or end, but also without connections, a film that would have the logic of dreams and the unconscious. Each proposed images and the other accepted or rejected them. Images that sprung from their dreams, imagination, or past. Like the dead donkeys that reminded Buñuel of the first corpse (of a donkey) he had seen in Calanda. In this choice, they first sought to make the succession of images appear unrealistic and secondly not entirely arbitrary. So as to create the impression in the viewer of a delusional sequence of scenes. The scenes needed to have verisimilitude, but the verisimilitude of dreams, where the sequence of events seems credible, although it does not withstand logical analysis.
However, it is impressive that, although this is his first film, there is a remarkable control of structure, frame, lighting, angles, and overall a robust direction that still retains its unparalleled freshness from beginning to end and creates a sense of hidden surprise without relying on sensationalism.
The music accompanying the film (an excerpt from Wagner's "Tristan" and Argentine tangos) is precisely what the director himself chose and played on a turntable in a completely arbitrary manner during the premiere. Although not so arbitrary, since the stitching of the scenes with the different music choices creates an illusion of narration.
When the film ended, Buñuel expected jeers, and he even had stones in his pocket to throw at the audience. To his great surprise, however, he heard the applause of the viewers, who were mostly art-loving aristocrats and patrons of Paris. This partly saddened him because he considered suspicious a film that so easily gains the appreciation of many. He then wrote: "What can I do against these idiots who found beautiful or poetic what is fundamentally nothing but a call to death full of despair and passion?".
This film opened the arms of the Surrealists to Buñuel, but it also caused their first conflict. Buñuel promised the publisher Gallimard (the epitome of the bourgeoisie according to the Surrealists) to give him the script of his film for publication in a magazine of his (NRF, "Nouvelle Revue Française"). The Surrealists had intended it for a surrealist print in Belgium. When the director told them he had promised it to the French publisher, they replied that the word of a Surrealist does not count and imposed on him to go to the print shop to destroy the plate. However, the text had already been printed.
This film is the first and last where Buñuel was his own producer. He took a sum of money from his mother, arguing that almost the same amount had been given to his sisters to get married. He spent half in cabarets with his friends and the rest on the production of the film.
The title of the film is due to an earlier poetic collection of his and was chosen because there is nothing Andalusian and no dog in the film.
In a Lonely Place (In a Lonely Place), 1950
Director: Nicholas Ray
Screenplay: Edmund H. North, Andrew Solt, based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes Director of Photography: Burnett Guffey
Music: George Antheil
Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Dixon Steele, the screenwriter), Gloria Grahame (Laurel Gray, the actress)
The film industry in Hollywood does not support movies that cannot be easily categorized. And if there is a crime, obviously the perpetrator must be found, and the film must be built on this plot.
Nicholas Ray was one of Hollywood's most important directors and knew the rules. In 1948, after having worked as an assistant to the also significant Elia Kazan, he made his first film (They Lived by Night) and two years later shot his third film titled In a Lonely Place starring the already famous Humphrey Bogart. Bogart gave his best in this role, perhaps because the role identified with himself. The first female role in the film was held by the also well-known actress Gloria Grahame, who was married to Ray but in the process of separating.
The plot of the film is seemingly simple and unadorned, as is usually (and logically) the case in any notable film. If the plot is labyrinthine, then the viewer will be anxious to follow it, and the director must be consumed in the effort to make the plot comprehensible, without being overshadowed by the directorial writing.
The narrative canvas is as follows: A well-known screenwriter, with a rebellious and rather violent character, was suspected of murdering a girl, whom he had met for the first time on the night of her murder. A young actress and neighbor of the screenwriter, who testified as a simple witness to their meeting, is also involved in the case. However, the acquaintance of the screenwriter with the actress quickly developed into an enthusiastic love affair. Meanwhile, the murderer is not found, no charges are filed, but the suspicions against the screenwriter are not erased. The actress, although in love, doubts as well, he senses it, resulting in his violence, although justified in this case, worsening his situation. In the end, when the police officer calls the couple to declare that the real culprit confessed, the couple has just clashed and separated under the weight of the lack of trust.
The film adopts the external elements of a detective thriller or a film noir, but in reality, it is nothing but a love story. And a love story is only interesting when love is threatened. And love is not only threatened by an external presence but also by an internal subversion. By the shaking of complicity and trust. Ray's dying marital relationship with Grahame probably influenced him. Ray even hid the separation from the producers, so he could finish his work undistracted, and he secretly slept in the studio at night.
The hero of Ray has all the characteristics that fit the director himself and that we find in all the characters of his films. He has an obvious difficulty in expressing his feelings. This is already punished in society. The police officer considers him guilty from the moment he did not show apparent sorrow for the death of the girl he had just met. However, he had discreetly managed to send flowers to her funeral. Whenever he decides to express his feelings, he does so like a steamroller. Thus, the moment he takes the courage to ask for his beloved's hand, he ends up making her suffocate.
Ray knows well the environment where his hero lives, Hollywood, and knows that it is a "lonely place," which crushes the unsuccessful. The screenwriter supports his friend and drunk actor, because he sees in him his possible own image. He fears the moment he gives an autograph, lest he be "the nobody," as the boy who asks for it tells him.
His anger and violence are parallel manifestations with the outbreak of his love. When someone is closed and "opens" outward with difficulty, then the "opening" will always be an explosion. Good or bad. His agent and bosom friend, however, has managed what the girl couldn't: to accept the screenwriter and friend as he is. Whole. She only wanted a part of him. And just as she wanted it.
But she is lonely on her part. Here we have the meeting of two lonely people, where one dares to go to the other at the moment the other hesitates. The choice of the house with two independent but neighboring apartments is highly successful. The success of the choice lies in that it is a house where the two lovers are together and apart. At first, it is she who invades the man's loneliness and enters his house as if it were her own. Later, when her suspicions begin, it is he who enters her apartment.
In the final scene, the hero sinks again into a dark tunnel of loneliness, without knowing what will follow. Loneliness is also emphasized by the looks. Their relationship begins when they look at each other. And the breakdown of it begins when, after their first fight on the beach, they stop looking at each other and instead, inside the car, each of them looks forward.
The film was based on a novel, only Ray significantly improved it. In the novel, the hero had indeed committed many crimes. Maybe something like that would help the thriller plot. But Ray did not want a thriller. He only adopted the style of a detective movie. What interested him were the emotional conflicts and dead ends. However, one of the significant discoveries of the film is that the viewer is carried away by the woman's suspicion and begins to doubt the hero's innocence as well. When the police officer reveals the culprit, the viewer feels the same guilt that the woman would have felt.
The harsh yet romantic "line" of the film, which the screenwriter puts in the script he writes, summarizes its content with an intensely poetic manner: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."
Plato Rivellis