Hitchcock Annual (1994) - The Branded Eye: Buñuel's Un Chien andalou
Details
- book review: The Branded Eye: Buñuel's Un Chien andalou
- author(s): Alexander Doty
- journal: Hitchcock Annual (1994)
- issue: page 175
- journal ISSN: 1062-5518
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dalí, Spellbound (1945)
Links
Abstract
Review of "The Branded Eye: Buñuel's Un Chien andalou" - by Jenaro Talens
Article
The Branded Eye: Bunuel's Un Chien andalou. Jenaro Talens. Translated by Giulia Colaizzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxiv + 192 pages. $14.95 paper.
Reviewed by ALEXANDER DOTY
Among the few filmmakers and films Alfred Hitchcock would admit he admired and was influenced by were Luis Buñuel and Un Chien andalou. If nothing else, using Buñuel's Un Chien andalou collaborator Salvador Dali to design the dream sequences in Spellbound attests to Hitchcock's desire to be Buñuelian. But, as Jenaro Talens points out in his introduction to The Branded Eye, over the years Un Chien andalou has been "reduc[ed] to the avant garde's artistic fetish" (xxiv). As a result, it has become one of those famous films which are automatically gushed over, even while it is subjected to scant critical commentary aside from "allegorical interpretations" (xxiv).
With The Branded Eye, Talens subjects Un Chien andalou to a detailed academic going‑over, analyzing the film's structural qualities as well as the art history contexts in which it has been placed. What Talens discovers is that Un Chien andalou is neither surrealist, perverse, nor transgressive, really, in spite of what previous film and art commentators (and even Bunuel himself) have suggested. Defining the film as apart from both classical narrative and avant garde reactions to the classical, Talens proclaims Un Chien andalou a profoundly radical work: a subversive "poetic discourse" which questions the act of reading texts in order to "produce sense" (22‑23).
In order to set up his analysis of Un Chien andalou, Talens provides a chapter which offers a brief overview of semioticstructuralist theori...
Alexander Doty teaches Popular Culture and Film at Lehigh University. He is the author of Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, published by University of Minnesota Press.
