Un Chien Andalou (1928)

Un chien andalou is a landmark of early avant-garde cinema. Impatient with the polite cinematic surrealism of artists like Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali wanted to stir things up and create "a despairing, passionate call to murder." Indeed, the images in Chien horrify even today, most notably the notorious eye-slashing scene near the beginning of the film. Many of the images seem to spring directly from Sigmund Freud's writings on sexual anxiety, such as breasts that mysteriously turn into a buttocks or a disembodied limb discovered by an androgyne, while others remain willfully obscure. Though the plot as such ostensibly concerns two quarrelling lovers, Buñuel and Dali gleefully destroyed all temporal and spatial continuity and systematically dismembered all forms of linear narrative and thought. Instead, meaning is created through visual associations, giving the film a thoroughly nightmarish quality. Chien went on to influence generations of filmmakers, from Maya Deren's masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to David Lynch's dark classic Eraserhead (1977), and it established the career of Buñuel, one of cinema's maverick filmmakers. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide