An eye, wide open, pinned still by fingers that look more like an instrument of torture than a human gesture. A straight razor, sharpened beneath a moon as slender as the razor itself, draws near. The cut to a cloud slicing across the moon is a poetic ellipsis, a moment of respite before the blade, in a brutal and intolerable close-up, sections the eyeball. It is no special effect. A calf's eye, to be sure, but the psychological impact is that of a definitive violation. With this single, unforgettable image, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí do not merely begin "Un Chien Andalou"; they commit an act of aesthetic terrorism. They declare war not on a character or a plot, but on the spectator themselves, on their passive gaze, their comfortable armchair, their demand for a safe and orderly cinematic experience. It is the most radical declaration of intent in the history of cinema: "What you are about to see will wound you. Stop looking and start seeing."

Born from a sacrilegious pact between two dreams—Buñuel’s of a cloud slicing the moon and Dalí’s of a hand swarming with ants—the film was conceived according to a single, ironclad rule: no image that could lend itself to a rational, logical, or cultural interpretation would be accepted. The result is a sixteen-minute short-circuit in the syntax of nascent cinema, a pure distillation of the Freudian unconscious freed from the chains of narrative. The temporal intertitles—"Once upon a time," "Eight years later," "Around three in the morning," "Sixteen years before"—do not mark a chronological flow, but rather mock and sabotage it. They are the false clues of a detective story with neither crime nor solution, a puzzle whose pieces belong to different boxes. Cinema, which was struggling to construct a grammar based on continuity and causality, is here torn to pieces and reassembled according to the associative logic of the dream, that same "automatic writing" that André Breton was theorizing for literature. "Un Chien Andalou" is a cadavre exquis on celluloid, a visual poem where every line is an assault and the meter is chaos.

The androgynous cyclist in a nun's habit. The hand trapped in a door, from which ants swarm like the stigmata of putrefaction. The two grand pianos dragged with great effort, weighted down by decomposing donkey carcasses and two live priests (one played by Dalí himself), like an intolerable burden composed of the pillars of bourgeois culture: high art, religion, morality. Each sequence is a hieroglyph of the unconscious, a rebus whose key is not comprehension, but emotional experience. Buñuel, a militant atheist and a scourge of the bourgeoisie throughout his career, begins here to forge his iconoclastic arsenal. The man who gropes the woman's breasts with lust, which immediately transform into bare buttocks in a visual association of pure libido, is not a character but the embodiment of Desire (the Freudian Id), blocked and frustrated by the Super-Ego (the pianos, the priests, the weight of civilization).

Viewed today, the film functions as a kind of Rosetta Stone for deciphering nearly a century of avant-garde and subversive cinema. The body horror and flesh-and-blood symbolism of David Cronenberg are already here in their entirety, in the close-up of the sliced eye and the crawling hand. The oneiric, domestic, and terrifying universe of David Lynch, especially that of Eraserhead, is a direct descendant of this Parisian apartment where the laws of physics and logic are suspended. The disintegration of narrative wrought by Godard and the Nouvelle Vague seems almost like child's play compared to this primordial atomic blast against coherence. "Un Chien Andalou" is the original "glitch" in the matrix of classical cinema, the virus that infected the system to prove that another kind of visual language was possible. A language that does not narrate, but evokes; that does not explain, but manifests.

Analyzing the film becomes an exercise in psychoanalytic archaeology. The famous scene of the hand and the ants is not just a powerful image, but a recurring fetish in Dalí's work, tied to his childhood memories, his fear of death, and his fascination with decay. The book that the man forces his alter ego to brandish like a weapon, before the latter is shot and falls, clinging to the back of a nude woman in a park, is another inextricable knot of desire, repressive education (the Marist Brothers, another Buñuelian target), and violence. These are not symbols to be decoded with a manual, but rather "poetic facts," as Buñuel called them—images that strike the psyche on a pre-rational level, bypassing the intellect's defenses to speak directly to the unconscious. It is a cinematic experience closer to a session of hypnosis or an induced hallucination than to a traditional viewing.

Its first public screening, in 1929 at the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, is the stuff of legend. Buñuel, fearing a violent reaction from the audience, had stationed himself behind the screen with his pockets full of stones, ready to respond to a potential lynching. Instead, the Parisian intellectual and artistic elite, including the Surrealists in full force, acclaimed it as a masterpiece, the authentic cinematic expression of their movement. Paradoxically, this bourgeois and intellectual success ended up disgusting Buñuel, who saw in his film a "desperate, passionate appeal to murder" and felt betrayed by the applause of the very society he wished to destroy. This ambiguity would mark his relationship with the public for his entire life, an eternal conflict between the desire to provoke and the frustration of being assimilated and celebrated by the establishment.

To rewatch "Un Chien Andalou" today is to make a pilgrimage to the very wellspring of the modern cinematic imagination. It is a film that does not age, because it was never "contemporary" to anything. It exists in a timeless dimension, that of the dream and the nightmare. Its violence has not diminished, its power to disturb is intact, its mystery insoluble. The final sequence, with the happy, smiling couple who, in the next shot, appear buried up to their chests in sand, "blind, rotting, and devoured by the insects of the sun," is the perfect closing of this circle of desire and death. It is the ultimate mockery: even the happy ending, that most tenacious of narrative conventions, is corroded and annihilated. It is proof that cinema can be not only entertainment or art, but also a scalpel for dissecting the soul, a razor for slashing the veil of our certainties. And our eye, afterwards, is never the same.