(1929; b/w) To this challenging, provocative, 17-minute, silent movie, a soundtrack (Carl Bamberger conducting the Opera Orchestra of Frankfurt for Richard Wagner's Prelude and Isolde's Death) was supplied in 1960. Director Luis Buñuel and avant-garde artist Salvador Dali produced in their only collaboration (a second effort failed to materialize) a seminal, experimental, surreal French cinema with actors Simonne Mareuil and Pierre Batchef.

In the opening scene, "Once upon a time …" Buñuel appears, sharpening a razor while smoking a cigarette before going to a balcony to view a full moon - as a thin cloud crosses the face of the moon, he slices open a woman's eye.

A collage of hallucinatory, nightmarish images collide, involving Eros and Thanatos, sexual obsessions and death. "Eight years later …" a man riding a bicycle, wearing a nun's white cowl and short skirt over his clothes, carrying a diagonally-striped box hanging from his neck, falls over in the street. A woman in a flat above rushes down to kiss his unconscious face before removing a striped necktie (wrapped in striped paper) from the box, attaching it to a starched collar and laying it along with the other outer-garment items on a bed.

A different man appears, staring intently at his hand from which ants emerge from a hole in his palm. In the street below them they watch a young woman poking with a cane at a severed man's hand as a crowd gathers around; a police officer picks up the hand and places it in a striped box before handing it to her. Embracing the box (penis envy?) as if it were the most precious object in the world, she's struck down by a car.

Back inside the apartment, the man fondles the woman's breasts (images of her both clothed and naked) until she pushes him away and dashes to a corner, raising a tennis racket in self-defense. He grabs two ropes and begins tugging with all his might, dragging two pianos (a pair of priests) draped with the head of an animal, its eye oozing. The woman escapes out the door, catching the man's hand with the ants crawling out its aperture.

"Three in the morning …" the door bell rings; the woman lets a man enter from below; he removes the white garments from the bicyclist (who has taken form where the items on the bed had been laid), tossing them out the window. The bicyclist is directed to face the wall with his arms outstretched beside a tennis racket (suggestive of a crucifix).

"Sixteen years earlier …" another male presence hands the man facing the wall a pair of books from a desk in the room; the books become pistols with which the man shoots the other. As the victim falls, he reaches for the bare back of a woman in a clearing in the woods; a group of men inspect the corpse and carry it off as two other men strolling by showing only mild interest.

In the flat the woman's attention is drawn to the image of a skull on the back of a moth clinging to the wall. A man wipes his mouth off his face as the woman applies lipstick to hers; she makes faces at him and departs, joining a young man on the rocky shore, whom she embraces and kisses before they stroll down the strand, coming upon the broken striped box and wet white garments of the bicyclist.

"In spring …" the head and torso of a man and woman appear above ground, either buried like debris or emerging like flowers.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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