People do not know how to deal with meaninglessness because they spend their entire lives looking for truths that guide them. It is desperate when they encounter something clearly meaningless that they can not control. But .... Life, in itself, boils down to that, does not it?

Un Chien Andalou is a compelling silent-movie depicting the nonsensical dreams of Luis Bunuel and collaborator Salvador Dali. Establishing himself as a surrealist and a unique visionary, Bunuel uses violence, sex and shock to create a wonderful nightmarish concoction of reality and fantasy. The director blurs the lines regarding to "what is" and "what is not". Written in just three weeks, Un Chien Andalou is perhaps one of the most profound films in cinema and a beacon of artistic compulsion. The film is not nearly as clean nor structured as Bunuel's later works, yet it is a fantastic reference to "where it all began" and beautifully summarises Bunuel's legacy as a filmmaker.

Some believe that horror lies in the unknown: the monsters, ghosts, werewolves, aliens and psychopaths of our imaginations, but others realise that true horror lies in what we do know, what we're forced to know: the everyday repressive and oppressive sexual and social atmosphere of normal daily life; the smothering banality of a repetitive existence.Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were anything but banal. Their masterpiece of Freudian surrealism, 'Un Chien Andalou' presents for your enjoyment the bizarre world of 'sex' -- lust versus fear; boredom versus insanity; guilt versus freedom; the male versus the female. Being a sexual male is a terrifying, oppressive, confusing and painful experience; being a sexual woman is even more so. 'Un Chien Andalou' successfully painted this age-old picture in a daring new language.Whether a grinning male watches from his window as an androgynous woman with a severed hand in a box is mowed down by a car, or a woman shuts her aggressively advancing partner's hand in the door to trap him (a hand which is bleeding ants, stigmata-style), or a man is chastised for his lust by a father-figure (who is revealed as the woman's new lover and is shot to death by the original) -- or whether, infamously and iconically, a hand (Buñuel's, in a brief cameo) slashes a woman's eyeball from its socket (is the razor the penis and the eyeball the hymen?), this film's tone is one of extreme sexual anxiety. It's the same unbearable universe of queasy, uncomfortable dream logic angst that David Lynch borrowed from Buñuel and turned up to ten for his horrifying and often misunderstood 'Eraserhead', almost half a century later. But it's no more weird, really, than a cloud passing by the moon. But it's as violent as a razorblade to the eye.Luis Buñuel once said, "If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply, 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams'." It's a shame that this unforgettable dream of his lasts for only seventeen minutes.

Buñuel's and Dali's opus, when both were strapping young guys in Hemingway's Paris, is film pure. Even more so than 2001, a film that I rate even one notch higher.There is no story here. There are no morals. There is no deep psychology, although the Freudian crowd has of course provided pitiful interpretations for the imagery. It is just imagery. The Freudians are just like hapless children taking a Rorschach test and trying to assign meaning to random ink blots. It is well-known that the two surrealists basically just one-upped each other with their weirdest dreams, and then tried to put on the screen what the special effects and micro-budget of the day allowed. In fact, "Un Chien Andalou" is one of the grand-daddys of independent film. No studio would have touched this thing with a pole. Fatty Arbuckle jumping on actresses and literally exploding them under his weight was poppycocks by comparison.I know that when a film really impresses me, it gets me to do something difficult. After "Chien," I had to sit down and write out some of my weirdest dreams as a stream-of-consciousness short story. About 20 pages of intense writing. My brother and his wife tell me it's pretty far out - but it's not as far out as this film.For some reason, whenever I see this film, I have to think of Brian O'Nolan's "The Third Policeman," a book that starts out harmless enough but then falls into a rabbit hole so deep that it all seems like self-iterative dream."Chien" is simply surreal. If you like Dali's melting clocks and elephants on sky-high stilt legs, or Hieronymus Bosch's medieval monstrosities, you'll like this film. And if not, let razor-blue sky of the blond-eyed and blue-haired take you to the beetle crevice with the whispering headlights that roll up and down in that labyrinth of crackling plaster walls, all rounded, too soft and too steep to climb up from, so you are trapped.