from a historical point of view, this film was a strong resistance to the so-called "avant-garde film" at that time, which used light and shadow processing, photographic effects, and montage rhythm techniques. The careful deliberation, and the very traditional and rational tone presented from time to time, go all out to appeal to the sensibility of art and the rationality of the audience. ...In "An Andalusian Dog", the filmmaker is positioned for the first time on a purely "poetic and spiritual" level ("spirit" here refers to what governs dreams or parasympathetic inhibition). Anything rational, aesthetic, or highly technical is excluded from the plot design. Measured by traditional norms, it is a deliberately anti-styling, anti-art film. The plot of the film is the product of an obvious automatism. In this sense, it does not attempt to retell a dream, although it makes use of dream-like techniques... The motives of the images are, or aim at, utterly irrational! Those images are mysterious and inexplicable to both the film's two collaborators and the audience. In this film, "nothing" means "everything". Perhaps the only way to study these symbols is psychoanalysis.
(From Louis Buñuel's "Notes on the Shooting of "An Andalusian Dog")
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