Introduction: She sits in the soft and bright light, embroidering lace intently. In the foreground of the harmonious and warm picture on the left is a cushion embroidered with three stripes-symbolizing the beautiful order she weaves. This is a small painting by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), which was printed in an album for viewing by a woman in the late 1920s. The good-quality silk skirt and neat curly hair of the woman in the painting show that she comes from a wealthy family. The woman who looks at the painting has exquisite makeup, wears a pearl necklace, gemstone ring and gold bracelet, and is dressed in a stylish fine checkered dress. In the boudoir with striped wallpaper, a man is waiting.
The life landscape of the middle-class Dutch family in the 17th century drifted to Spain in the 20th century through the artist's brushes and printing techniques. The respect for a decent and harmonious family life is a spontaneous social concept in Spanish soil. In 1900 and 1904, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali were born in two enviable decent families in Spain. They have received strict Catholic education since childhood, but they have all grown into deviant young artists. Bunuel rebelled against Catholicism, which represses human nature, and the middle-class family life that integrates the individual into the social order. In 1924, Breton published the "Manifesto of Surrealism", proposing that works of art should express the true process of thought without being corrected by reason, beauty and morality. Buñuel, who believed in Freud's psychoanalysis, became a surrealist. In 1928 (time in doubt), Dali co-wrote the screenplay for the movie "An Andalu Dog" with him, which was produced and directed by Bunuel. They tried to use this film to attack the audience's values and challenge the audience's aesthetic habits and artistic taste. Of course, the more important purpose is to mock the current "avant-garde film artists" who play mysteriously with light and shadow effects and get into rhythmic montage skills, but "sometimes specifically show a completely popular and reasonable atmosphere." What director Buñuel wants to do is to use video technology to realize the free expression of ideas, rather than indulging in fictional rationality and cliché narratives. The experiment he did in "An Andalu Dog" is to use images to simulate the automatic mechanism of the subconscious mind, creating motion images similar to dreams-expressing his views on sex and death, and how sex is in a civilized society Exploited and exploited in a structured manner. Soon after the prologue of the shocking "eye-cutting" scene in "An Andalu Dog", it was the scene described at the beginning of this article. It seems to be the most common and least "surrealist" in the whole film, and it seems that viewing paintings is just what the director randomly finds for the actress. But the scene of a woman watching "Girl Making Lace" is an important detail that reveals the director's intentions of "An Andalu Dog". It reveals women's expectations for the ideal family life of the middle class. After the prologue is over, the first scene of the feature film shows a young man riding a bicycle on the street to a certain place. The white baby suit is eye-catchingly put on the outside of his dark suit. A close-up shot was taken on his chest-a box decorated with stripes hung around his neck with a keyhole (the box contained a striped tie, which we will see later in the scene). The next scene is a woman in a striped room watching a picture book of middle-class family life. "Striped box/striped tie/keyhole in the box" and "striped room/striped cushion in the painting/woman" form a complete psychoanalytic combination. The destination of the baby-like man is the female room (womb). The woman's room, clothing, and the paintings she admired are all striped. She will also take out the striped tie from the striped box and expect the baby man to wear the strap of the adult man. The stripe symbolizes order. It decorates the woman's clothing in the film and binds the man's collar, which is the boundary of men's desires. Order restrains the instinct of mankind's frenzy, and shapes a civilized, orderly and harmonious society.
(Screenshot from "An Andalu Dog") The woman heard the sound of a bicycle (perhaps a bell, not shown in the film), nervously threw away the picture album, and ran to the window to watch. She saw the baby man with an expression of surprise and disgust. The man fell downstairs at the woman's house, and the woman saw through the window and hurried downstairs to kiss him. She got the man, took him into the room, arranged his clothes and tie, and put them on the bed. At this time, the woman became the helper and manager of the man, like the man's mother. She stared at the collar with the striped tie, fantasizing that the tie was already tied, like a mother expecting her son to grow up.
(The woman looks at the open collar of her clothes, the fantasy tie is already tied) (The screenshot is taken from the third scene of the "An Andalu Dog" feature film "Eight Years Later") The character identity of "An Andalu Dog" is fluid, and men are sometimes A baby, sometimes a young man with a strong sexual desire, sometimes his own father, he is also a murderer who kills himself (father). The relationship between men and women is also fluid: sons/mothers, sexual assailants/victims, husband and wife, boyfriends and girlfriends wrestling with each other. The transformation of the character's identity is irrational like a dream, but it conforms to the logic of subconscious interpretation. The man who took off the baby clothes found a hole in his palm, and black ants crawled out of the hole. This is a classic lens in the history of film, which has been interpreted by countless critics as a "black hole of male desire". I agree with the view that "hand" symbolizes sexual desire and instinct. It is a general metaphor for the "hand" that appears many times in this film. Unusual hands appear three times in the film, and they appear in different situations. I think the specific connotations of the three hands of desire are also different. The first time is the hand of development. The hand symbolizes desire and male genitals. The black ants that crawl out are a symbol of the desire of adolescent males, and also a metaphor for the growth of the second sexual characteristic of hair. At this moment, the man had just taken off the baby clothes, and he was confused about the ant hole in his hand. However, after the palm of the anthole, a woman’s dark armpit hair and a piercing black sea urchin are superimposed in turn, suggesting sexual impulses and danger to women.
The second time, it was the hand of desire. The protagonist and heroine saw a broken hand on the street from the window. A neutral man wearing a men's upper body and a skirt wearing a skirt was playing with this broken hand. There was a crowd of onlookers. The police dispersed the onlookers and ordered the neutral man to put the severed hand into the striped box-it is forbidden to expose desire, and instinct should be restrained by order. Then the neutral man stood alone on the road with the box in his arms, and the man excitedly expected the neutral man to be killed by a car on the road. The neutral man was really killed, symbolizing the end of childhood. Men are conscious of their desires.
The film next shows the plot of a man forcibly stroking a woman's breasts. Here, the image of the female body hidden by the striped clothing is superimposed on the image of the female nude. This represents a man’s sexual fantasies. In the process of fantasizing, the man becomes a dead body with bleeding from the corner of his mouth. This reveals Bunuel's view of the consequences of sexual desire. The woman is still in good condition. She went from resisting to enduring sexual assault by men, but finally escaped from the man's hands. She stepped across the bed, and he also stepped across the bed (which may imply that they had a sexual relationship), and the man used his killer-to propose. So we saw the installation art that critics are keen to analyze-the man dragged two thick hemp ropes with two Catholic priests tied to the hemp ropes, two elegant upright grand pianos, each on the piano. A donkey carcass with eyeballs gouged out. Satisfying sexual desire requires legalization of sexual relations through marriage. To get married, you must strive to gain religious approval and the ability to maintain a decent living standard of middle-class families. But Buñuel tells us through the video that it is ridiculous to think that religion is permitted, and that set of values in the civilized world is stubborn and decadent (a metaphor of a dead donkey). In order to satisfy sexual desire, men have to accept the discipline of social system and values and become a diligent husband.
The third time, it was the hand of abstinence. This happened when a man tried to obtain a woman's body through marriage. The woman fled behind the door and clamped the man's hand with the door. Dense black ants crawled out of the black hole in their hands, which is a sign of sexual maturity and vigorous sexual desire. The man struggled, and finally closed his palm. The woman saw a man in a baby suit lying on the bed, smiling slyly.
"An Andalu Dog" is a recognized anti-rational and anti-narrative film. On the one hand, it is because of the fluidity of the character's identity, and the character's actions and shots are highly metaphorical. On the other hand, it is because of its smooth image time. It makes it impossible for people to construct a complete self-sufficient story according to causal logic and chronological order. The time reminders appearing in the film are: "Once upon a time", "Eight years later", "Three o'clock in the morning", "Seventeen years ago", "In spring", they actually do not have any temporal impetus to the narrative—— In dreams, the concept of time is not clear, and time is often jumped or mixed. Although it is not a narrative movie, "An Andalu Dog" still has the motivation to promote the development of "story". This is the confrontational relationship between "stripe (civilization and order)" and "hand (sexuality and instinct)". Stripe disciplines to proceed, while the hand keeps trying to resist. It violently grabbed the striped-wrapped female breast, it shot and killed the "Order Me/Father" in a plaid suit, and it stroked the fantasy naked girl's jade back. After the man returned the baby, the subtitle "Three o'clock in the morning" appeared. A man wearing a top hat and a checkered suit rang the doorbell roughly-the location of the woman's room also shifted from the second floor to the first floor. The man came to the baby man's bed and began to beat and scold him. Teaching a cowardly son like an authoritarian father. He took off the baby man's baby clothes and punished him to stand in the corner. At first, the man's face was not visible on the screen, until the subtitle "Seventeen Years Ago" appeared and the man turned around, we saw that the man's face was exactly the same as the baby man. The adult male saw the dusty desk and fell into nostalgic reverie. He picked up the textbook (an extension of the school organization) and handed it to the young man. When he turned and walked to the door, the young man took the opportunity to pull out a pistol and killed him.
The mirror flashed in the film reveals that these two identical men are actually different life choices of the same person. The plaid suit and the woman’s plaid dress indicate that they are a married couple who abide by order. This man who wears a plaid suit and obeys the ideal and orderly family life expected by women and society has exposed his true desires and desires before his death. Belief. He visualized the Bairun back of the naked woman in the forest, and rushed to stroke it. However, the fantasy of this naked woman disappeared, and he fell alone in the instinct wood, not in the woman's house. The space has happened again, following his fantasy, a real transformation has taken place. After his death, several men found him and collected his body (several people are like Christ carrying the cross or suffering).
The man killed the disciplined himself and competed with her again in the women's room. At this point, Bunuel once again used imaging technology to perform magic. The woman entered the room and saw a moth with a skull pattern on its back on the wall. She stared at it angrily, and when the camera went back to the wall, the moth was replaced by a man. The man covered his mouth with his hand, and when he took it down, his mouth disappeared, and then the woman's armpit hair grew in this position. Women see it as a challenge. She used lipstick to enhance the color of her lips, but she found that she had no armpit hair. We don't know if her armpit hair was stolen by a man or if she removed her own hair. However, hairlessness is a modern society's requirement for women's bodies, and women's armpit hair exists in the face of men's sexual violence. At this point, the man has completely broken with the woman who is no longer sexy in the order. Sex and order empower a woman. With this power, she can form a family that conforms to social ideals. This family uses order and rules to suppress desire and turns the woman’s husband into a son. The misogyny and marriage phobia in "An Andalu Dog" can be seen (the prologue of the film is a man who imagines that he has cut a woman's eyeballs). The woman and the man in the film left the hut after a contest. She put on a striped silk scarf and kissed a man wearing a striped vest by the sea. The man accepted her in a cool and well-behaved manner, and the two strolled along the beach. At this time, the film appeared subtitles prompting: "In the spring", and then it turned into the next scene: two corpses with their upper bodies exposed on the beach, the woman is wearing a striped swimsuit, and the man is behind a huge ant.
The combination of sexual desire and order leads people to death! This 17-minute experimental video conveys the destructive power of sexual desire and its irreconcilability with order. It is like a code, condensing the various relationship scenarios that a man may experience with a woman from a baby to an adult. The hysterical desire struggles of the hero and heroine are arranged in a smooth period of time, showing to the world that human sexuality has been alienated and exploited by the civilized order of historical synchronicity (although he did not discuss female sexuality). Eisenstein, the pioneer of the montage school, failed to make "Das Kapital", but I think Bunuel made "Civilization and Its Shortcomings."
(The main content of this article was published in the January 2018 issue of Movie World)
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