The dodgy title of "Andalusian Dog" shows its independence and uncompromisingness. A major surrealist film, and certainly its most influential, The Lost Dog was in fact created long before the young Spanish director joined the formal movement. The razor-cut eyeball acts as a symbol of attacking canonical vision and the comfort of the audience, where the audience's proxy screen-eye is attacked. The abstraction of painting is shaken by a still, eye-level camera, while the poetic lyrical film is mocked by a frenzy of dislocation and incongruous editing that shatters time and space, a post-cubism that questions the certainty of seeing. Montage style. The film is also interrupted from time to time with invisible, silly intertitles to deliver a heavier blow to "silent" cinema, both mainstream and avant-garde, detracted from the absurd. The film is widely known for its supposedly deliberate and mysterious "symbolism"—the protagonist's fascination with striped objects, a priest on a yoke, a donkey, and a grand piano, a woman's butt melted into her chest, moths on a dead man's head, and blood-eating creatures. Ants - has long been a topic of discussion among critics, but more recently attention has been shifted to the editing structure in which these images are captured. Constructing irrational spaces from rooms, stairs and streets, and distorted time sequences, the film's two male protagonists are embarrassingly alike, and their identities are ambiguous.
In the history of avant-garde cinema, there have been roughly two main styles of production: the Man Ray tradition, which is shorter in length and has devious themes; and the abstract German cinema, which usually sets a Different spaces, during which stable perception is disturbed, the film attempts to make the subject and the image unrecognizable. An Andalusian Dog sets an alternative mode in which elements of narrative and performance evoke psychological engagement and entry into the plot or scene, while at the same time alienating through the prohibition of empathy, meaning, and closure audience. What is produced is an image of a sort of detachment, or a sort of "dual consciousness" that the Surrealists applauded in their criticism of naturalism.
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