Essay discussing how Bunuel's surrealist films rejected conventional Hollywood conventions.
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Course
Film History
Institution
OCR
Essay discussing how Bunuel's surrealist films rejected conventional Hollywood conventions. Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or. Salavador Dali. Surrealism. Experimental films. OCR Film History Section B. A Level Film Studies.
Bunuel rejected the conventional Hollywood narrative contemporary audience were
accustomed to. Instead, he created a complex, indefinable illustration of the subconscious.
Audiences feebly attempt to draw meaning from sequence, where there is none to find,
creating an ambiguity in the narrative that is both unsettling and liberating.
One way in which narrative ambiguity is created is through Bunuel’s use of title cards that
give the illusion of a coherent succession of events. In Un Chien Andalou, the title card ’16
years ago’ appears, followed by a shot in the same place with the same people. This disrupts
the viewers’ belief of time and space. Another intertitle in Un Chien Andalou reads ‘in the
spring’. The spring often connotes ideas of rebirth and loveliness, however, Bunuel follows
this with a grotesque image of death and dismemberment as the couple is buried and
tortured. These title cards give the illusion of a story but instead; they confuse the viewers’
sense of special awareness. Bunuel does something similar in L’Age D’Or. He begins the film
with an extended sequence of scorpions, with intertitles that give accurate information
about the images seen. Anyone whose familiar with Bunuel’s work would see that this is
unlike Bunuel to make rational sense, however, as the film goes on, you realise just how out
of place the sequence was in relation to the rest of the ‘narrative’. Creating an ambiguity of
whether this is a documentary or fiction.
The sound in L’Age D’Or also proposes a false sense of relation. The cowbells continue to
sound after the cow on the bed sequence ends. This suggests that the cow is nearby but it is
never shown. The film continues but still the sound is heard, the sound appears to link a shot
of the man and the woman despite being in separate locations and backgrounds, this gives a
false link, almost alike to the Kuleshov effect in which two consecutive shots forge a relation
in the viewers’ mind, despite there being no link. This effect is actually seen in Un Chien
Andalou, with the woman and the eye being stretched open, next is a shot of a cloud slicing
the moon (a supposed graphic match), then, an extreme close up of an eye of a calf appears.
Never explicitly in the link made but Bunuel appears to suggest a relationship in this
sequence that just isn’t there. These 3 shots in sequence appear to tell a story, however the
woman appears unharmed ‘later’ on and the shots had no relation. These random shots are
then ambiguous and do not form a narrative unlike what our mind has forced us to think.
Editing is used by Bunuel to create an ambiguity of narrative. He leads the audience on by
using intertitles that indicate a time and space but actual it’s the same, similarly, sound and
sequencing suggests correlations that don’t actually exist. This leaves the story ambiguous,
as in whether you want to interpret a link or not to form a narrative in your mind.
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