You brace yourself and pray you are wrong. It’s too late; the man slowly drags the razor blade across her iris, spilling the inner stuffing from inside the eyeball. Your stomach drops and you realize that only thirty seconds have passed. What an inconceivable way to begin a film, leaving the viewer horrified and repulsively intrigued! The scene ends abruptly and the text reads, “Eight years later.” The film promptly dives into another unrelated bizarre scene. This trend continues and the scenes following each other grow increasingly nonsensical over the course of fifteen minutes.

You try to make sense of the random scenes and search for some semblance of a plot, but alas, nothing. There is neither enough time nor context to comprehend the assumed symbolism embedded in each scene of the production. The film emerges as a compilation of several arbitrary scenes that cannot be understood through comparison or reason. Dalí and Buñuel, in fact, agreed that “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted” when writing the script. Similar ideology influenced the Beatles in the creation of “I am the Walrus.” These artists reject notions of inherent symbolism that often diminish the significance of art and instead favor impulse reactions to their work. Un Chien Andalou suggests that surrealist works are perhaps not to be understood, only felt.