Un Chien Andalou

Alchemy begins with the solve, the dissolution, breaking down the coherent, hardened forms of ordinary matter into the undifferentiated prima materia from which transformation becomes possible. Un Chien Andalou is nothing but solve, sustained for sixteen minutes. Bodies flow into other bodies. A hand crawls with ants from a hole in the palm. A mouth is wiped away and replaced by armpit hair. Time itself refuses to fix, the intertitles announcing "eight years later" over a scene that continues unbroken. Nothing is permitted to congeal into stable identity.

The man drags two grand pianos loaded with dead donkeys and two live priests, an image of everything heavy and rotten in the culture, roped to him and impossible to move. This is the nigredo, the blackening, the encounter with the putrefying weight that must be confronted before anything can be reborn. The film's genius is that it never offers the coagula, the recombination into a new gold. It leaves the viewer suspended in the dissolving bath. The transformation it induces happens nowhere on the screen and everywhere in the loosened, disoriented consciousness of whoever watches without defense.

Gnosticism holds that the soul lives entombed in a false order, lulled asleep by the seeming rationality of a world that is actually a construction. The waking mind's insistence on coherence is precisely the sleep. Buñuel's cut across the eye is a gnostic operation performed on the audience: it severs the faculty that keeps the false order intact. Once linear cause is destroyed, the images arrive the way gnosis arrives, without permission and without explanation, straight from a source beneath the managed self. The film does not depict awakening. It attempts to trigger it, by refusing every handhold the sleeping mind reaches for. What is left, if the viewer surrenders, is the raw material of a psyche that has briefly stopped defending itself.