Un Chien Andalou (1929)

There are very few films from the silent period that have imagery so vivid that even people with a casual interest in films are aware of them. Fritz Lang's Maria robot from Metropolis is one. I'd argue that the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one also. But probably the most shocking and arresting scene of all silent cinema is to be found in 1929's Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), which was the first of two Surrealist films to come from the collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

The scene itself is the first scene in the 16-minute film. A man (played by Buñuel) is seen sharpening a cutthroat razor on leather. He walks out onto a balcony, his face surrounded by Gauloise smoke. He looks up to the night sky moon and sees the bright moon about to be pierced by a thin cloud. We then cut to a closeup of a woman, her left eye being held open by the man. The scene goes back to the moon as the cloud cuts into it. Return then to an extreme closeup of the woman's eye as the man's razor cuts into it, spilling the clear gel from inside the eyeball.

Anyone who has ever witnessed the scene will find it as unforgettable as any image from cinema, and it is possibly even more shocking given that no context for the scene is offered. No sooner has this scene finished and we're presented with a man riding his bike down the road wearing a nun's habit. Shocking indeed.
Though the Surrealist movement had been bubbling away for a few years before Un Chien Andalou was released, this is the first time that it had made a successful transition to cinema, though much literature had been written on the subject. Before I go into the film too much, it's important to understand what 'Surrealism' is defined as, especially since after World War II it has found itself all but dropped from the English language:

Surrealism, n. a style of art and literature... stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.

So basically it's trying to give voice to dreamlike (subconscious) imagery. This is significant because Buñuel and Dalí both took their inspiration for making the film from dreams that they'd had: Buñuel had a dream in which "a long tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razor slicing through an eye", and Dalí had dreamed of "a hand crawling with ants". They then tried to tell a love story in the most unconventional way possible, trusting to their instincts whilst trying to be as shocking as possible. It seems that though they collaborated heavily with the script and ideas for the film, it was largely Buñuel  who did the majority of the work on set, and considering he was indeed the filmmaker of the two, this seems reasonable to presume. However, the two famously fell out whilst making their 1930 sequel, L'Age d'Or and Dalí blamed this on not being able to have full control and went on to publicly disown the film. So it's hard to be sure just how much influence Dalí, still only 25 at the time, had in  Un Chien Andalou.

What is obvious is that, though there is no traditional storyline here, the film is held up by a loose love story which Buñuel and Dalí then attempted to completely turn on its head at every opportunity. An example is in a scene with a young woman and young man in an apartment room. They watch out of their window as a woman in the street below gets hit by a car, and immediately afterwards the man tries to grope the shocked woman in the apartment. She resists him at first, before allowing him to grab  breasts. The woman stands disinterested as the leering man rubs at her breasts, and we see as he rubs her clothes fade away as he imagines her naked.

She eventually manages to push him away, and he chases her around the apartment before she hides behind a chair, threatening him with a racket. The man, leering once more, begins to stride towards her. In conventional cinema she would either attack him as he gets close, or be seized by him. In Un Chien Andalou the man turns around and picks up two pieces of rope. As he turns and approaches the woman once more, we see the rope is attached to two large pianos, with two decomposing donkeys sandwiched in the them. As if that wasn't unusual enough, we also see two bemused priests (the one on the right played by Dalí himself) being dragged along by the rope. As he struggles towards her, the woman escapes through a door, trapping the man's hand which is revealed to have ants crawling from it.
It's an utterly unpredictable scene, and is a great example of how Buñuel and Dalí were trying to challenge people's perception of what is going to happen.

Obviously there was no real human eye-slicing going on, but full credit to Buñuel and Dalí for making it look so authentic. They used the eye of a dead calf, with extremely strong lighting applied to make it resemble a human. Despite it being over 80 years old, the effect has aged far less than many computer-generated effects from less than a decade ago. It's seems likely that Un Chien Andalou will continue to occupy its strange position of not really belonging to any period of time for a good while yet, and though it doesn't look quite as fresh as some of Dalí's paintings may do, it's definitely a film that will last on your mind for far longer than its 17 minute run-time.