Buñuel: “Un Chien Andalou would not exist if surrealism did not exist.” (From Buñuel’s 1929 Preface to the film’s script.)
Buñuel: “But what can I do about those who seek every novelty, even if that novelty outrages their most profoundly held convictions, about a sold-out or insincere press, about which this imbecilic crowd that has found beautiful or poetic that which, at heart, is nothing but a desperate, impassioned call for murder?” (From Buñuel’s 1929 Preface to the film’s script.)
Buñuel: “The plot is the result of a CONSCIOUS psychic mechanism, and, to that extent, it does not attempt to recount a dream, although it profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams.” (From Buñuel’s notes on the making of Un Chien Andalou.)
Buñuel: “To produce in the spectator a state which could permit the free association of ideas, it was necessary to produce a near traumatic shock at the very beginning of the film; hence we began it with a shot of an eye being very efficiently cut open. The spectator entered into the cathartic state necessary to accept the subsequent events of the film” (Adamowicz 43).
Dalí: “Le chien andalou [sic] was the film of adolescence and death which I was going to plunge right into the heart of witty, elegant and intellectualized Paris with all the reality and all the weight of the Iberian dagger, whose holt is made of the blood-red and petrified soil of our pre-history, and whose blade is made of the inquisitorial flames of the Holy Catholic Inquisition mingled with the canticles of turgescent and red-hot steel of the resurrection of the flesh” (Adamowicz 69).
Octavio Paz: “The release of L’Age d’or and Un chien andalou signals the first considered irruption of poetry into the art of cinematography” (Paz 120).
Jean Vigo: “Our cowardice, which leads us to accept so many of the horrors that we, as a species, commit, is dearly put to the test when we flinch from the screen image of a woman’s eye sliced in half by a razor. Is it more dreadful than the spectacle of a cloud veiling a full moon?” (From Vigo’s Preface to the script of Un Chien Andalou.)
Jean Vigo: “Two grand pianos, stuffed with corpses and excrement—our pathetic sentimentality.” (From Vigo’s Preface to the script of Un Chien Andalou.)
Aldo Kyrou: “Un chien andalou is a perfectly ‘automatic’ film (and probably the only one), but I believe automatism is necessary when it liberates the self and not when it hides under sometimes flashy adornments. Un chien andalou is a crafted film, unlike Buñuel’s other films, which are a continuous and uncontrolled outpouring of the ‘I’” (Adamowicz 11).
Robert Desnos: “I do not know any film that affects the spectator so directly, and is made so specifically for him, engaging him in conversation, in an intimate rapport. But whether it’s the eye sliced by a razor, whose crystalline liquid trickles viscously, or the assemblage of Spanish priests and grand pianos bearing its load of dead donkeys, there is nothing in it that does not draw on humour and poetry, which are intimately linked” (Adamowicz 19).
Benjamin Pérez: “For the first time, cinema, disdaining vain anecdote, tried to plunge into the abyss of the human soul in order to bring back to the surface the grimacing beasts that lead a life of caged lions about to devour their keeper. The spectator could only be irritated by this film which, coming from the depths, reveals to him what he stubbornly hid from himself. He suddenly felt naked in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, ready to see himself as he is, stripped of the fine sentiments he liked decking himself out in” (Adamowicz 20).
Georges Bataille: “Several very explicit facts appear in successive order, without logical connection it is true, but penetrating so far into horror that the spectators are caught up as directly as they are in adventure films. Caught up and even precisely caught by the throat, and without artifice ” (Adamowicz 59).
