Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel And Salvador Dalí, 1929)

When people see something shocking, a car crash in the street, many of them laugh. After sudden mental shock, to many people laughter comes more than fear. If there’s one movie that I would have loved to have attended during its first screening, that’s the one. I wish I could see the faces of the audience, the day Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were showing it for the first time.

I saw it first in France, when I was an adolescent, probably around the same time I had seen Eraserhead. In my new movie Vortex, Dario Argento plays a character who’s writing a book on cinema and the language of dreams, and he had to consider which are the movies that get the closest to the language of dreams. The first one that came to my mind was this. You can think of Eraserhead too, or you can think of Secrets Of A Soul by Pabst, but the one that started the imitation of dreams in cinema is Un Chien Andalou.

Because it’s short it’s one of the movies that I’ve seen more than 40 times. I love playing it to friends now it’s on YouTube. If I go a party and people want to put something on screen I always say, ‘Let’s play Un Chien Andalou!’ And everybody loves it, every time.