(#93a is The Seventh Seal, which I’ve previously seen and thought was excellent.)

So hey, speaking of dodgy Youtube rips, I had to watch this there (with Portuguese subtitles even, but it’s a silent movie without many intertitles, so not a big deal), because it turns out this 1928 silent movie isn’t available anywhere legit — maybe because it’s just 21 minutes, so would be an awful deal as a $3 rental, maybe because of copyright issues, maybe because of the subject matter.

“What subject matter is that?” you ask. Well, there’s a disturbing part where a guy has ants crawling out of a hole in his hand (pictured below), but that’s not as disturbing as the part where he later is groping this woman whose breasts turn into a butt, and then she runs away from him and he chases after her dragging two grand pianos inside of which are dead donkeys oh and also he’s pulling pumpkins and two priests.

But probably the most disturbing part is where a dude cuts open a woman’s eyeball with a razor, and it wasn’t really her eyeball of course, but it was actually a (dead?) animal’s eyeball, so hope you enjoy seeing eyejuice.

Long story short, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were trying really fucking hard to be shocking, and the best part is that it didn’t even fucking work, because sophisticated Jazz Age audiences were by god not going to let themselves be shocked by anything. Extended quote from Wikipedia here, because it’s too good:

The first screening of Un Chien Andalou took place at Studio des Ursulines, with an audience of le tout-Paris. Notable attendees of the première included Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard and George Auric, in addition to the entirety of André Breton’s Surrealist group.[20] The audience’s positive reception of the film amazed Buñuel, who was relieved that no violence ensued. Dalí, on the contrary, was reportedly disappointed, feeling the audience’s reaction made the evening “less exciting.”[21] Buñuel since claimed that prior to the show, he had put stones in his pockets “to throw at the audience in case of disaster”, although others had no recollection of this.[22]

It was Buñuel’s intention to shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie of his youth, later saying: “Historically, this film represents a violent reaction against what at that time was called ‘avantgarde cine,’ which was directed exclusively to the artistic sensibility and to the reason of the spectator.”[23] Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a huge success amongst the French bourgeoisie,[24] leading Buñuel to exclaim in exasperation, “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?”

Oh, the perils of being an anti-bourgeois shock artist in an age of cynical sophistication!

Anyway, it’s easy to see why this is on the list, because if it wasn’t shocking in 1929 Paris, it certainly would have been shocking in most places in most of the 20th century, so it was probably a forbidden thing for a lot of the older critics, one that really blew their college-aged minds when they saw it at some semi-licit off-campus screening.

If you take out the shock value, though, what’s left is honestly not that much. Some of the imagery is striking, I guess, but probably the main virtue of this for my purposes is that it was short.