Why Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel Made the Still-Shocking Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Why Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel Made the Still-Shocking Un Chien Andalou (1929) Under most circumstances, there’s nothing particularly shocking about cutting into an eye removed from a dead animal. Gratuitous, maybe, and surely disgusting for some, but certainly not psychologically damaging. I remember a man turning up one day to my first-grade classroom and showing us how to dissect a real sheep’s eye, which most of us found a fascinating break from our usual spelling and math exercises. But in education as in art, context is everything, and it is the context established by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel that has allowed their own act of eye-slicing to retain its visceral impact. It occurs, of course, in their short film Un Chien Andalou, from 1929, the subject of the new Nerdwriter video above. The shot of Buñuel’s hand taking a razor to the disembodied eye of what he later said was a calf comes early in the picture. What gives it its power are the images that precede it: Bu

Added 1 May 2026