Listen to as well as Look

After reading Liebman’s theories on the meaning or lack of meaning in the film Un Chien Andalou, you come to realize that although the film appears to be a mismatch of random dream like images I like Lieban feel that Dali and Bunuel put a lot of thought and planning into the film. He states they “do not attempt to recount a dream” and that they more likely were using gestures and visual images in place of verbal expressions. The only words or verbal’s in the film were 5 short sentences that are thrown into the film to distract us from making any sense of the story.
Liebman goes on to explain how the scenes in the film correspond with words and many of these words have various meanings. In a way the jokes on us. As the saying goes “We’ve been had in the eye” or “ants in the pants” He connects these saying, some not as familiar in our time, to the scenes in the film, the cutting of the eye and the ants crawling out of the hand. If you think about it these avant garde films were not made for the general public but more likely the elite in society or those who think they have a broader outlook on life, writers, artists, those who think they have an edge on what’s hip. Dali and Bunuel were playing games with them, challenging their minds to find the puns on words and images, a lot of the wording in the reading explaining the theory was in French but I was still able to get the point he was making, it’s interesting once you break down a seemingly random movie the way he did how you can see all these things, as Liebman said you have to listen as well as look.