Le Chien Andalou

The analytical claim made by the creators of the film Le Chien Andalou is that the content bore absolutely no symbolism and that nothing that could be considered symbolic would be accepted as material. In the depiction of sequential imagery, no matter how void of meaning the images are individually, the encompassing audience reception leaves lots of room to create interpretation rooted in personal encounters with the content of each image is it can be found by anyone free of context in the world, and either intentionally or inadvertently, symbolism can be inferred and meaning can be constructed. I saw many messages outside the realm of psychoanalysis through content-specific implications. The first click! I felt in my brain was the idea of mind over matter that I inferred from the blade activity. I felt another click! when the Vermeer painting was revealed from the abrupt ceasing of the woman's reading targeting the film's inherent value of art. The next click! ensued in the form of seance, igniting the concept of reincarnation in my mind, which was followed by yet another click! as the hand of the man who had just been brought to the present erupts ants from a hole in the palm, alluding to a schizophrenic syndrome which I personally interpreted as a reminder of our inability to access supernatural powers for personal benefit, making the point that if they could be channeled, it would be all-inclusive and not only to our desires; there is a world of bad to be had there, and even if we seek only the god, the bad will come as well.

There seems to be a larger point here that connects to something our class has been making me think about. In regards to the development of prehistory, I asserted in a previous blog that the faith of civilizations older and smaller than ours are today remained so stable, as Curtis claims in The Cave Painters, largely because of a lack of exposure to other humans, amongst whom philosophy has room to develop in a different direction; therefore the more humans there were in the world, the more our development sped up. I base this off my belief that every mind is capable of original thought. By the same standard, I think that the film Le Chien Andalou was left predominantly ambiguous because its worldwide reception and analyses, such as all of ours in this class, would complete it as a work of art.