As legend tells it, the first audiences to watch Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou were struck numb with horror. There were stories of punters fainting in their seats, of women miscarrying, and multiple complaints being made to the police – usually in response to Un Chien Andalou’s most famous shot, of a woman’s eye (really, through a bit of editing trickery, the eye of a calf) being cleanly sliced in two by a blade. This was in 1929, at Paris’s Studio des Ursulines cinema. Nearly 100 years later, reactions likely won’t be as dramatic. You’d hope, anyway. But chances are that a handful of people will still reach for their sick bags – such is the timeless power of Buñuel and Dalí’s disconcerting magic.
That shot in question is among a host of clips showcased in Kinaesthesia, an enthralling, dreamy romp through the annals of silent film, and in particular silent films that plunged their viewers – and often their characters – into the human subconscious. We witness the endless staircases to nowhere in Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924), the nonsense horse race of Hou Yao’s Romance of the Western Chamber (1927), and the mad, billowing curtains of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), along with countless more.
