The obsession of the eyes in Luis Buñuel's work (Spain, 1900- Mexico, 1983)

Luis Buñuel was a highly regarded Spanish film director particularly famous for his silent surrealist short movie he made with the famous Spanish painter Salvador Dalí: “An Andalusian Dog”. Released in 1929, it is considered as the first film produced purely from within the Surrealist movement, and a landmark in the history of cinema. Based on an exchange of dreams between Dalí and acclaimed director Luis Buñuel, this tale of unfulfilled desire opens innocently with the words “Once upon a time.” What follows is one of the most shocking and celebrated sequences in movie history: a razor slashing a woman's eye in extreme close up, along with the prolapsing vitreous. Buñuel's violent aggressions against sight actually force us back to his particular way of seeing. His world is seen first as a grey, hazy, distant jumble of undetermined things; no other director shoots a scene from quite that neutral, passive distance. Then the eye of the camera suddenly picks out an object that has been there all the time, or a revealing gesture, zooms into them, makes them come violently alive before again retiring to the indifferent point of view. This particular way of seeing also appears in: “This Strange Passion”, “Belle de jour” and “Viridiana”.