How does Un Chien Andalou reject narrative conventions?

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 Un Chien Andalou rejects narrative conventions by using many typical methods commonly seen in the surrealist movement. 


Most prominently, we see the dismissal of the cause and effect principle. This means when we see something happen in the film it is unlikely that we will see the action have any effect on the final outcome of the narrative, or even in the next shot of the film. For example, in the scene where the lady has her eye cut open, that shot leaves relevance as quickly as it came. It entered out of nowhere with no build up to it, this shocks the audience as literally no one could expect that to happen in the moment. After the moment has passed and we cut away, it is never even referenced again. It shocks the audience into staying engaged. This leads to a rejection of the average narrative convention that we, as an audience, have come to expect from the majority of films, which tend to follow the continuity system. We expect to have at least basic character arcs and a followable narrative, but when the events of the film have no effect on the events that follow or precede them, narrative structure will break down.


Another way Un Chien Andalou rejects a standard form of narrative, would be the lack of a “Fictional Geography”. This is a piece of Film Form Micro that we have come to expect from every film we watch, that is just not present in this example of the surrealist movement. Fictional Geography is where shots are presented in such a way that it feels like there is continuity in the movement of characters. Without this though, each shot is like a shock to the audience as it is in a totally different location. For example, in the final scene the lady leaves the house and is immediately in the middle of a beach, we know from previous context that there is no beach in the area of the main setting, and it is shot in such a way that we can infer there has been no time jump. This rejects the standard and expected form of narrative as the audience can not decipher where the characters are going to go next, when every shot is in a wildly different location that shouldn’t be anywhere near each other, it is hard to fit into a narrative structure.


In conclusion, Un Chien Andalou does not conform to the standard and mass-accepted narrative structure that audiences have come to expect in the modern day and instead opts for an incoherent structure that is notorious for the surrealist movement.

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