considerable speckling and scratches. Our best guess is that dupe negatives were struck from the best available source mate­ rials existing in 1960, the origi­ nals by that time long since vanished or deteriorated, with the subsequent prints acquiring ad­ ditional damage as the years have gone by. Buñuel’s second (and, in our


Luís Buñuel and Salvador Dali slash through cinematic taboos in UN CHIEN ANDALOU.


of them played by Dali). The film’s striking imagery, as well as its sly mockery of bourgeois conven­ tions, became highly influential. Kino’s presentation of Un


Chien Andalou exhibits the jerky, animated movements of a silent film projected at the wrong speed, thus accounting for the rather short running time indi­ cated above. The running time most frequently listed in refer­ ence books is 17m, which is what this transfer would run were the speed correctly adjusted. As has been the case with all versions of this film since 1960, the soundtrack consists of music— Beethoven, Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” and an Argentinian tango—added at Buñuel’s autho­ rization, duplicating the music that was played during the film’s Paris premiere. We compared Kino’s transfer with that on an old Video Yesteryear tape of ex­ perimental and avant-garde films that also used a print copy­ righted 1960 by Les Grand Films Classiques. We found Kino’s transfer was better, but not pro­ foundly so. It is sharper and a


bit brighter, with slightly better contrasts, although the inter- titles—meant to disrupt any logical cause/effect connection between events or narrative progression—in contrast to Video Yesteryear’s edition, are left untranslated. Still, the source materials simply are not in the best shape, exhibiting


view, much funnier) film, LAge d’Or (“The Golden Age”), which logically should be paired with any video presentation of Un Chien Andalou, is not part of the Interama Collection and hence is not included in this edi­ tion. Instead, Las Hurdes— Buñuel’s third film, often referred to as LAND WITHOUT BREAD after its French release title Terre sans pain—is part-trav­ elogue, part-documentary about a remote mountainous region of Spain called the Hurdes, about which very little was known even at the time Buñuel shot his film. Shot over a period of four weeks in the spring of 1932, Las Hurdes details the profound ef­ fects of poverty, disease, incest (“ in-breeding” ), and lack of


For his third film, Buñuel turned his attention to harsh realities in LAND WITHOUT BREAD.


9

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