Alternate soundtrack for “Un Chien Andalou”
Un ChienAndalou is a silent surrealist movie. If I should change the soundtrack of the movie, I would like to use Berlioz’s“Symphonie Fantastique”, 1st Movement: Reveries – Passions. I choose this soundtrack because I really want to highlight changing moods in the movie andindicate this movie comes from dreams. Also film’s and music’s stories are matching in some crucial points.
Beginning part of the “Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”, 1st Movement: Reveries – Passions” is obsessively but slowly portrays a character which is artist’s ideal woman. Then mood of the music changes. Suddenly the music is gets brighter. Unusually for classical era, this music has rapid changes of mood, rhythm and tempo. The movie has different storytelling than classical five stage storytelling (context, conflict, climax, closure, conclusion) as like a dream. One of the other reason that I choose this music is storytelling style of the music. In the music, the mood is changing and twisting so frequently until end of the music. Symphony is emotionally restless and filled with powerful expressions, swings from the most optimistic mood to the dark bottom. The movie is also violating the era’s cinema understanding that is famous continuity rules created by C.W. Griffith. The movie and the music are both undermining the understandings of their era.
When we look at the Berlioz’ s “Symphonie Fantastique”, we encounter a story about an artist who has intoxicated himself with overdose opium, then our protagonist starts dreaming about his ideal woman which he will never get. He describes her with a huge passion. We can hear dreamy falling leitmotiv which is indicating that what we are listening is just a dream. When it comes to the movie, whole idea of the movie derived from Dali’s and Luis Bunuel’s dreams. Another dominant feeling in the movie is passion, and rage and self hatred attached to it. Absurdity and the dreamy sequences gives us a hint that it is all just a dream, a dream we all live, an unending battle between our desires and restraints.
At the end of the movie, young man makes the young woman’s armpit hair attach itself then the woman feel disgust and leaves the apartment. Before she leaves the apartment we feel trapped because of obsessiveness of the young man. After she leaves the apartment she finds herself on the beach and in chill mood. In the 00:13:00 timecode of the music (just before final section of the piece; the coda) is suddenly becomes trapped and obsessive. In the final section, music is religious kind of positive and it subdued its passions, obsessions as like after she left the apartment.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe