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1 The Militant Surrealist The appearance of Un chien andalou on the Paris intellectual scene was a bombshell for many, not least for the Surrealist Group around André Breton. The film was screened at an invitation-only session at the Studio des Ursulines art house on 6 June 1929, and its showing was tantamount to the epiphany of Surrealist cinema, hitherto dreamed of but never realized, and to the catapulting to fame of its makers, two provincial Spanish unknowns, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. With its public release at Montmartre’s Studio 28 on 1 October a fresh chapter in the history of the Surrealist movement began, since not only did the twenty-minute movie blaze a new trail in terms of its creative genesis and its visual imagery, but it also heralded a struggle for its ideological appropriation on the part of Breton’s group in order to prevent it from being claimed by different intellectual rivals. The a posteriori accounts of when Buñuel and Dalí met this or that Surrealist, and the group as a whole, are vague and contradictory and impossible to verify today. The fact that Un chien andalou had been programmed to accompany the première of Man Ray’s Les Mystères du château du dé at the Studio des Ursulines guaranteed, given the American artist’s Tout-Paris connections, an elite audience. If not before, it can be said that on 6 June Buñuel—and he alone, for Dalí was in Figueres—would (or could) have met the Surrealists Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, Joan Miró, Hans Arp, and Robert Desnos; artists like Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, Jacques Lipchitz, and Le Corbusier; film director René Clair and the cinephile Viscount Charles de Noailles, who’d commissioned Man Ray’s short and would have an immediate impact as a patron on the lives of the two Spaniards.1 We also know that through the good 6 offices of Miró, Dalí, in Paris for two months, partly for the shooting of Un chien andalou (which began on 2 April) but mainly to further his career as a painter, had met the Belgian art dealer Camille Goemans and signed a contract on 15 May that would provide him with a stipend enabling him to prepare his first one-man show six months later. Goemans had introduced Dalí to René Magritte, then living near Paris, and whose work—as Agustín Sánchez Vidal has demonstrated—was already known to Dalí and to Buñuel, as revealed by several shots in Un chien andalou that are more or less facsimiles of Magritte’s images.2 (For example, there is a moment in which the male protagonist, Pierre Batcheff, stares fixedly at the palm of his hand—ants will later pour out of a stigmata-like hole in it—an image that replicates the Belgian Surrealist’s 1928 painting The Mysterious Suspicion.) It seems that Dalí also visited Robert Desnos and crossed paths with Paul Éluard and his current girlfriend Alice Apfel (known as “La Pomme,” a translation of her German surname), but not the absent Gala Éluard—that momentous meeting would come about later. On this occasion the French poet appears not to have registered Salvador’s name, since in a letter from Paris to Gala in Switzerland, written sometime during the first half of July, he referred rather vaguely to Goemans going on holiday “with some Spaniards who have made an admirable film to Cadaqués, in Spain.”3 Un chien andalou’s frenetic Freudian satire on Jazz Age heterosexuality slotted perfectly into the local zeitgeist. Many a vanguard intellectual identified with the movie’s take on the tragicomic vicissitudes of libidinal gratification and wanted to meet the perpetrator(s). Writing from Paris to Dalí in Figueres on 24 June 1929, Buñuel spoke exultantly of having encountered “all the Surrealists . . . , especially Queneau, Prévert, Max Morise, Naville, all ‘splendid’ and just as we’d imagined,” before mentioning the loan of the film to Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac for a further restricted screening. Later in the same letter the debut director alludes to his great sympathy for Breton—without divulging if the two have already met—but laments that “he now finds himself surrounded by foul little Surrealist types like Thirion, Mégret and their friends.”4 Although he’s aware that the arrangement with Artaud and Vitrac will have to be hushed up so as not to...

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