25 segments unfold, the offscreen girl narrator
shifts from mythological accounts of paternal rela-
tionships to third-person accounts of episodes
between a contemporary girl and her father. The
episodes are illustrated with candid documentary
footage, often featuring men and girls at play, and
with what appear to be home movies, edited in a
way that obscures their origins. The footage some-
times enforces the narration’s mood and content
but just as often conflicts with the girl’s story or
combines with it so that additional meaning is
imparted to both image and spoken word. As the
successive layers are revealed, what began as an
apparent abstract exercise reveals itself as an auto-
biographical account of the filmmaker’s troubled
relationship with her distant and demanding
father. Ironically, this experimental approach ulti-
mately delivers a more emotionally complex and78 CHAPTER 3 TYPES OF MOVIES
1324Experimental film: image as shockLuis Buñuel and
Salvador Dalí collaborated to produce An Andalusian Dog
(1929), one of the most famous experimental films. Through
special effects, its notorious opening sequence can be
summarized in four shots: [1] the title, “Once upon a time... ,”
which, under the circumstances, is an absurd use of the
classic beginning of a nursery story; [2] an image of a man
(who has just finished sharpening his straight razor); [3] an
image of the hand of a differently dressed man holding a
razor near a woman’s eyeball with the implication that he will
slit it; and [4] an image of a slit eyeball. There is no logic to
this sequence, for the woman’s eye is not slit; rather the slit
eyeball appears to belong to an animal. The sequence is
meant to shock the viewer, to surprise us, to make us “see”
differently, but not to explain what we are seeing.