Plot

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí present 16 minutes of bizarre, surreal imagery.

In a surrealistic film with input from Salvador Dalí, director Luis Buñuel presents stark, surrealistic images including the slitting open of a woman's eye and a dead horse being pulled along on top of a piano. A mysterious film open to interpretations ranging from deep to completely meaningless, this short (17-minute) film certainly presented something new in the cinema of its day.—garykmcd

A series of surreal moving images loosely tied together by common actors are presented. Underneath a moonlit sky, a woman's eye is cut open by a razor blade. While a young woman in her apartment deals with a cyclist who took a tumble outside her building, the police, another young woman, and a crowd of onlookers deal with the aftermath of the accident itself on the street. Two young men have an altercation resulting in one of the men dying and being transported away to another world. The young man and woman in the apartment begin to transform themselves both manually and magically with other objects of their persons. The young woman then leaves the apartment and is transported to another location where she and another man marvel at what has happened with the man she just left. The two have a somewhat ambiguous end to their story.—Huggo

Once upon a time, a man with a steady hand, one shave-ready straight razor, a woman compliant to the point of extreme submission, and her precious eyeball somehow mingled together. In the night sky above, the moon suffers a deep laceration from a slender cloud, and somewhere in a bourgeois living room, the festering bodies of two dead donkeys are dragged atop black grand pianos, while tireless ants scamper in a man's palm. Bizarre desires and perpetually appealing sexual frustrations prepare the ground for a shockingly sensual and utterly surreal magnum opus of provocation.—Nick Riganas

In a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye is slit open--juxtaposed with a similarly-shaped cloud obscuring the moon moving in the same direction as the knife through the eye--to grab the audience's attention. The French phrase "ants in the palms" (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally. A man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey towards the woman he's itching to kill. A shot of differently striped objects is repeatedly used to connect scenes.—Ryan T. Casey <RTCasey@mn.uswest.net>