See Exquisite Corpse and fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. Other films whose writing processes might be characterized as “automatic” include Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates (1983) and David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). Thus, critic Elza Adamowicz notes that when Buñuel says that “the images produced ‘are as mysterious and inexplicable to the two collaborators as they are to the spectator’…he is echoing Breton’s comment on Les champs magnétiques: 'To you who write, these elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else’” (Adamowicz 10).

Processes of automatic writing pervaded surrealist practice-for example, the collaboration between André Breton and Philippe Soupault on the 1919 surrealist text Les Champs magnétiques-as well as Buñuel’s and Dalí’s writing of the screenplay of Un Chien Andalou.

The source of writing may be the unconscious, or it may (according to some) be spiritual or supernatural. The process of writing without consciously aiming to produce anything intelligible. He famously titled a chapter of his autobiography My Last Sigh, “Still an Atheist…Thank God!” Dalí, in contrast, held a much more positive attitude toward religion, and became a devout Catholic after World War II. Buñuel was an avowed atheist throughout his life, and during the Spanish Civil War he aligned himself with anti-clerical anarchist and communist movements. We can see an anti-clerical tendency in the film’s mocking depiction of the two Marist Brothers (in the first shot, played by Dalí and Jaime Miravilles, in the second shot played by Miravilles and Marval) dragged along the floor with the grand pianos and other items. Opposition to religion and religious authority.

For example, the Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, former friend of Buñuel and Dalí from their days as students at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, accused the film of being a personal attack on him, supposedly saying, according to Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh, “It’s called An Andalusian Dog, and I’m the dog!” In fact, Un Perro Andaluz, Spanish for “An Andalusian Dog,” was the title of a book of poems Buñuel wrote in 1927 but never published. This has not prevented some from reading some significance into its title. Buñuel and Dalí chose the title Un Chien Andalou, French for “An Andalusian Dog,” because it did not bear directly on what goes on in the film, and so was in keeping with the film’s ambitions of not making rational sense.

My last sigh bunuel