A man sharpens a straight razor, a thin cloud crosses the moon, and a blade slices through a woman's eye. Nearly a century later, the opening of Un Chien Andalou still short-circuits the brain. This episode traces how two ambitious twenty-somethings, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, turned a lunch conversation about their nightmares into a 17-minute silent film shot in 10 days in 1928 on less than 100,000 francs secured from Buñuel's mother.

The conversation explains their single rule of writing, that no image with a rational, cultural, or psychological explanation could stay, and how Buñuel edited the film at his kitchen table, scraping emulsion by hand and splicing with cement. It also covers the calf's eye from a butcher that made the razor scene work, the ants in a hand, the rotting donkeys on grand pianos dragged along with priests and s ...