The Neon Demon of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's groundbreaking surrealist short "Un Chien Andalou" – that all you can do is howl or cheer." Tirdad Derakhshani, writing for "The Philadelphia Inquirer", called Refn a "bold visionary artist... able to revel in the culture of instant gratification while also subjecting it to critique", giving the film three and a half out of four stars and calling it a "brutal masterpiece". Rene Rodriguez of "The Miami Herald" wrote positively of the film's visuals and experimental filmmaking, writing, "To complain that "The Neon Demon" lacks substance or that it doesn't have anything to say about
Un Chien Andalou defined Surrealism as "Psychic Automatism", unconscious, capable of returning to the mind its true functions, beyond any form of control by reason, morality or aesthetics." The film was financed by Buñuel's mother, and shot in Le Havre and Paris at the Billancourt Studios over a period of 10 days in March 1928. It is a black and white, 35mm, silent film, with a running time of 17 minutes, although some sources state 24 minutes, and a physical length of 430 meters. For many years (and still), published and unpublished reports have circulated that Buñuel had used a dead pig's eye,