How does one celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the most notorious short film ever made—Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou? By watching it four times, of course, with live music: four new soundtracks by a diverse group of composers, creating entirely individual homages to this fascinating, outrageous, and unique work of cinematic surrealism. The second program in an ongoing series devoted to the intersection of live music and film, Sospeso's concert is a collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center and is part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2004.

From its opening—a razor blade slicing an eyeball, creating cinema's most iconic image of violence—to its unsettling finale, Un Chien Andalou ("an Andalusian dog") sums up the artistic aspirations of an era, the revolutionary Parisian avant-garde between the wars.

Film historian Raymond Durgnat wrote that the film "reveals itself at each viewing to be richer and more indefinable, as the sensitivity of its shades of mood become apparent." Sospeso explores these shades through four different musical 'readings:" Sospeso's directors (Kirk Noreen and Joshua Cody) contribute two; Germany's leading composer Wolfgang Rihm's interpretation is informed by the modernist tradition, and bravura improviser/composer Elliott Sharp brings his quintessentially New York perspective to a work that continues to provoke.

Jean Vigo called the film "a masterwork from every apsect: its certainty of direction, its brilliance of lighting, its perfect amalgam of visual and ideological associations, its sustained dream-like logic, its admirable confrontation between the subconscious and the rational." Join Sospeso and the Film Society for another look.