` Chapter 15 Great European Directors: Luis Bunuel Objectives: Key words: surrealism, anti-bourgeois, dark comedy, repetition Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) Thank God I m an atheist Luis Bunuel Buñuel was born in Calanda (Spain) in 1900. The eldest child of a rich-landowning family, he studied with the Jesuits in Zaragosa, where his father owned a mansion. At 17 he moved to Madrid where he lived at the elitist Residencia de estudiantes until 1925. In his autobiography, My Last Breath (1984), Bunuel quips, the worst thing about death was that I won t be able to read tomorrow's newspaper. This satiric take on life is evident in all his works. Buñuel is in fact satirizing his own class, to which he comfortably and unabashedly belonged. He understood the neuroses and pettiness of his middle class Catholic upbringing well. He is the most iconoclastic and rebellious of directors, whose work is characterized by his view of mankind, which is, savage, macabre, and cynical. He was an enemy of General Francis Franco's Spain (1936-1975) and lived in exile in Mexico for a long time. He was anti-fascist, anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois. A surrealist, his films are best remembered for exposing the follies of human nature and his belief that human beings are beyond redemption. Un Chien Andalou (1928) Bunuel collaborated with Salvador Dali (1904-1989) on Un Chien Andalou, an unusual debut film with surrealist images. It has one of the most defining images of the surrealist cinema - a hand slicing a woman s eyeball. It also demonstrated Bunuel s obsession with playing with the narrative. His eye-splicing scene cuts to a cloud drifting along the moon, and we the viewers, get the sense that the narrative is seemingly illogical. The film was shot in two weeks and upon release shocked the audience. Generally read as a symbol of modernist vision, the films images raised a number of philosophical queries. Some other distorted images include dead horse on a piano and ants in a hand. Bunuel s debut film anticipated his continuing exploration of surface reality versus deeper forces.
Surrealism Term related to art/theatre movement, which explores subjective dream states and was concerned with subverting the logic of representation. L Age D Or (The Age of Gold; 1930) Henry Miller on the film: Either you are made like the rest of civilized humanity, or you are proud and whole like Bunuel. And if you are whole and proud, then you are an anarchist. Bunuel and Dali collaborated on the screenplay of The Age of Gold as well; which can be called a surrealist frenzy. The film was notorious for its subversive and anarchical interpretation of sex, religion and society, themes which remained a continuing preoccupation for the director. The film is notable for its notion of l amour fou, and has an episodic narrative structure. The film opens on a strange note, with a documentary on scorpions. Next, we see a band of outlaws in a state of starvation and a group of priests performing strange rituals on the beach. Soon the holy men are reduced to skeletons. The scene cuts to a couple making passionate love, but interrupted several times for reasons that are not clear. Among its several peculiar images, two stand out: a cow on bed and L age D or exemplifies the surrealist belief of not making art. Bunuel, along with his cameraman Albert Duverger, crafted simply lit visuals. For the soundtrack, he experimented with juxtaposing Wagner, Schubert and Debussy with the ceremonial drums of Calanda in Spain. Bunuel s characters are hypocritical and selfish, who can compromise any principle in order to find gratification. As expected, the film aroused extreme emotions. People, especially those belonging to the League of Patriots, staged protests outside the theatres, leading to prohibition of screenings. While commenting on Bunuel s surrealism, Ed Gonzalez elaborates: The surrealist manifesto included in the film's original theater program suggests that "the social function of L'Age d'or must be to urge the oppressed to satisfy their hunger for destruction and perhaps even to cater for the masochism of the oppressor." It's no coincidence then that film suspiciously begins as a documentary on scorpions, a class of arachnid predominantly found in the hottest regions of the Western world. One of the more telling title cards reads: "Not at all sociable, it ejects the intruder who comes to disturb its solitude." A scorpion then cripples and
devours a large rat. While the scorpion itself is not unlike the meddlesome bourgeois of the film's second half, the arachnid comes to represent any and all mechanisms of oppression. (Gonzalez, 2002) In 1946, Buñuel was invited to adapt Lorca s La casa de Bernarda Alba to be filmed in Mexico. The project never materialized, but Buñuel found other opportunities in Mexico, and decided to move his family there. In Mexico he made commercials and worked on several projects, all reflecting a deep sense of antifascism and subverting middle class notions of superiority. Viridiana (1961) The film was made when Bunuel was persuaded by many young Spanish filmmakers to work in Spain several years after his departure. The film, banned in Spain, tells the story of a young woman, Viridinia who comes into a generous inheritance. In her zeal to reform the world, the young woman who had earlier planned to enter a convent, assembles a group of thieves, beggars and whores. The film won many festival prizes and heralded Bunuel s return to Spain after decades overseas. The central image recreating the Last Supper as a feast of beggars--displeased the Spanish censors. This proved yet again that the filmmaker had retained his ability to shock and provoke the conservative audience. The Exterminating Angel (1962) The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there s no explanation - Bunuel on The Exterminating Angel. A dark comedy, "The Exterminating Angel" begins with the statement, "The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation. The dinner guests arrive twice. They go up the stairs and walk through the wide doorway, and then they arrive again. Soon it all becomes clear. The guests are incapable of leaving. They slander each other, and demonstrate greed, lust and jealousy. More surrealistic touches come by: the cook suddenly escapes from the house, along with other servants; a women s purse is filled with chicken feathers and rooster claws; gusts break through plaster to open a pipe for drinking water; two lovers kill each other. Bunuel does not offer any comments on these happenings. After a while, they get desperate to get out, but cannot. They start revealing their savage instincts: they smash furniture around the house, murder each other, kill the sheep wandering into the halls, and cook them on a fire made from broken furniture. The theme of the film is implicit: the bourgeois have reached the cul-de-sac. Having defeated the workers, the rich are trapped in their wealth and have isolated themselves from the world outside.
Belle de Jour (1967) If only you weren t so cold. Belle de Jour Belle de jour starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean Sorel is Bunuel s first color and most popular film. Bunuel co-scripted the film with Jean-Claude Carriere, where the themes are unfulfilled desires and sadomasochism. He employed a blend of reality, fantasy and dreams to convey the female protagonist s dilemma. In the chapter on French New Wave, we see how the filmmakers of that age were redefining style on screen. Bunuel explained it as a film that explored chaste eroticism. The plot of Belle concerns Severine, a beautiful housewife selling herself during the day in a high-class brothel. We also see glimpses of fantasies which may be the consequence of some abuse she suffered as a child. Though she loves her husband, she is drawn to Marcel, a gangster who soon develops genuine feelings for her. The brothel owner names her Belle de jour (Daytime beauty) because her working hours are between 2pm and 5pm, when her husband is away at work. Catherine Deneuve plays the cool, detached blonde to perfection, who came to be regarded as a fashion icon as well as a symbol of liberation from bourgeois morality. A critic rightly explains the story as, a kind of fantasy cryptogram, with countless clues verbal puns about cats, nonsense syllables, bells, speech with motionless lips, time cues, and so on as to when we are in a fantasy, and whose. (Adler, 1968) Bunuel is more interested in fetishes and explores the heroine s clothes and shoes. The film also delves deep into Severine s deep, dark world of hallucinations where she is constantly debased and subjugated by men around her. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) This darkly comic film is in French, and stars Fernando Rey, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stephan Audran. It won the Oscar for best foreign film. It had screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere. This is a period when social unrest in Spain was at its height, not to mention the political disturbances in the US for example, the Vietnam War. Forces of counterculture were felt throughout and the upper middle class was a popular target of disdain. The film is about a set of upper class couples who try, yet repeatedly fail to have a meal together. As in The Exterminating Angel, Bunuel uses food as the central social ritual; a way of displaying wealth and good manners. He also employs multiple dreams/fantasies and blurs the distinction between the real and the unreal and disrupts narrative continuity. Repetition as an aesthetic device is also used to represent the fundamental human
experience. The motif of repeated actions in The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is explained by Deleuze as, In fact the bad repetition does not occur simply because the event fails. It is that which makes the event fail, as in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where the repetition of lunch pursues its work of degradation through all the milieux which it closes on to themselves (Church, army, diplomacy ). And in The Exterminating Angel, the law of bad repetition keeps the guests in the room whose boundaries cannot be crossed, while good repetition seems to abolish the limits and open them on to the world. Bad repetition appears in the form of inexactitude or imperfection: the introduction of the same two guests in The Exterminating Angel is on one occasion warm, and on the other frigid; or take the host s toast, which is made once in an atmosphere of indifference, the other time in one of general attention. However, repetition which saves appear to be exact, and the only one which is exact: it is when the virgin has offered herself to the God-host that the guests rediscover exactly their first position and at last find themselves free. (Deleuze 1986:136) Later works and themes The Phantom of Liberty (1974) is a social satire and free-form film, using the device of interconnected stories. That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) interrogates the theme of love and desire; a terrorist group is named the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. In The Milky Way (1968), the Pope is put before a firing squad. Although he targeted the Church and the bourgeoisie, he also showed beggars as rapists, blind men as paedophiles and housewives as prostitutes. Bunuel s legacy lives on in the works of contemporary filmmakers such as David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar and Terry Gilliam. David Thomson provides an assessment of Bunuel s cinematic standing as, The sooner one allows that the interruption of bourgeois ceremonies and affairs in L Age d Or, Exterminating Angel, and Discreet Charm is of a kind with that in La Regle du Jeu, the sooner one sees that Bunuel is a comic director and that his reputed savagery is only a consistent view of the neurotic frailty with which we lead our lives. (Thomson 117). References 1. Adler, Renata. Belle de Jour. 11 April 1968. New York Times.http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF173EE461BC4952DFB2668383679EDE (accessed on 6 Oct 2014).
2. Gonzalez, Ed. L Age D Or. Slant Magazine. 17 April 2002.http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/lage-dor (accessed on 6 Oct 2014). 3. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Selected readings 1. Bazin, Andre. The Cinema of Cruelty: From Bunuel to Hitchcock. NY: Arcade, 1975. 2. Bunuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 3. Evans, Peter William. The Films of Luis Bunuel: Subjectivity and Desires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 4. Gwynne, Edwards. The Discreet Art of Luis Bunuel: A Reading of His Films. NY: Marion Boyers Publications, 2000. Selected websites http://www.luisbunuel.com/ http://cinephilefix.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/european-art-film-an-analysis-of-luis-bunuels-theexterminating-angel/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/luis_bu%c3%b1uel http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/bunuel.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/luisbunuel http://blogs.indiewire.com/twhalliii/the_2006_new_york_film_festival_capsules_bunuels_legacy_for_b etter_or_worse http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,90057,00.html http://luisbunuelfilminstitute.com/ http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/mrc/bunuel6.html Quiz 1. Answer the following: i. What are the 2 main preoccupations in Bunuel s works? ii. What is the significance of Bunuel s collaboration with Dali? iii. Explain the relevance of repetition as a motif in Bunuel. 2. State whether the following are true or false: i.l age D or has a documentary on scorpions. ii.un chien andalou has the notorious eye-splicing scene. iii.belle du jour stars Elizabeth Taylor in the title role.
Answer key 2. i.- True; ii- True; iii.-false