The Luis Buñuel Project – That Obscure Object Of Desire

Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: tasteofcinema.com

Luis Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object Of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet Du Désir) (France / Spain, 1977), is an adaptation of the 1898 novel La Femme Et Le Pantin (The Woman And The Puppet) by Pierre Louÿs, which served as an effective vehicle for both Marlene Dietrich (Von Sternberg’s The Devil Is A Woman) and Brigitte Bardot (Julien Duvivier’s The Female). Once again he collaborated with Jean-Claude Carrière on the screenplay, and the basic narrative of the book is left intact. But Buñuel and Carrière nonetheless put their own irreverently surreal cast on material that had already taken some politically incorrect liberties, even in 1898.

Buñuel regular Fernando Rey is Mathieu, a wealthy, well-groomed man-about-town who becomes obsessed with a poor but pretty Spanish working girl named Conchita. He relates the story of the relationship (in flashbacks) to the other passengers of his train coach, who have just watched him dump a bucket of water on the pursuing Conchita’s head before embarking. Mathieu, who regards himself as a devoted and generous find for any woman whom he might take a fancy to, has treated Conchita to enormous amounts of attention and indulgence. Conchita, nonetheless, torments him with varying and escalating degrees of tease and denial, imploring him to not see her as a possession but as another person with her own full life and desires. By the time Mathieu boards this train, he’s seemingly done with her.

Conchita first appears as a chambermaid in Mathieu’s household, inexperienced but earnest. That evening, Mathieu wastes no time in conveying his affections towards his strikingly lovely new employee. She demurs and they part, minutes later, on seemingly flirty good terms, but Mathieu discovers the next day that Conchita has quit. Months later, while languishing in Switzerland, he encounters her again; she’s touring with some musician friends (as a dancer) and they’ve just been stiffed by their agent. He helps them out with some cash (after being oddly pranked by them), and learns where Conchita lives in Paris. He visits often, ingratiating himself with Conchita’s mother and offering them favor upon kind favor. He eventually asks Conchita’s mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage, and offers her a large financial incentive. But Conchita again refuses, feeling that Mathieu is buying off Mom instead of earning her own affections patiently and honestly, and disappears. A few months later, Mathieu and his magistrate brother Edouard (Julien Bertheau) are having lunch at a posh restaurant and discover that Conchita is the recently-hired coat-check girl. Once again reunited, Conchita agrees to live with Mathieu at his country estate.

Fernando Rey and Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: dvdactive.com

Here, at roughly the halfway point of the film, is a good spot to assess the larger context. Mathieu‘s Paris, and greater Europe for that matter, is plagued by terrorists blowing up cars, shops and restaurants, shooting dignitaries down in the streets and bombing planes. The insurgents are a vague mish-mash of lone wolves, anarchists, religious extremists and other various small groups, all with fearsome acronyms like the P.O.P., the G.R.I.F. and the O.U.T., and all allegedly in the service of the R.A.O.I.J., the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus. Mathieu wields enough privilege and wealth to avoid most of this, but it’s an insistent background. Conchita is a fascinating character made even more complex by the famous stroke of Buñuel and Carrière’s of casting two separate actresses in the one role. Carole Bouquet – French, tall, willowy and wry, making her feature debut, seems more elegant, and somewhat regretful at denying Mathieu his way with her. Ángela Molina, an earthy and cheery Spanish actress with a bit more experience, is more extroverted and engaging, but also more directly defiant. Neither performer is used for particular consistent purposes, though – Buñuel and Carrière alternate them almost at random, a few times within the very same scene. Mathieu’s having to contend with two Conchitas adds extra complexity, and extra boundaries to negotiate. But Buñuel the surrealist is far more interested in letting created associations reverberate than in setting up specific symbols or allegorical contexts. The film is full of visual non-sequiturs: mouse traps, pet baby pigs, a fly in a cocktail. A seamstress repairs an embroidery tear on a blood-streaked piece of fabric, and there are recurring guest appearances by a burlap bag – sackcloth, perhaps?

Mathieu’s country estate is quite nice, but terrorists have disabled the nearby power station. The candlelit evening would seem to be conducive to mutual romance, and Mathieu is delighted that he can finally be intimate and alone with Conchita. But Conchita is adamant about protecting her chastity; he can be as intimate as he likes, but she won’t surrender that. (“Just wait a little while longer. You know I’m yours and yours alone. What more do you want?”) Days go by, they spend lovely recreational days together in Paris, but she still insists on remaining chaste. One night after being turned down again, Mathieu discovers that Conchita’s musician friend has been sleeping over with her in the other room after being tossed out of his hotel. (“But don’t worry, we slept back to back – exactly as I do with you!”). Mathieu throws her out, but he’s irretrievably smitten. He has Edouard use his connections to get Conchita and her mother deported back to Seville, but he then pursues them there anyway. He becomes more obsessive, more pos-sessive, and she continues to profess her love while making him jump through more increasingly demeaning hoops. “I belong to no one, and I am my most precious possession.”

Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: pinterest.com

Mathieu is the protagonist here, and in seeing the relationship through his eyes  we’re naturally sympathetic to his frustrations concerning Conchita. But Buñuel, throughout the film, is just as much on Conchita’s side, and is clearly admiring of her self-protective tendencies; there’s no evidence that Mathieu wouldn’t toss her over if given his full indulgences. It’s why she won’t ask him for money; as long as he sees it as a means to his end, he’ll always give it to her anyway. He’ll pay her and Mom’s rent, she can have a room on his country estate, he’ll buy her a small villa in Seville. She meets his frustrations with cruelty, and vice-versa; at one point he strikes her, repeatedly, and, face bloodied, she responds with “Now I know you love me.” Conchita’s reaction may distress us these days (it distressed some back then), but it’s true to Louÿs’ book – after this episode, it’s definitely her pursuing him now – but Buñuel uses this moment to obscure things further; is this another manipulative tactic, or is she truly relenting? Has he done enough for her by now to earn her acquiescence? The privileged Mathieu never changes throughout the entire story, but Conchita has no choice but to strive,  adapt, and oftentimes submit, in order to keep a roof over her head, food in her mouth, and love in her modest life. By the time we end up back on that train, though, near the end, it’s pretty clear what each of them know they need, and how pointlessly, even maliciously, they’re willing to treat each other in order not to just admit that to each other. The terrorists are the least of our problems, some might say – just look what we do to each other. And Luis Buñuel has a good laugh at our expense, again…

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Phantom Of Liberty

“I experience in every event that my thoughts and my will are not in my power. And that my liberty is only a phantom.” – The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée)

Luis Buñuel’s earlier religious-themed films (arguably most of them in some manner, but Nazarin, Viridiana, Simon Of The Desert, and The Milky Way primarily) were critical of the uses to which ‘civilizing’ moral structures and institutions (like the church, colonialism and governments) were put. Other, later films expressed the tug-of-war between social strata (peasants, workers, the educated middle-class, clergy and the wealthy), and how each represented character exercised, or denied themselves, their own free will (Viridiana, The Diary Of A Chambermaid, Belle De Jour, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). While Discreet Charm…, at the time, was a provocative black comedy quite unlike most others, I found that its subsequent imitations, homages and extrapolations quickly dated it. Luckily, I didn’t have remotely as many of those problems with The Phantom Of Liberty (Le Fantôme De La Liberté) (France, 1974), which I regard as a superb distillation, and extension, of many of Buñuel’s most engaging and thought-provoking tendencies.

Jean-Claude Brialy and Monica Vitti in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit:askhelmut.com

The film begins with two of Buñuel’s favorite reference points – Francisco Goya’s famous “Third Of May 1808” painting (where Spanish resistance fighters face a French-Napoleanic firing squad), and Jose Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio, (the haunting of Don Juan by both Dona Elvira, who died of heartbreak after he abandoned her, and her father, Don Gonzalo, whom Don Juan murdered when he left her). We see the resistance fighters, defiant in the face of the rifles, but they’re crying “Death To Liberty!” and “Long Live The Chains!”, typically surreal contradictions. (Inveighing against their genuine better interests – does that sound oddly familiar..?) The statues of Don Gonzalo and Dona Elvira are prominent in the ransacked church the French encamp within, and a soldier, chowing down on communion hosts, drunkenly flirts with her statue, only to be mysteriously bonked on the head by the stone hand of Don Gonzalo. Furious, injured, but probably still drunk, he digs up the grave of Dona Elvira and finds her miraculously well-preserved in her coffin, which enables the defiling soldier to… be abruptly cut away from, as a nanny now reads from the play in a 20^th century park in Paris.

Somewhat similar in structure to The Milky Way and Discreet Charm…, Phantom’s episodes seem far more free-associative and self-contained. Once an idea is expressed, and a point has been made, the narrative will veer abruptly in a new unpredictable direction. A man has trouble recognizing his wife on the street – he suspects sleeping problems and sees a doctor, whose nurse must interrupt their session to tell the doctor she needs a few days off. We then follow her out of the office rather than continuing with the patient. Buñuel and co-creator Jean-Claude Carrière, by this time, shared a familiar common language of dreams, tall tales and philosophies, and here they have wicked fun subverting standard narrative cause-and-effect, one-thing-follows-another structures. Where The Milky Way relied on its picaresque on-the-road scenario, and Discreet Charm… depended on the arc of the privileged ‘diners’ inability to determine their own fates, Phantom relies purely on how its characters react to their own perceptions of reality under quite varied circumstances.

Anne-Marie Deschodt, Michael Lonsdale and Milena Vukotic in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit: legrandaction.com

Our visitor to the doctor dreams of a rooster, a postman, and an ostrich, but actually has the piece of mail the postman gave him in the dream. The doctor’s nurse goes to a small country inn, meets a group of Carmelite brothers who help her pray for her sick mother, and ends up drinking, smoking and playing poker with them. Invited to another room, they all leave in disgust when an S&M couple starts indulging themselves, but the dominated man is upset and surprised that the monks aren’t staying. A professor comes to a police academy to lecture on Laws and Customs, but the officers relentlessly prank him like bullying children. Off the professor goes to dinner, where the table is surrounded by toilets and set with magazines and ashtrays; if you want to eat dinner, you go into a private room where you’ll be undisturbed. A man learns he has cancer, slaps his doctor when offered a cigarette, and tells his wife at home that he’s fine. The couple then learns that their daughter is missing! They hurry to the school to get the news from the teachers (while the daughter, Aliette, stands beside them), then angrily report the abduction to the police (with Aliette sitting next to them in the office). (“You did well to bring her. It helps,” says the police captain as he’s filling out her missing persons form.) A sniper guns down Parisians from the Tour Montparnasse building, is arrested, tried and sentenced to death. He is now, of course, free to go. A woman in a bar reminds a man, the police commissioner, of his long-dead sister. The long-dead sister then phones him at the bar. He’s later arrested for trying to open her grave and must face – the police commissioner. Together, the two of them go to the zoo to arrange… a firing squad…

Ellen Bahl, Pascale Audret, Jean Rochefort and Claude Piéplu (with Valerie Blanco) in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit: katushka.net

Much of the unexpectedness or incongruity of these situations hinges on the exercise of personal choice, or the following, or rejection, of social and moral standards. But who sets the standards in the first place? Buñuel, here in his 70s, had lived long enough to see political terrorists become celebrities, poverty-stricken people vote for their oppressors, and the pendulum of sexual liberation swinging back towards repression. The important difference for Buñuel was his graciousness – he never demeaned or made careless fun of his characters. No matter how far from someone else’s idea of logic or order or common sense they strayed, he always found common cause with their basic humanity.

This film certainly ranks near the top of my Luis Buñuel Project, but many would argue his last film is the real masterpiece. We’ll find out soon…

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: wondersinthedark.wordpress.com

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret De La Bourgeoisie) (France, 1972) was the Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner in 1973. Academy members had been no doubt watching Luis Buñuel’s career throughout the sixties – the films are always entertaining, in their particular ways – and now they had finally found one of his films that didn’t feature poverty, disfigurements, sexual fetishes, outright blasphemy or homages to the Marquis de Sade. A winner! But simmering here underneath the narrative’s overt drawing-room-comedy aspects are Buñuel’s (and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière‘s) usual darkly surrealist conceits regarding sex, death and dreams.

The film is a series of episodes where a group of friends attempt to sit down together and have a proper meal. There’s Don Raphael (Fernando Rey), an ambassador to a fictional Latin American country, M. and Mme. Thévenot (Paul Frankeur and Delphine Seyrig), Mme. Thévenot’s younger sister Florence (Bulle Ogier), and the Sénéchals, Henri and Alice (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran). But they arrive for a friend’s dinner on the wrong night. Or they discover the restaurateur has passed away and is lying in state in the adjoining dining room. Or a seemingly busy café is out of tea. And coffee. And milk. Or a military squad on war exercises arrives and must eat first. The interruptions become sillier, and/or darker, and/or more abstract as the narrative moves along. But it’s what’s revealed about the characters along the way that gives the film its subversive frisson. Between social engagements, the three men are active in the international cocaine trade. Don Raphael is stalked by a pretty female ‘terrorist’ selling stuffed animals (whom of course quickly becomes desaparecido thanks to two of his agents), and he is often asked about the allegedly miserable and corrupt conditions of his small country, which he amiably denies. The Thévenot’s are gourmand connoisseurs; she poring over menu choices or guessing dishes from the kitchen smells, while he goes on and on about his own delicious caviar supplies or his making the perfect martini while demonstrating that the working class is too unrefined to be allowed to drink them. “There’s nothing more relaxing than a dry martini,” he states. “I read it in a woman’s magazine.” The sister, Florence, is perky and charming, but prone to overindulgence in the aforementioned martinis. The Sénéchals are textbook social companions – there’s no indication of what they do for a living or where their contentedness springs from, but dinners are usually at their place, provided by a kitchen full of domestics, except on the rare occasion where Henri and Alice sneak down their own back trellis to have sex with each other in the backyard behind the bushes, while their guests wait to be served…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: archive-cinema.tumbler.com

Each potential meal with the six becomes its own little parlor drama, but some of them feature other guests as well. Monsignor Dufour (Julien Bertheau) is the presiding local bishop, but nothing makes him happier than gardening for the Sénéchals on the side. A young soldier in the out-of-everything café, apropos of nothing, narrates a grisly ghost story of familial betrayal and retribution. A sergeant in the military squad relates a dream he had about meeting dead friends on a quiet city street. Then, gradually, our main characters’ exploits start slipping into dreams as well. The military-squad Colonel (Claude Piéplu) invites all to dinner at his place, but his whisky is cola, the chickens are rubber, and his dining room turns out to be a stage in a theater, with a booing, whistling audience deriding them all for not knowing their ‘lines.’ Then Henri Sénéchal wakes up… to go to the Colonel’s for dinner, where he witnesses Don Raphael arguing with the Colonel over insults to his country, and then shooting him in fury. And then M. Thévenot wakes up. It doesn’t all dissolve into dreams, though – Monsignor Dufour is called to the side of a dying man for last rites, only to discover the man is the killer of Dufour’s own parents. Should he absolve him or avenge them? If only this could be a dream…

Speaking of crime, the intrepid Inspector Delecluze (François Maistre) breaks the case of the cocaine-smuggling diplomat, and promptly arrests Don Raphael and his five accomplices just as they’re sitting down to dinner. (*gasp!*) Delecluze dreams of a bloody, ghostly sergeant letting prisoners free at night, and, now awake, he receives a call from an interior minister ordering him to free his arrestees. Freed, they sit down to dinner again. But now there are gangsters with machine guns…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: 1001plus.blogspot.com

A genuine surrealist, Luis Buñuel rarely trafficks in outright allegory or symbolism. He, rather, sets up a series of recurring associations, and hopes that you’ll draw a lot of the same impressions and conclusions that he has. But, if that doesn’t happen, he’ll work hard to have, at least, entertained you anyway. Overlapping dreams, irony and surprise, stagey and stylized sex and violence, and even a soundtrack that interrupts its own characters are familiar devices these days, but Buñuel and Carrière were true masters at inventing and employing them. The film overall seems remarkably tame these days, almost half-hearted compared to the comedies and satires that ensued over the following 45 years, inspired by work like this. But there are still very few films that are even remotely like these late Buñuel films. Indulge.

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Exterminating Angel

Viridiana, by its creators’ general consensus, had been a very successful film, despite having been banned in Spain, where Buñuel had shot it. General Franco, honestly, hadn’t found it all that incendiary, but the powerful Spanish clergy, following the Vatican’s lead, were infuriated, and convinced Franco to forbid its presentation in Spain. It wasn’t until 1977 that Spaniards were allowed to exhibit the film.

Buñuel had made the acquaintance of Gustavo Alatriste a few years earlier in Mexico, and when the successful and wealthy Alatriste decided to invest in filmmaking (no doubt at the gentle urging of his wife, the actress Silvia Pinal), Buñuel was amenable to having Alatriste produce both Viridiana and his next film, which started out as The Castaways Of Providence Street, but was, upon script completion, titled The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) (Mexico, 1962). The castaways part was a reference to Gericault’s famous painting of The Raft Of The Medusa, but another writer friend of Buñuel’s had used The Exterminating Angel (a reference to Abaddon (in Hebrew), or Exterminus (in Latin) who was the King of the Locusts in Revelations, and the first harbinger of the destruction of the Earth’s population after the 144,000 are saved) as a title for a play he’d never finished. Buñuel appropriated the title with the writer’s blessing, and the rest is film history.

Blanca, Dr. Conte, Colonel Alvaro, Julio and Lucia de Nobilé – “The Exterminating Angel.” credit: cinephilefix.wordpress.com

The story rests on a simple idea; having gathered at a wealthy couple’s stately home for an after-the-opera dinner, the hosts, their maître d’ and their guests, (19 people, altogether) find they cannot leave the music room they’d all gathered in after the meal. There are no physical barriers or supernatural force fields; they simply lose the will to proceed when they reach the wide open doorway that leads to the next room, individually and collectively. They settle in to the various chairs and sofas, find spots on the floor to stretch out, and spend the night, assuming they’ll just leave in the morning. But, much to the consternation of their hosts, they don’t. Or can’t. And nights turn to weeks, as a crowd gathers outside the house, cognizant of the fact that its inhabitants are trapped inside. But the people outside are no more able to enter the home’s entry gate than those inside are to walk out.

The situation lends itself to symbolic speculation, but Buñuel insists that the reasons for their imprisonment, their ‘shipwrecked’ state, are unimportant; it’s a surrealist device. What’s important to Buñuel is how these people function within that situation. The crisply-tuxedoed, stylishly coiffed-and-gowned haute bourgeoisie are generally stiff and pretentious at the start of the evening’s gathering, and Buñuel has some surrealist fun at their expense. The kitchen staff, inexplicably, already knows to start sneaking their way out of the house just before the guests arrive. Two of the male guests meet three times in fairly quick succession – the first is a warm introduction by a third, the second is them recognizing each other as old friends, and the third is an introduction by a third where they regard each other coldly, warily. The entrance of the guests themselves into the palatial house happens twice, while two escaping kitchen workers wait through both entrances in real time before leaving. The evening’s host, Edmundo Nobilé (Enrique Rambal) makes the same toast to the opera’s prima donna twice. When the first course is presented on a large silver salver, the waiter trips on his own feet and falls flat on his face, sending the food flying everywhere. The guests howl with laughter and derision, and assume it’s a prank-on-purpose. We think we’re sharing the hostess’ mortification (she’s Lucia de Nobilé [Lucy Gallardo]) as she marches to the kitchen. But, out of the guests earshot, she informs the maître d’, Julio (Claudio Brook) that one of her guests, the taciturn Mr. Russel, wasn’t amused, and that he should therefore cancel the planned entrance of a small bear and three goats that she had also arranged as a surprise. After dinner, they all retire to the music room, save for Leticia, “the Valkyrie” (Silvia Pinal), whom, as a lark or an omen, throws one of the dessert ramekins through the dining room window. “Some Jew passing by,” quips Leandro.

Up until now, everyone had been on their best behavior. After Blanca’s piano performance of a short sonata, their praise is effusive, even if a few of the comments (“Pity there was no harpsichord,” “Please play some Scarlatti next”) seem damning with faint praise. It’s here that the aforementioned third not-so-friendly introduction, between Cristián Ugalde and Leandro Gomez occurs – yet another hint of unpleasantness to come. Cristián’s wife, Rita (Patricia Morán) is discussing her pregnancy with Lucia and another guest – “This is the fourth, isn’t it?” Cristián is asked. “Actually, I’ve lost track, ma’am,” he deadpans. Lucia arranges to meet her secret lover, the retired-hero-Colonel Alvaro (César del Campo) in the bedroom, unconcerned that Edmundo might interrupt them. Edmundo and Lucia, as the hosts, are somewhat put-off that their guests (Lucia’s lover among them) are slowly turning the music room into a campsite, but Edmundo, the ever-gracious host, indulges it amiably.

Edmundo Nobilé and Leticia, “The Valkyrie” – The Exterminating Angel.” credit: filmlinc.com

When everyone wakes in the morning, Lucia has Julio serve dinner leftovers for breakfast, and coffee. Julio, unlike the others, has been going back and forth between rooms performing his duties, but upon serving the breakfast spread, he finds he can’t leave the room, either; he and Blanca, the pianist, slump onto chairs just inside the doorway, struck with a mysterious despair.

One of the projects Buñuel was considering before Viridiana was an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies. The Raft Of The Medusa is an obvious touchstone here; Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos) is also cited as an influence. “Hell is other people (L’enfer, c’est les autres)” is a sentiment Buñuel might pass along here as well, but without Golding’s or Sartre’s earnest humorlessness. Civility disintegrates quickly and consistently as the days, then weeks, go by. A guest likens their predicament to a train crash she survived, whereupon a third-class car was crushed: “I think the lower classes are less sensitive to pain,” says Rita, in sympathy to her friend. When the bullying Raul (Tito Junco) accuses Edmundo of trapping them there deliberately, Leticia slaps him derisively. Days before, a young man decided the water in the plant vases was too funky – now the other guests note that the same young man drinks from them anyway. A small closet full of ceramic vases becomes the communal latrine, yet the women emerging from it have visions of mountain landscapes, flowing rivers and eagles passing overhead.

‘The Exterminating Angel” credit – criterion.com

In the following days, the men take an antique axe and dig into the interior wall, exposing a water pipe for all of them to use; of course, letting the women drink first sets off another near-brawl amongst the men who aren’t interested in waiting. Mr. Russel’s heart gives out and he dies; the body is shuttled into another closet. Julio, at this point, offers to share the plateful of crumpled paper bits he’s eating. Doctor Carlos Conde’s patient, Leonora (Augusto Benedico and Bertha Moss, respectively), implores him to join her on a pilgrimage to Lourdes after they escape their ordeal in this house. “When we get to Lourdes, I want you to buy me one of those washable plastic Virgins. You will, won’t you?” A young, ardently devoted couple, who have missed their own wedding, commits suicide in one of the other closets, to the apparent dark amusement of many of the guests upon discovery, which seems a little inappropriate until it dawns on us, the viewers, that we’ve been having the same darkly amused sense of schadenfreude towards the whole situation that  Buñuel has been regaling us with. And just when you think things might not be all that funny anymore, the bear and the goats get loose inside the house – when the goats enter the music room, it quickly becomes a barbecue pit (with furniture, paintings and musical instruments feeding he fire) while the bear shambles happily through the rest of the house.

“The Exterminating Angel” – credit: criterion.com

The movie is tricky; obviously Buñuel is sending up the social constructs of his ‘castaways,’ and how their manners, rituals, co-dependence, condescension and prejudices entrap them, but there’s much more going on than simple symbols or allegories. There isn’t a reason in the world why any one of them can’t walk through that doorway, and yet none will, even for their own self-preservation. Nor will the friends, families and returning kitchen employees of those trapped within set foot on the grounds to discover what’s happening and/or lead them out. When they do finally figure out how to leave (a strategy that seems just as surreal as their reasons for staying in the first place), they all go home, clean up, and head for church (of course) to attend a mass that the Nobilés have arranged as a Te Deum (thanks for a specific blessing). When the Mass ends, the priests exit the chapel…except… they stop at the doorway. Looking behind them, the congregants, as well, show little impulse or interest in walking outside. And as the film ends, a flock of twenty or thirty sheep make their way to the church’s entrance…

On the whole, Buñuel was content with the film – Alatriste left him alone to make the film he wanted to make, a luxury that his previous producers, even Oscar Dancigers, had rarely afforded him. It was also his most forthrightly surrealist film since L’Age D’Or, 32 years earlier. Buñuel, though, like most serious artists, claimed he could only see mistakes and missed opportunities – he would have preferred to have shot the film in Europe, either London or Paris (the Mexican film industry was at a pretty low ebb in the early 60s), and Alatriste had been a little stingier with this budget than he’d been with Viridiana. But I suspect Buñuel couldn’t have helped but smile when Alatriste, watching the finished film, concluded, “I don’t understand a thing in it. It’s marvelous!”

In the BFI / Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, The Exterminating Angel is 202^nd with critics, 132^nd with directors (a tie with Belle Du Jour). Buñuel is perennially in the conversation when people discuss their favorite films of all time, and The Exterminating Angel is always near the top of those conversations about Buñuel. He would make one more interesting film with Gustavo Alatriste and Silvia Pinal in Mexico, Simon Of The Desert in 1965, but next up on the Project is Diary Of A Chambermaid, more progress in Buñuel’s goal to return to exclusively European filmmaking.

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread)

‘Las Hurdes’ – photo courtesy of http://www.ruralc.com.

Las Hurdes (more commonly known as Land Without Bread [Tierra Sin Pan]) (Spain, 1933) seems, on its face, to be an almost pointlessly dire travelogue documenting the miserable living conditions of the people of the Las Hurdes mountain range, and the Hurdano valleys within, in the Spanish province of Extremadura (aptly named). It’s almost the antithesis of what you might expect from the canny, darkly humorous Surrealist that produced Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or. But, while the film is a presentation of very real aspects of the people and culture, Buñuel has shaped his film in very politically persuasive ways to expose the very un-Christian neglect to which the ostensibly ‘Christian’ church and government has culpably subjected these people, and this region.

Buñuel’s commitment to the surrealist aesthetic was unwavering, but he felt that the Surrealist movement in Paris had given up on the idea of constructively transforming society through their art, unlike other revolutionary art movements in Russia, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in France. He was also distressed that André Breton, Louis Aragon and the others were becoming dismissively elitist snobs, concerned only with their own work for its own sake. Coupled with the censorship of his screenings of L’Age D’Or, featuring his depiction of Jesus as a main character in a Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom, Buñuel left France to pursue other avenues of creative work.

Buñuel’s fellow participants in the making of this film were Spanish anarchist acquaintances, and they were anxious to use their ‘documentary’ as a damning statement against the incumbent King Alfonso
XIII, whom the filmmakers knew was acutely aware of the levels of poverty and degradation that the Hurdanos were subject to, yet did little more than pay lip service to any kind of real reform or relief. They were careful to keep the film grounded in actual reality, but also took opportunities to accentuate the squalor within the structure of the film.

Travelogue-style, we first visit the village of La Alberca, a small, clean, animated town just outside of the mountain range, where an annual feast is being celebrated. One of the features of the day is young bachelors of the town riding on horseback through the city streets, ripping the heads off of rope-suspended birds as they ride past. Buñuel sets a tone here very early, not only depicting the casual cruelty that the men are capable of, but the ease with which these acts are institutionalized, and celebrated, by the populace.

Then we journey further in, to the valley village of Las Batuecas, almost entirely abandoned at the time save for a crumbling monastery and its sole inhabitant, a friar. “Today, adders and lizards are the friar’s only companions,” states the narrator. It’s a ghost town, and it probably should be – the whole region is characterized by brutal summers and almost constant drought. “Within the walls are the ruins of 18 chapels.” The question isn’t why has the church abandoned this village; the question is why did they build here in the first place?

If settling in Las Batuecas seems like a bad idea, the populations of the valley villages of Aceitunilla, Martilandrán and Fragosa are almost outrightly masochistic; the desolation and poverty smack you in the face. What houses exist are stone shacks; a tiny spring winds its way through the town, used for laundry, washing and drinking water for both people and the pigs that a few lucky inhabitants own. Otherwise the only foods are beans and potatoes. (All of those beheaded game birds in La Alberca take on new importance in hindsight). Honey is one of the only marketable ‘crops,’ but the hives must be transported seasonally, and donkeys are routinely stung to death. Mosquitoes, and the ‘swamp fever’ thereof, are a big problem, as well as inbreeding within the isolated families. When a small child in the village dies from deprivation or disease, a frequent occurrence, “…the women of the village all hasten to the bereaved home,” almost all carrying small children themselves.

The film is less than 28 minutes long, but even at that brief length, we often ask ourselves, “is he kidding us?” A friend of mine once heard the morosely dirgelike song ‘God Damn The Sun’ by the Swans, and found it hilarious – they couldn’t possibly have meant this seriously, he believed; it had to be satire. Buñuel knows exactly what he meant – accentuating the absurdity doesn’t render any of this untrue, but the absurdity also compels us towards empathy in a way that another more earnest and objective narrative might not. Buñuel understood that any other conventional approach would enable us to distance ourselves further from what we’re seeing. We’re told that the Hurdano have no chimneys in their homes, inflicting smoke damage upon themselves when they cook. Neanderthals figured out the concept of chimneys – these people somehow didn’t? People die of snakebites not because the bites are fatal, but because their treatment of the bites invariably leads to infection. A long explanation of the uses of strawberry tree leaves explains that the leaves are used for personal bedding until they rot; then they’re used as fertilizer.

Buñuel’s real point, of course, is that if even one government official, or even one clergy member, took a day or so to visit, at negligible expense, and shared ideas like “this is how chimneys work,” “this is how you boil water for sanitation,” “here’s what composting does,” many of these problems would disappear. But for all of their political good intentions, all of their Christian charity, they just couldn’t be bothered. He’s not making a statement about the natural, survival-of-the-fittest unfairness of existence – he’s making a statement about the absurdity, the surreality, of institutionalized neglect.

So what’s it like there today? It seems the Spanish government hasn’t so much improved things as they’ve figured out how to make it all tourism-friendly. “Pay special attention to the farmsteads: houses made from flat slabs of slate, with thatched roofs.” How quaint! “As far as fauna is concerned, Las Hurdes is a region that serves as shelter for protected species such as wild cats, otters and black storks. You can also see other animals such as boars and mountain goats here.” And be sure to pick up a jar of Las Hurdes honey!

The ideal way to see this film, other than in a theater, on the big screen, is to get hold of the Kino Video that features both Land Without Bread and Un Chien Andalou. It’s also on YouTube.

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Un Chien Andalou & L’Age D’Or

Surrealism isn’t just interesting nonsense. Back when I was in high school, knee-high to a grasshopper and almost as intelligent, I cultivated an interest in Theater of the Absurd. The idea of the absurd tugged at the aspiring anarchist in me, the aspiring anti-establishmentarian. But the more I read Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, et. al., the more I discovered that those works were genuine reactions to genuine events, not the least of which were the various Civil and World wars that rocked Europe in the early-to-mid 20^th century. Especially for Europeans, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Absurdism – all of those –isms – were actually rational reactions, either heartfelt cries of despair at the extremes of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, or, in the case of the futurists, an acknowledgement of the powerlessness of politics and socialization in the face of mechanization and technology. The easy example of the former is Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ – his abstracted rendering of the result of German Luftwaffe target practice sanctioned by Franco upon his own disgruntled Spanish subjects in 1937. But, even earlier, the twenties and thirties were equally influenced by the introduction of mechanized warfare in World War I, and the economies of scale concerning human slaughter that were introduced into their own back yards, their own countrysides. Europeans were also having second thoughts about colonialism, and social divisions in general – racial, religious, economic, classist. What constitutes an inferior society? What’s the rationale for subjugating people, any people, besides snobbery and profit?

Another big issue for the surrealists was Dream Logic. They figured, as most of us admittedly do when asked, that the disjointed weirdness of dreams and dream imagery is our brains’ way of working out all of the stuff we see completely differently, i.e. ‘normally’, in our conscious awoken state. Dreaming is essentially a mental battleground for a host of unlinked associations trying to connect themselves. They don’t make much direct rational sense to us in-and-of-themselves, but they come from somewhere, by God. So the aspiring surrealist assumes that if these ideas and images are true to me, and interesting to me, then they might have a resonant truth or evoke a resonant interest in others. This is an especially good assumption when you apply dream logic in expressing ideas about The Big Three: Sex, Death, and Religion.

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Like any young artist/student, Luis Buñuel was aware of these early cultural movements. Two of his acquaintances in Madrid at the time were Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. Upon moving to Paris in the late twenties, he co-wrote a short surrealist film with Dali – Un Chien Andalou (1929). They, of course, were mindful of the socio-political currents of the age. They were also fascinated with Freudian theories of dreams, sex and death, and the influence of these forces on everyday life. And, lucky for us, they were a couple of intellectual hipster goofballs in their mid-twenties.

Un Chien Andalou’s first scene is a powerful evocation of the surrealist prerogative. Based on a dream of Dali’s, a thin horizontal cloud passes in front of a full moon in the night sky. Then a straight razor, in close-up, slices through a woman’s eyeball. Huuuhhh??!! Objectively, the compositional parallels are obvious, and brilliant, but the surge of subjective emotion accompanying the scene in each viewer is what they really wanted to evoke. And it’s effective, to say the least. The woman appears soon after, unmolested, in her apartment. Time goes out the window with logic in these films – events occur that have no bearing on subsequent events. (The Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz was notorious for killing characters in the middle of his plays, only to have those same characters appear in later scenes) (Hello, Aeon Flux!) (…and Kenny!).  She’s waiting for a man who arrives shortly, on bicycle, in a partial nun’s habit, carrying a mysterious striped box around his neck. I won’t relate each and every thing that happens subsequently, but Bunuel’s astonishing parade of characters and events within the broad framework of a seemingly conventional drawing-room melodrama is easily the most fascinating, and mind-bending, sixteen minutes you’ve surrendered yourself to lately. And, yes, it’s only sixteen minutes long. And yet he finds the time to involve a man pulling ropes, the Ten Commandments, two priests and two grand pianos draped with dead donkeys. And books turning into guns. And a man’s mouth disappearing from his face. (Hello, Neo!)

Dali contributed to, but did not directly participate in, Bunuel’s second feature, L’Age D’Or (The Golden Age) (1930). Both features are obsessed with the idea of seduction and rejection, isolation and socialization, fetishism and conformity. He also adds a healthy dose of satiric venom towards the government and the church, which got the film banned for years. Five days after its initial French premiere, right-wing extremists rioted and public exhibitions ceased. It wasn’t screened again until 1979, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

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The film starts with a hungry and destitute band of eight men who turn out to be soldiers, of some kind, patrolling the coast. (Actually, the film starts with a quick documentary on scorpions, but, apparently, I digress…). One of the men, on patrol, spies a group of chanting priests on a hillside by the sea, and reports back to his squad. “The Majorcans are here!” “To arms!” cries Max Ernst. And off they dodderingly go. When they arrive, though, rather than any battle, they find boatloads of visiting government dignitaries performing some kind of civic founding ceremony. The aforementioned priests are now a heap of skeletons, dessicated. The ceremony is interrupted, however, by a couple howling, writhing and making out in a nearby mud bog. We can’t have that! The man is led away by the police, but not before he kicks a dog belonging to an elegant female dignitary. The police must also wait for him to step on a bug. Now striding down a city street, the man produces papers establishing that he, too, is a very important dignitary, and the police release him. Thank goodness – how else would he able to then accost a blind pedestrian?

Meanwhile, the woman is back in her resplendent home. The household is preparing for a grand soirée – for the woman, this, of course, means getting that live cow off her bed and out of the bedroom. Minutes later, the party’s in full swing – all of the guests are in evening wear and black tie, skillfully avoiding the horse-drawn hay wagon rolling through the foyer, and hanging on every word of a distinguished man whose face is crawling with flies.

The Man arrives, and finagles his way to a garden reunion with The Woman, a tryst which is constantly being interrupted by elements of the party. Infuriated, the man re-enters the house and starts tossing things out the window – pillow feathers, furniture, plows, priests, giraffes,…

Meanwhile…the film concludes with a brief staging of the seemingly calm aftermath of 120 days of bacchanalian debauchery involving four ‘scoundrels’, eight adolescent girls and four older, more experienced ladies-of-ill-repute. The men are, as it turns out, noblemen, one in Christ-like robes and beard, thwarting the exit from the chateau of one of the young girls. After a muffled scream, the religious man emerges alone without his beard, and the film closes with what appears to be six female scalps, affixed to a crucifix, blowing in the snowy breeze.

Recasting Jesus and three government officials as the main characters of the Marquis de Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is not how you win friends and influence people. At least not then. Bunuel thought it was a good time, understandably, to return to Spain. His next film there, ‘Land Without Bread’, will be examined here later.

If you’ve been inclined to pursue these amazing films, and like them, you may be inclined to dig a little deeper and check out the 1920s films of the talented Germaine Dulac, who made wonderful silent films like The Smiling Madame Bendet and The Seashell And The Clergyman. She employed surrealist imagery, feminist politics and photographic special effects that predated most cinema by forty or fifty years. Great stuff, and they’re all an hour long or less. Happy hunting!