Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by orejones (D) on January 26, 2004 at 10:33:01

In Reply to: Re: Wait Mr. Higgins! Not kaka at all...... posted by Victor Khomenko on January 24, 2004 at 10:57:27:

...as he was one of the greatest teasers in his time: he was always provoking, and sending people towards empty alleys, always laughing at the grandeur, and systematically shattering their beliefs, showing us not just the other side of ourselves, but how ridiculous most of our assumptions about ourselves are..., and how hypocrisy grows fast and high wherever there are social relationships.

Bunuel was a true anarchist at heart: he started his working life while at the Residencia de Estudiantes, in Madrid, where he met Dali, Garcia Lorca (he was mad at Bunuel, because he [Garcia Lorca] thought that "he was the dog at "Un Chien Andalou"), Alberti, Picasso (whom he deeply disliked, seeing him as selfish)..., in few words, he was a member of what has been called "The Generation of 1927", and he had to fly away from Franco´s persecution, taking shelter in Paris, where he dove deeply in Surrealist circles. He always showed his disgust with conventionalisms, with religion, and with psychologists, too: he was always making ridicule of all that, and of their followers, too.

And that´s the key to many of Bunuel´s films: he mocked religion, and religious symbols ("Simon del Desierto", "Viridiana"); social conventions ("The Discreet Charm...", "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz", "The Phantom of Liberty"...), and both of them in "The Exterminating Angel". He mocked surrealism itself from inside ("Un Chien Andalou", "The Age of Gold"...), and he laughed at all of them, and at no few viewers, in a frequently ferocious mood. He frequently said that he was obsessed with sex and with death and religion, and both Eros and Tanatos play a crucial role in most of his films.

But Bunuel wasn´t a boutadier: he had a deep, warm heart, too. And he made films where he explored the despair and suffering of human beings, as he did in "Las Hurdes" ("Land without Bread"), a documentary on misery and hunger; or in "Los Olvidados", ("The Young and the Damned"), a portrait of misery and violence very much in the line of the best Italian Neorrealism, with a surrealist touch in some scenes; or in "Nazarin", with a young Paco Rabal playing the role of a deeply honest young Catholic priest, who, from his love to his human fellows, lives among thieves, whores, and beggars, following the command of his faith, and who is stolen, ridiculed, beaten, stolen and even denied by his own church, finally failing in his attempts to make their lives better...

About psychoanalitical implications, so frequently interlinked with surrealism, he used them in his usual mocking way, with fetishism in "Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre", sadomasochism in "Belle de Jour" and in "Tristana" (based in a novel by Pierre Louys, the same guy who had written about Saphic love, and some other scandalous books)

He went into classics, too, with "Robinson Crusoe" and "Wuthering Heights"..., and he left only so few stones unturned along his career.

About hypocrisy, I´d say that Bunuel was more interested in showing how it arises during social interactions, that it is the unavoidable fruit of the way bourgeois society goes, than about it being a part of ourselves: actually, he never said, or showed it to be, a part of ourselves per se. And yes, at the time he filmed "The Discreet Charm..." many stones in Paris´s streets had not been put back in their places, after that Revolution of May 1968, whose cry of war was "C'est Interdit d'interdire" (It´s forbidden to forbide), the cry of every free spirit, both in Europe and everywhere: Bunuel was one of the freest men, even when he never got rid of his ties to religion, to sex, and to death.

And I think Mr. Ebert is basically right: bourgeois society accepted it in those days, in a way much different from the way it is seen today.

About Beauty... I think it´s better to leave it to every one to define it in his own terms, as it usually "is in the eye of the beholder".

Regards

BF