Criterion recently (finally!) released The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert on DVD and I'm using that as an excuse to treat myself to a Buñuelathon.
Not that anyone should need such an excuse. Luis Buñuel was not only one of the world's great filmmakers, he's one of the fun ones. Surreal imagery and constructs, relentless attacks on religious and bourgeois hypocrisy, he can be more concerned with prank than plot. At his very best, the camera itself gets giddy, veers off to show us something taboo or unexpected, communicates the excitement of obsessive, illogical indulgence. The Spaniard's works are sometimes centered by a sympathetic realism and a genuine sense of suffering, the gravity of his concern keeps fart-filled balloons from bursting into an atmosphere of wink/nudge piffle.
And glancing through his filmography - works that run from the silents through The Seventies, from experimental shorts to straightforward literary adaptations, through three languages - I'm disappointed at what small percentage of his films I've seen. The two early collaborations with Salvador Dali, of course, and have caught most of his late classics, some many times. But there are major gaps. So I've gathered together nineteen of the thirty-two films he directed, most everything available on Region 1 DVD, am setting them up, knocking them back.
(At first I was going to approach this as an actual marathon, because what better way to shake your head loose than to sleeplessly immerse yourself in surrealism? But even my inner glutton couldn't conceive how to deal with subtitles during hour twenty-three. These are movies, not television, not LSD. They're not even necessarily surreal. Point is to see the films, period, and I'll get through them as I can.)
In between I'll drop a few words and a couple screenshots. I'm not promising coherent analysis or profound insight (the web-wide Buñuel blogathon from a couple years ago is probably a better place to find those), this is not a research project (my barely cracked copy of My Last Sigh is in storage, anyway), I'll capriciously enjoy bonus features (or not) where available. And I'm not going to liveblog, because the point is to see the films, computers are just agents of interruption, liveblogging is the only thing worse than Twitter. (Also, I'm not going to worry about SPOILER-labelling, so read (or don't) appropriately.)
Okay, on your mark.
Un Chien Andalou (1929, 17 minutes)(rent/buy)(un chien screen caps via)
"Once upon a time."
Let's start by showing you the inside of your eyeball. Eighty years on, still one of the most shocking images on film, that's the director wielding the razor. It's not just the boldness of the idea, it's the boldness of the goop (a calf's, btw); the match cut with the moon very poetically communicates the action, the shot itself is unnecessary, only it isn't. That the short was embraced as poetry or excused as dream-froth upset Buñuel and Dali. It's right there, upfront and explicit, this movie is a sharp thing meant to get your insides out.
But I'm not supposed to cling to metaphor, this isn't designed to make any sense. The difficulty in subverting form - in society, in art - is that humans require structure and reason to function. Buñuel might devote a lot of his time addressing how hilarious (vitreous humor, rimshot) and false the membrane is that reshapes animalistic urge, but perceptive anarchy is very hard to sustain. Even over the course of these very necessary seventeen minutes, a brain is going to grab at similarities and try to weave them into an intent, if not a narrative. So the recurring questions of sexual identity and confrontations re: guilt are going to quilt over mere reactions to the film's imagery.
But it's that imagery which endures. My favorite is the androgynous woman, standing in the street, poking at the disembodied hand with a cane. I don't know why.
That doesn't make me angry. What does make me angry is that this DVD only has this single short (along with an interview with Buñuel's son and a scholar's commentary - poor guy only has the running time to address all sorts of shit, settles into contextualizing the movie as a summation of surrealist film). But I'm an American, and consumer-based ire is our most righteous indignation.
(I wish they had at least included Land Without Bread. It doesn't work as a companion piece with Un Chien, but it's probably still the best mockumentary ever made and deserves to exist somewhere on DVD in this country.)
Unsatisfied with the reaction, Buñuel would next make a more direct appeal to outrage. And Dali would disown the effort because of its directness.
L'Age d'Or (1930, 63 min)(rent/buy)
"What joy! What joy in having killed our children!"
This one encouraged a riot, ink thrown at the screen, vandalism to the theater. Given the hard-to-top blasphemy of its ending, I guess I can understand. But aside from the scalps hanging from the cross (chipper music, Capra Xmas nightmare), the climactic nastiness is only a matter of assemblage. The orgy is just a series of intertitles, the murderous scream is dubbed over a shot of a closed door. Jesus walks out, helps an injured girl, what's so wrong with all that? More disturbing: Where did his beard go?
More disturbing than the notorious toe-sucking: The reaction shot of the statue's face.
You can choose to acknowledge a level of developed coherency. Why is there a cow on the bed? Because there's a cow on the bed. Also, maybe, because there's not a man on it. It's a sex farce in that the central couple is unable to consummate their relationship - they're disengaged by police, discouraged by their social peers, interrupted by work, frustrated by the woman's psychological desire for her father. And perhaps a social critique, repression leads to perversion (the implied fecalfelia is hilarious) and violence (the man, a Goodwill Ambassador, kicks puppies and blind men), though it's hard to see how either the scorpions or orgiasts are repressed, or if perversion is supposed to be wrong. Again, take what you will. Frankly, I think that dude's a sadist and that she digs it.
More important, there's a formal brilliance going on. This was commissioned as a talkie (according to the commentary, this was a spousal birthday gift from some distant descendant of the Marquis de Sade, who gets a nod in the final bit), and on some level any synched-sound scene is antithetical to what Buñuel is doing. Basic narrative cinema is created from carefully conceived scenes shot out of order and constructed in such a way to make them feel seamless. Meaningless intertitles like "Eight Hours Earlier" help reveal the construct of shot a to shot b, and the director jumps through locations and times and moods. It opens as a documentary on scorpions! But synch sound binds elements together in formidable logic. We are used to seeing people talk and hearing words come out of their mouths, such cinema is replicating naturalistic behavior, and that's useless here. So what Buñuel does is shift between silent and sound cinema, to keep you off balance. There's a lengthy speech that seems meaningless, an entire conversation takes place without the lovers' mouths moving. But while he's disassociating the sound and action, he also uses the sound to bind his lovers (that psychic conversation, the way they share ambient animal sounds (the cow's bell, dogs barking)) when they're separated.
More more important, the thing's a blast. Though indulging in the unexpected is its own kind of decadence.
Gran Casino (1947, 96 min)(rent/buy)
Buñuel's first full-length feature, and first Mexican project, comes almost fifteen years after his last directorial credit. Between Land Without Bread and Gran Casino, Buñuel returned to his native Spain from France and started a production company; he fled to the United States after the Spanish Civil War. He worked at MoMA editing and subtitling anti-Nazi propaganda for Latin American distribution, then, after his leftist political inclinations lost him that job, worked for Warner Brothers dubbing their films into Spanish. Phillip Kemp quotes Buñuel on this DVD's commentary as saying he was "resigned to the fact I would never make another movie of my own."
He got an offer to do so from a producer working in Mexico's then-booming industry, the request was for something with a little action and a few musical numbers. The script for Gran Casino is credited to others, but Buñuel apparently had a hand in it. It's pretty bad.
The film is watchable if uninteresting. It concerns the disappearance of an independent oil man; his sister - who goes undercover as a performer at the titular nightspot - and a subordinate investigate. Plot isn't straightforward so much as flat. Cast is lukewarm likeable. The male lead is a cross between Clark Gable and Gene Autry and Mario Lanza (three back-up singers amusingly spring up whenever he sings). There's a dancer that's something of a third-rate Rita Hayworth. The female lead is filmicly frigid; her best moment is an emotionally intense stage wail that interrupts one of the movie's more dramatic scenes.
He might have already made one of the world's iconic works, but this was the first time Buñuel as director needed to bother with niceties like plot and character. There are some showy touches - a dance number takes place in a single, lengthy 360 pan - and brief flashes of his peculiar sensibility (bagpipers, a too-long close-up of a stick dragging through a puddle of crude, the superimposition of a shattering record during a moment of violence). But as Kemp notes, nobody would think of releasing this on DVD if Buñuel's name wasn't in the credits.
Susana (1951, 86 min)(rent/buy)
"I don't belong to any man nor his desires."
Hot stuff. A temptress escapes from prison (Gran Casino also opened with a jailbreak), hides out with a family who assumes she's an innocent. She makes quick work of a rancher, his bookish son, his most trusted employee. Rosita Quintana is all the obvious kinds of wowza. She has only one go-to move when preparing for seduction, that's to stretch the neckline of her top down past her shoulders. But she has great shoulders! Buñuel is beyond suggestive with his actress, showing egg white running down her thigh, having her breathe to fog up a glassed-in gun case. If this were filmed in Smell-o-Vision, the scene where Dad sniffs the girl's dropped handkerchief would earn an X. The look on Quintana's face after the son says, "I could spank you!" will keep you up nights.
Susana's name, one character tells us, "is a symbol of chastity."
Beyond all the sexytime fun, there's plenty to admire about how Buñuel directs our sympathies. Susana is manipulative and destructive, but is she evil? "Dear God," she declares when her jail bars cast the shadow of a cross, "You made me the way I am. Just like scorpions... or rats... I have as much right as a snake or this spider." A normal moralistic film would see a triumph in the restoration of the family unit and its casting out of temptation. Knowing what we know about Buñuel, he doesn't give a Susana's ass about the family's religious inclinations (except for the chance to reveal any hypocrisy), and his happy ending is absurdly exaggerated. For all her conniving, Susana doesn't get much beyond the thrill of conquest and the right to assert that "she does what she wants."
She's more a Force than a character, and it's nice that - unlike, if I recall correctly (we'll see soon) the pervasive dickteasiness of That Obscure Object of Desire - her noirish "Evil Woman" is offset by two other female characters. One is a faith-filled housekeeper who's treated like a cartoon (but is, in terms of the plot, correct in most of her assumptions). The other is the mother, who is kind and strong and generally wise enough, though for sake of the plot she's kept behind the curve. It's not until the matriarchal position is threatened that the family is really in danger; the film doesn't get dangerous until she snaps. A shot from Susana's POV of Mom+horsewhip is scary stuff.
The men, naturally, are just weak, cock-led flesh.
A Woman Without Love (1952, 91 min)(rent/buy)
"One never sees his mother as a woman, but when you do you can find out surprising things."
Based on a Guy de Maupassant story, it's another domestic drama, this one a bit of a snooze. An affair and an inheritance challenge the relationship between brothers. The most interesting thing could be that the less sympathetic brother in some ways best represents where Buñuel's sympathies might lie; he's not frivolous, he wants to do work that will benefit society. (He's also very cynical about women, and would probably nod a lot through Susana and Obscure Object.) But he's also self-righteous, unfair, cruel.
What's become clear in watching these earlier movies is that Buñuel's eventual mainstay, Fernando Rey, was just the last and best of a series of monied dandies. So far: The owner of Gran Casino, the Ranch Owner in Susana, the patriarchal antiques dealer here - who is contrasted with his wife's lover, a forest engineer ("That tree is venerably old," he sighs at one point, "And to think they will make tables and chairs out of it for vulgar people.").
Also, the dinner table - a central absurdist situation in later works - comes in to play back here, too. In Susana, family unity was exemplified when the group refused to eat dinner until the father returned home; early in Woman, the wife tells the son and her lover-to-be that her husband can eat alone when he comes. The husband's health is often discussed at the table, and he finally dies there.
El Bruto (1953, 83 min) (rent/buy)
Los Olvidados (1950), which won Buñuel the Best Director prize at Cannes, hasn't gotten an official DVD release in the U.S.. (I saw it for the first time a few years ago, would like to see it again.) So El Bruto is the first title in this marathon to concern the downtrodden. A landlord is evicting all the tenants from a building he owns so he can sell the land and build himself a mansion elsewhere. When they try to organize an opposition, he hires a dim-witted strongman to terrorize them.
The movie suffers from the fact a couple of its characters are not supposed to be smart, relies on that to force down a couple unlikely ironies. The Brute (character's real name is Pedro, is played by Pedro Armeddáriz, who looks like a barrel-chested Ernest Borgnine) is described as "a shameless man," but he's really a soft gooey center with a hard, order-following exoskeleton. He suffers, as all the innocents in the film do, when he tries to enjoy his own life or think for himself.
There's a nice chase though a lumberyard, a wonderful, explicitly unnecessary visit to a slaughterhouse, a scene where an old man gorges on candy a few feet from a corpse with a crushed head. Buñuel dishes his best asides to the landlord's younger, lusty wife (Katy Jurado, who was in High Noon). The camera lingers as she watches herself chew her food in a mirror, she shares the great weird ending with a rooster.
La Ilusión viaja en tranvía (Illusion Travels by Streetcar)(1954, 90 min) (rent/buy)
No hablo! If, as Dave Kehr describes, surrealists would purposely disorient their viewing experiences - popping into already-started films, leaving when things started to make sense - then this whole project is antithetical to that code. I'm watching all these movies within a certain context, in a chronologically dictated order, obeying laws of availability.
Here's my first opportunity to get confused. Three of the available films, despite coming from fucking Lionsgate, do not have English subtitles. And despite living in these United States, I do not speak Spanish. (I will probably always be embarrassed by this, will probably never do anything to correct this.) La Ilusión comes coupled with a similarly deficient Nazarín; the third film, which I did not spring for, would have been 1952's Subida al Cielo.
Between 1951 and 1956, fifteen features were released crediting Buñuel as director. A ridiculous pace, one I'm guessing wasn't fueled by creative passion. How many of these titles genuinely attracted the man, how many were uninteresting assignments, no idea. Illusion offers a loose, vignette-oriented framework that might have provided more room to abuse its situation had it been a more personal project: Two transit workers borrow a soon-to-be-retired streetcar for a joy ride, wind up picking up and delivering groups of people over a 24 hour period.
Buñuel didn't write the script - not that I would understand a word of it - and the vignettes are very talky. There's an appealing working-class vibe. Religious matters come to the fore in a couple light instances: An amusing bit of street theater depicts the casting out of Satan and man's fall from Grace; a pair of women escort a statue of Christ on the trolley, nestling its crown of thorns back into place. There's a good little bit where peasants ransack a truck full of smuggled foodstuffs. The film seems to be bookended by documentary narration (though it could have been one of the characters).
An unkind form of confusion, then, in which I got the overall gist but was kept unaware of the particulars.
Robinson Crusoe (1954, 90 min) (rent/buy)
"You were always wayward."
English! Color! Land!
One of two adaptations of classic literature he made that year (the other was Wuthering Heights), this was less an opportunity to catch up with Buñuel than with Crusoe. I've neither read the book nor seen any of the other adaptations - though there's been other stranded isle sitch stuff (Lost, Castaway - not the Tom Hanks volleyball one, Nic Roeg's too-naked Oliver Reed flick, and when I was tiny, Swiss Family Robinson).
It is a pretty darned good story, one - at least in this version - about learning the value of men and their company. Crusoe is a slave trader when he crashes; when his man Friday finally comes along, Crusoe introduces himself as "Master," says in voice-over that it was nice to have a servant again. "Someday, if you're good," he promises his dark-skinned partner, "I'll teach you to smoke." By the end, naturally, Crusoe comes around in what limited ways early 18th century writing allowed.
Buñuel strictly serves the story, here (I've no idea how faithful the story is to the novel, obvs). He doesn't shy away from showing Crusoe's madness (the man goes around feeding bugs to other bugs; "I learned to master everything on my island except myself," he tells us) but doesn't show it in any particular expressionistic ways. I'd guess Buñuel enjoyed how Crusoe orders Friday to eat with a knife and fork while getting his own fingers greasy, the scene where the two argue over matters Biblical. There's a scene where Crusoe fondly touches the dress he's using as a scarecrow; it more qualifies as an acknowledgement of general sexual longing than as a fetish moment. Crusoe does not react with any humor when Friday starts cross-dressing.
Irish actor Daniel O'Herlihy, who got an Oscar nom for his Crusoe, claims in an interview that Buñuel spoke no English -- though the director had lived in the U.S. all those years and appears in documentaries using the language well (perhaps O'Herlihy wasn't aware the director was hard of hearing, perhaps Bunuel was abusing that situation). There's no obvious impediment toward that end; it's not the most dialogue-laden of pictures. (There is too much voice-over.) There's a nice use of location shooting, and the color is vibrant (this DVD's "restored" print is fuzzy) though, again, not used in any particularly expressive way. This lost, lonely island is about as far from the inside of your eyeball as you can get.
(CONTINUE TO PART TWO)
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