Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema 1960-2020 - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series

Portrait of Luis Bunuel by Salvador Dali

Luis Buñuel (1900-83) maintained that his Jesuit education and surrealism marked him for life.This was fully apparent in the two films from his middle filmmaking phase in Mexico (1946-58) merging with the final European phase in the 'full maturity' of his filmmaking (1959-77). The saintly defrocked priest in Nazarin (1958) about whom Bunuel reflected, “that the absolutely pure Christian is condemned to defeat in this world” yet his Christianity is ultimately self justifying. In Viridiana (1961), on which for the first time since L'age d'or(1930) Bunuel had complete freedom in its realisation, Nazarin's counterpart, a young nun, full of charity, kindness and idealistic illusion about humanity, is confronted with the notorious beggars' orgy, a burlesque on the Last Supper to the strains of Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus', one of Buñuel's most mordant pieces of religious parody. Yet, in the face of her total defeat, Viridiana remains ambiguously poised in resignation.

In 1938 the sudden end of the Civil War in Spain found Buñuel unexpectedly stranded in New York where he was on a diplomatic mission for the just overthrown Republican government. He was offered a largely administrative job in New York with some curatorial work in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art. He finally ended up in Hollywood 1944-6 where he was put on a 2 year contract by Warner Bros, to dub films into Spanish and as an occasional consultant on other people's films for two years (most notably on Robert Florey's The Beast with Five Fingers).

The majority of his Mexican films were made from scripts not of Buñuel’s choosing, genre films shot mostly on three week schedules – melodramas and comedies, even a musical. Oscar Dancigers who produced nine of the Mexican films nevertheless promised him a free hand on every third feature if he kept costs down. One of Buñuel’s most personal films, El, was the result of this arrangement. He was able to form close partnerships with two writers Luis Alcoriza (for seven films) and Julio Alejandro for three Mexican films (and later Tristana). He invariably had a hand in shaping the screenplay and claimed in his autobiography that he ‘never made a single scene that compromised my convictions or my personal morality’.

Films like Los Olvidados, Nazarin and The Young One show that Buñuel was not against realism only against its acceptance as sufficient. It is a means of drawing us into the world in order to contaminate reality and throw realism’s insufficiency into relief. Dreams in Buñuel are coextensive with the everyday, they are not contained at a safe distance from it. His Mexican period is also something of a rebuttal to those who still insist on confining surrealism in the modernist avant garde and quarantining Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or as almost the only truly surrealist films.

Delia Garcés, Arturo de Cordova, El

A surrealist engagement with the subversive potential of popular culture can be found in Buñuel’s injection of black comedy into a melodrama such as El (1952). Andrew Sarris characteristically claimed that Buñuel ‘could have been one of Us’ except that his rider that Buñuel ‘hated everything that Hollywood stood for’ is demonstrably not true. After all, one of Buñuel’s favourite films, Portrait of Jennie, was the labour of love of an archetypal Hollywood producer, David O.Selznick. In his demonstrated ability to work in an industry framework without compromising his surrealist affinities, the Mexican period films also offer plenty of evidence to the contrary. It is unlikely, however, that Buñuel could have achieved the relative collaborative freedom in the Hollywood studio contract system with its strict division of labour and especially in the political climate of the time, that he did in the Mexican industry, which obliged him to pursue a career south of the border.

Buñuel moved to Mexico City where he made his first feature film Gran Casino in 1946, for which he was poorly paid to work with inferior material by producer Oscar Dancigers. It was a flop and from 1947-9 Buñuel was without work in the industry until he directed a box office success El gran calavera (1949) that gave him a chance to make a film of his own choosing. He did a deal with Dancigers beginning with Los Olvidados / The Forgotten Ones (1950) that also commenced Buñuel's productive collaboration with cameraman Gabriel Figueroa. Made in “relative freedom” but still poorly paid, its originality briefly put Buñuel back on the international stage (an award at Cannes) 'rediscovered' after the break of 20 years following his Surrealist triptych, Un Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age d'or (1930) and Las Hurdes (1932).

The critical success with the restoration of the “obsessive dream sequence”, an overt stylistic sign of surrealism, in Los Olvidados, a social melodrama set amongst young delinquents in the slums, did not ensure more subsequent freedom as a director of 11 further features 1950-5 including five for Dancigers. Dream sequences appear in Subida al cielo/Mexican Bus Ride (1951) to match those in Los Olvidados. In Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) praised by Aranda as “a model of interpretative adaptation,” the Oedipal influence rules in the dreams which are in the original story,” Séguin notes. It is also the case that the Oedipal influence rules the main dream sequence in Los Olvidados. There are no dreams in the blackly comic Ensayo de un crimen /The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) which is deliberately structured around obsession (Buñuel was delighted when a critic said Archibaldo was the most pornographic film he'd seen, responding that 'all my films are pornographic').

Los Olvidados

The transition period from exile to international status was marked by three features in France (1955-9), two in Mexico including Nazarin in which a young itinerant priest in experiencing the sins, poverty and plagues of the secular world learns to accept as well as extend charity, and a Mexican-US co-production. Raymond Durgnat described The Young One (1960 as “Marxism in dramatic action as few films can be,” filmed in English on location on an island south of Acapulco. The characters including 14 year old Ewie played by an amateur (Kay Meersman), one of Buñuel's “most haunting creations of an innocent, enigmatic, free and hence calm” (ibid). Bunuel regarded The Young One as 'his most spontaneous film' which he said he made 'all in one stroke, that all the people changed, undergoing an evolution during the shooting' (quoted Aranda 183).

In his return to Spain, at Franco's invitation, to make a film of his own choosing. Buñuel chose the 'blasphemous' Viridiana (1961), a companion to Nazarin in its portrayal of the selfless altruism of a young nun confronted by ridicule and cruelty, its ending, as ambiguous as that of Nazarin, is optimistically open. The fifth of Bunuel’s transition films to full international recognition, Viridiana was filmed in Mexico as a Spanish financed production for protection against confiscation, a wise precaution as it turned out, the plot on the submitted script “gives no idea of the deep subversion [intended in Bunuel’s vision of Spain] latent in the images” (Aranda 198)

Viridiana

Buñuel made his mysterious black comedy, El ángel exterminador /The Exterminating Angel (1962), in Mexico with Spanish money, closing the Mexican period in his career. It was in The Exterminating Angel, following Viridiana, that dreams resurfaced “in the elementary and allusive form of the gag” (Seguin). In Buñuel's recovery of an untrammelled surrealism in which a random gathering of people for a dinner party is trapped in a situation for which there is no seeming explanation. The black comedy arises from the increasingly absurdist constraint on the drama to co-operate, even as on the surface the classically styled narrative requires, even demands, a rational explanation, the first of the closed-situation narratives in modernist European art cinema in the 60s, as Kovács notes, with examples in the eastern European new waves in Poland (Polanski's Knife in the Water), Czechoslovakia (Nemec's A Report on the Party and Guests) and Hungary (Jancsó's The Round-up), and films by auteurs such as Bergman (Persona), Fassbinder (Beware of a Holy Whore) and Marco Ferreri (La grande bouffe)

Bunuel and Julio Alejandro wrote the script of Tristana - they had earlier collaborated on Viridiana - adapted from a lesser novel by an acknowledged Spanish master, Benito Perez Galdos, in late 1962; novels invariably acted as points of departure for Bunuel. He suggested Tristana to the production company and received assurances from the censorship authorities that there would be no problem only to have the script rejected at the last minute on quite trivial grounds. “Bunuel resignedly told [the persistent] Silberman that he was ready to make Diary of a Chambermaid.”

Diary of a Chambermaid

Based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau, Diary of a Chambermaid was the first of Buñuel's seven collaborations with writer Jean-Claude Carrière and one of five with producer Serge Silberman. The film is set in the bleak greyness of approaching winter shifted from the turn of the century in the novel, by Bunuel, to the rise of fascism in the thirties in a politically unstable France. Jeanne Moreau plays Cèlestine, the chambermaid who comes to service in a wealthy country estate where, “in the special eerieness […] in its intimate inhumanities,” she becomes locked in a pact with the gamekeeper Joseph, a sadistic fascist. “Because they maintain the Buñuelian sense of contradictions of a dialectic, his characters can be, in the orthodox sense, ‘types', and yet retain their qualities of inner life, of unpredictability.” (Durgnat). Any sense of “Manichean divisions” that seem to be established “are promptly undermined by contradictions that are made clear by the sardonic placidity of Bunuel's style” in which he rejects liberal clichés of a division that humankind is basically either good or bad. He portrays “the life force as ambivalent, brutality is authentic, not the result of alienation or frustration.” Moreau as Cèlestine is “thoroughly Buñuelian in catching the nuances of a complex character” (ibid). Also filmed by Jean Renoir in America in 1945, in comparison with Bunuel’s direct assault on the manners and political morals of the bourgeoisie, Renoir’s is a very different - almost romantic - adaptation, one of three other film versions of Mirbeau's novel which was originally published as “a voyeuristically inclined serial.”

In this mature phase of his career culminating in the six features beginning with Belle de Jour (1967) Buñuel removes the outward trappings of psychological causality in the narrative thus suspending momentarily the distinction between the 'real' and the 'imaginary'. “This is done,” Thomas Elsaesser observes, “without resorting to subjectivist fantasy, avoiding surrealism yet remaining faithful to the surrealist aesthetic while retaining behavioural naturalism in gesture and circumstantial detail.” As Elsaesser further points out, proof of Bunuel's rare visual sense lies in this “audaciously controlled displacement[rather than dislocation] of overt logic and continuity in favour of an inner dynamic... A transference of significance takes place, the narrative often proceeding by omitting causally expected shots that would logically move the narrative forward.” Elsaesser notes that “this narrative method actually goes back to Buñuel's first film Un Chien Andalou / An Andalusian Dog (1927), except that the explicitly psychoanalytic symbols of his first film are ultimately abandoned in favour of an imagery of cumulatively disruptive visual under-statement integrated into the characters' realistic environment. Elsaesser concludes that this development in Buñuel's oeuvre “ as one of the most remarkable phenomena in modern cinema.”

The surrealist belief in the irrationality of religion is again foregrounded by Buñuel in the 'stingingly realistic' portrayal, in Simón del desierto /Simon of the Desert (1965), of the fifth century Syrian saint, Simon of Stylites who spent 39 years living atop a 66 foot column near Aleppo preaching to pilgrims.

Belle de Jour

It was the possibility of introducing two levels of reality into his adaptation of Joseph Kessel's original novel of Belle de Jour, in which there is only one level, that led Buñuel to accept the invitation to film it from the producers. “Alone among the surrealists, Bunuel succeeded in elaborating and refining the specific means of cinema without betraying the conscious impulse” (ibid).

Louis Séguin titled his review of Belle de Jour in Positif in 1967, “The Periphery of Dreams.”Suddenly following Simon of the Desert “which was woven out of mirages and apparitions, comes Belle de Jour with dreams making their reappearance in Buñuel's world, masterfully pervasive at first but quickly becoming as insidious as they are imprecise...diluted into the mental landscape.” Structured into the story of the young wife of a surgeon who seeks to enliven her sexually unfulfilled marriage in the 'forbidden territory' of a brothel, are six daydreams with masochistic themes alternating with seven episodes of real life and three brief memories from Séverine's childhood. Up to the sixth and final imaginary episode when the previously paralysed Pierre suddenly gets up from his wheel chair as if nothing has happened, Séguin notes, “the story is easily understood from an almost linear interpretation which would make it rather ordinary,” like Kessel's 1928 psychological novel on which it is based, “if it were not for obstacles [placed by Buñuel] which cause the dividing line between dreams and reality to crumble.”

From the uncertainty of the episode of the mock funeral at the Duke's, Séguin proceeds to identify a series of ways in which the crumbling of the divide – the logical decomposition of Belle de Jour – proceeds. Some scenes belong to the imagery like the coach and coachmen at the beginning and end, and the repeated references to cats. Others refer both to the real and the imaginary, or can be logically explained. The use of sounds such as various bells are heard in both real and imaginary worlds in the slide to calculated confusion. The two gangsters are initially so archetypal as to be imagined. A number of coincidences are so simplistic as to appear normal, others take us to the limits of the unknown, the lacquered box of the Korean client in the brothel is unusual and calculated.

When the time comes to determine where the imaginary begins and the real ends, all interpretations are possible from the most linear and ordinary to the most absolute, worthy of Jorge Borges […] Everyone viewing Belle de Jour can choose between an infinity of possible films. […] Seeking rational justifications for this tale would remove all of Bunuel’s impact. [,,,] As his work matures and becomes more organised what strikes one first is the perpetual and systematic use of the gag.

In addition to the mordant humour in The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert in “the gags are red-hot-topical in Discreet Charm, which followed on the heels of the events of 1968 (Short 162).

“Throughout Belle de Jour Bunuel continually affirms his repeated and necessary combat against Christian morality” (Séguin 99)).

For Bunuel his inspiration, neither explanatory nor transcendant, “rejects both psychologism and scholarly distinction between dreams, daydreams and visions as not useful from a creative viewpoint.” He keeps them at what Séguin refers to as “poetic reversal [of the narrative] that sheds more intense light on the story,” in distinguishing from the poetic that exalts or explains the story.

In an interview at the time of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972 [Bunuel]explained : ‘An image strikes me, I keep it; I don’t ask why it has made such an impression on me, or if it springs from an association of ideas ,or from an emotion, or a dream, or a memory. We surrealists let images overtake us like this. I have never used symbols on purpose (ibid 160).

Tristana

“From the Mexican Susana (1950) to Tristana (1971) via Journal d’Une femme de Chambre and most famously, Belle de Jour, Bunuel assumes the viewpoint of the woman trying to understand what men want and using their sexuality to fight the submissive destiny prescribed them by society” (Short 162). As Short poInts out, Simon is “only one of many Bunuelian heroes around whom the woman literally runs rings. As victims alike of traumatised childhoods, both male and female protagonists become victimisers in their turn. Bunuel made no bones about the multiple contradictions among which he contrived to forge his own life: ‘They’re part of me and part of the fundamental ambiguity of all things, which I cherish’ “ (ibid).

With the ongoing legacy of L’Age d’Or, La Voie lactée/The Milky Way (1969) further opened the way for the essayist film. Amused by the ongoing war fought by the Church against heresy, Bunuel and Carrière compiled a list from Church histories of apostasies and their repression (Baxter 287). The final titles in The Milky Way claim everything in the film which concerns Catholicism and its heresies is religiously correct. Baxter reports Bunuel’s embarrassment when “The Milky Way was well received by the Church, sections of which were thawing in the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council,” while the Spanish government in declining to ban The Milky Way, welcomed Bunuel back to Spain.

The production company that had advanced Bunuel $30,000 for Tristana in 1962 approached Bunuel for a re-launch having found Italian and French finance. Bunuel determined that Tristana should mark his triumphant return to Spain - his previous entry, Viridiana, had been under false pretences with an ulterior motive (ibid 292).

Made between two successful masterworks - Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1973) - Tristana, is too often overlooked as arguably his most personal and fully realised work, reflecting his profound understanding of Spanish culture and characters. Tristana is set in the late 20s and filmed on location in the narrow medieval streets of Toledo where Bunuel spent his university years, characters bearing early memories of his father and favourite sister (Baxter 293).

The perverse relationship underpinned by unconscious drives, between Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) and her guardian, a much older poor aristocrat, freethinker and chauvinist Don Lope (Fernando Rey), “standing for the impotence and historical amnesia of Spain,” from whose oppression flees only to be entrapped by circularity. She is impelled by illness to return hardened from her initial guise of devout innocence to that of icy revenge.

“Tristana belongs with Belle de Jour in the Bunuel oeuvre. It is post-Viridiana and post-Nazarin in its sensibility, refusing even the illusion of a messianic figure equivalent to Viridiana, Nazarin or Simon of the Desert come to heal the poor. The political has been transformed into the sociology of a callous aristocracy struggling with its death throes in an unrelieved homeland” (Mellen 55). As a tale of ‘l’amour fou’ (given ‘a black rather than rosy testament’) bathed in an autumnal melancholy, Tristana contrasts with the ironic detached tone and lightness of his final three films which, Robert Short, quoting Michael Wood, “are Bunuel’s thoughtful response to a changed cultural climate […] There is a serenity in Bunuel’s late films. But it is not his. It is the false and fragile serenity of the society he pictures. It is a confection of denial, and it can’t last, Bunuel wants to suggest. Unless of course it lasts for ever.”

In addition to Viridiana, the other features (1950-62) most contributing to Bunuel’s transition to the ‘fragile serenity of the society he pictures’ jn Belle de jour, Tristana and the three ironically absurdist comedies made in France in the 70s, are Los Olvidados, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, El, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de La Cruz, Nazarin, and The Exterminating Angel. The Young One and Diary of a Chambermaid have been given retrospective critical recognition after being met with indifferent initial receptions.