The Phantom of Liberty has recently been released on DVD by Criterion. Beautifully restored and mastered with a video introduction by Jean-Claude Carriere. The accompanying booklet includes an essay by Gary Indiana plus a Bunuel interview conducted by Mexican film critics Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrent in the mid '70's. What follows are my thoughts about the film.

It's one of those small curiosities that the work of art, be it a film, a book, piece of music, a painting, or what have you, that serves as our introduction to a particular artist's oeuvre, so often remains our favorite even after we are well acquainted with the artist's greater body of work. For me The Phantom of Liberty is the work of Luis Bunuel's that embodies all the spirited, provocative imagination that pervades his films.

I remember sitting in the theatre in a kind of euphoric state of confusion, thinking this would be the kind of film I'd like to make. Stringing along the audience until they think they know what the film is about and who the protagonist is and then suddenly have that character disappear and never be heard of again. The only other film I can think of that imparts this same degree of dislocation is the beginning segments of Providence by Alain Resnai, in which we are witness to the dying novelist's creative process as he works on his last book.

In the video introduction to Criterion's recently issued DVD of The Phantom of Liberty, Bunuel's co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carriere says that the financial and critical success of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie gave them the freedom to do whatever they wanted; a dangerous circumstance. Bunuel had the idea of filming not a story but a series of overlapping stories that are left behind just as they begin to get interesting.

In the booklet accompanying the disc, critic Gary Indiana mentions Bunuel's expressed dislike of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which he felt would have been a better book if while Raskolnikov was on his way up the stairs to kill the pawnbroker, he had passed a boy on his way to buy a loaf of bread and the narrative turned its focus to the boy. This is the key to the structure of The Phantom of Liberty and though it had never previously occurred to me links it spiritually to works such as Calvino's If On a Winter's Day a Traveler. The linear way the film unfolds through dreams, stories, and fragmented narratives also somewhat recalls Wojicech Has' film of Potocki's novel, The Saragossa Manuscript.

Indiana suggests that with Discreet Charm, Phantom and That Obscure Object of Desire, his final film, Bunuel hit his highest marks as a film maker.The films do not constitute a trilogy but rather in Indiana's opinion are different configurations of the same film. I concur with his opinion, though I would add The Milky Way as well. I believe it's something of a minority view among Bunuel fans, however.

Beginning with what seems to be a dramatization of Goya's painting The Executions of May, we find Napoleon's army in Toledo and soon to be shot Spaniards shouting Down with Liberty. On first glance this appears to be one of Bunuel's ironic little jokes, but as is explained in his interview with Colina and Turrent, "Vivan las ca'enas!" (long live chains!) was actually shouted by the Spanish, expressing their preference for the Monarchy to the supposed liberty the French were peddling.

It occurs to me how often Bunuel was taken to task for invented and gratuitous, shocking images in his films, such as the crucifix daggers in Viridiana, that later turned out to be quite common throughout the Aragon region of Spain from which he hailed.

From the executions we move to the French celebrating their victory in a church, the commander munching on communion wafers, the finding of a treasure, a statue coming to life and conking the commander on the head when he gets fresh with another statue and an exhumation of a woman's corpse that he plans to sleep with.

At this point we hear the voice of the actress, Muni, reading the passage, she looks up and asks another woman, who like her is sitting on a bench in a park in modern day Paris, the meaning of the word 'paraphernalia' which she has just read. Muni is governess to a couple children playing in the park. At the playground slide they're confronted by a leering man who offers them a packet of photographs to share with their friends, but tells them they mustn't show them to adults. They accept them and upon arriving home immediately turn them over to their mother. She looks at them and becomes angry. Then we watch as she and her husband coo over them getting more and more erotically worked up, eventually the camera pans behind the couple and we see the photos, ordinary tourist snaps of monuments like the Taj Mahal and the Arc de Triomphe. Nevertheless they call in the governess and sack her for her neglect.

To try and describe the 'plot' of Phantom is pointless. Suffice it to say that this is Bunuel's assault not only on narrative logic, but reason itself. He repeatedly turns the logic of human norms of behavior on its head.

An instructor in a school for gendarmes is treated with the antics one would expect from grade school children. Meanwhile he tells them a story which we witness.

People socialize around a large table while seated on toilets and then flush and retreat alone to small locked rooms to eat.

A little girl is lost in plain sight. She's both there and not there as her family takes her to the police to report her missing.

A man who has trouble sleeping has what appear to be waking dreams, a rooster walks through his room, followed by a postman on a bicycle and an Ostrich. He's describing them to his doctor who tells him to find someone else if he's going to describe his dreams and the man says it wasn't a dream, I have the letter the postman left and hands him a sheet of paper. As the doctor begins to read it his nurse interrupts with an urgent request to speak to him. She shows him a letter advising that her father is deathly ill and asks for time off to visit him. She leaves and the camera follows her.

At a country inn where several stories intersect, Carmelite priests come to her room to pray for her father and afterwards draw her into a poker game in which bets are made with scapulas and religius medals.

A mass murderer, based apparently on the Texas tower sniper, shoots random passersby from a highrise building. Is later convicted, sentenced to death and then immediately released, only to find a throng of autograph seekers waiting for him outside the courtroom.

I've seen the film enough times now that I remember most all the individual scenes and images but their sequence remains a surprise every time. Here in his penultimate film Bunuel comes full circle. The structure, the questions about the role of chance and the subjectivity of morals and social norms, that are left hanging in the air, recall L'Age D'or. The forty odd years in between the two has softened the old man though. Phantom is less in your face than L'Age D'or, more flowing and relaxed, human folly is treated with a gentler humor, but underneath is the same thorny iconoclast.

In the end we return to the shout of Down with Liberty, this time mouthed by students and workers demonstrating at a zoo. The camera focuses on the police chiefs as they give the order to charge the crowd. Then with sound of shouting and gunfire the camera pans over to the quizzical gaze of the Ostrich astonished by the depths of human folly.