Buñuel's topics - tribe.net

The Milky Way newly released on Criterion

gidouille — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:08:19 GMT

A prologue tells us the Way of Saint James, the pilgrim’s road from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, was also known as The Milky Way, the constellation followed at night by its travelers. Two modern day pilgrims, Pierre and Jean, are on the road for reasons which remain vague, having little luck in catching rides. They encounter a man who asks the first if he has any money and when he replies no, tells him then you shall have none. He turns to the other and upon being told he has a little, gives him a sizeable banknote. He tells the first to father a child with a prostitute and name the child “ye are not my people”. and to the second, he says name the child “no more mercy”. So opens The Milky Way, Bunuel’s sly 1968 film, the first of a trilogy on philosophic themes, taking in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.

According to Bunuel’s scenario partner, Jean-Claude Carriere, the initial idea was very broad, a film about the notion of heresy. Carriere describes this wonderfully, heretics are those who choose their own mistakes, zeroing in on some small untruth within a doctrine and replacing it with their own truth, even if it subjects them to danger or death. With this in mind Carriere assembled a vast amount of material from the history of the church, both orthodox and heretical, relating to the six core mysteries.

Bunuel was out scouting locations for The Milky Way during the student worker rebellion of May 1968. On the surface The Milky Way would seem to bear no relationship to the political climate of the time, Carriere says he and Bunuel were treated as something like heretics for even wanting to make a film about religion. Still, though the dominant Orthodoxies may shift, their tendency to claim absolute ownership over their domain remains constant. Bunuel had mixed feelings about the upheavals. On the one hand he was amazed and gratified to find surrealist slogans from his youth scrawled on walls all over Paris, on the other he predicted the rise of the seemingly random and pointless violence to come, and which he would depict in subsequent films. He wondered whether Breton’s idea of the perfect surrealist act as opening fire randomly on a crowd hadn’t been an inspiration for the Red Brigades, Bauder-Meinhoff and others.

I first saw The Milky Way in the late ‘70’s during a Bunuel festival, which was my first exposure to any of his work. Bunuel draws on a number of different orthodox and heterodox viewpoints across millennia, each of them taken at absolute face value, but not easily identifiable. Though knowing a little about the various sectarian beliefs presented is useful in decoding the film, it’s not necessary. Bunuel is conducting an investigation into the very properties of belief itself. The crucial point is the peculiar knack humans have for staking claims upon the invisible and abstract, as if they were quantifiable and then defending their territory from claims jumpers, so to speak, at all costs. This absurdity is, I think, what interests Bunuel, rather than any of the competing ideas in and of themselves. Director Milos Forman called The Milky Way highly political because this same notion of orthodoxy opposed by heterodoxy applied equally to the soviet system he’d known in Czechoslovakia. The same could be said today of the degraded political systems of the west, or the various fundamentalisms into which so many of our human institutions have devolved.

Bunuel once opined that Crime and Punishment would have been more interesting had Dostoyevsky suddenly abandoned Raskolnikov entirely to follow another character after a chance encounter. He greatly admired The Saragossa Manuscript, particularly its use of layers upon layers of embedded fragmented narratives, a principle which he really took to heart a few years later in The Phantom of Liberty.

In The Milky Way he has yet to completely abandon the linear narrative, employed here to link together the other layers, the pilgrims' encounters in time and space, and provide an emotional context for them. In Pierre and Jean we have two everymen in a classic picaresque story, two heroes, as Ian Christie notes, each more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, on a journey unstuck in time.

Journeying through "a forest of symbols", as one critic put it, they encounter

- a child with stigmata sitting alongside the road

- a rite of 4th C Priscillian Dualists

- Jean telling Pierre his beard makes him look more trustworthy leads to a vision of Mary telling Jesus not to shave

- a heretic is condemned by the inquisition for his disagreement on a small point of scripture

- a bishop has his predecessor's body dug up and burned for heresy because of writings found after his death

- two followers of the the dead bishop interrupt with their anti-Trinitarian views, flee from the soldiers, through a forest to a lake where two hunters have left their clothes while swimming, put them on and enter the 20th century right in front of our eyes

- an angel of death at the scene of an auto accident tells Pierre, who's suffering from sore feet, to take the dead man's shoes

- an 18th century sword fight cum debate between a Jesuit and a Jansenist ends apparently amicably

- the maitre‘dhotel at an exclusive restaurant regales his staff with theological musings while setting up for the night

- an invitation to join a picnic at a religious school, Institution Lamartine has them grateful for a meal as little girls recite dogma by rote, as part of the entertainment, repeating the refrain “he is anathema” on cue, after every described transgression, the picnic scene is intercut with Jean’s reverie, armed rebels bearing a red and black flag stride resolutely up an alley, arriving at the town square they find the Pope, line up and shoot him, back at the picnic a shot rings out, the man next to Jean asks what was that, is there a shooting range nearby, to which he replies somewhat sheepishly "that was me, I was imagining the execution of a pope".

Bunuel employs many of the same actors to found in several of his late period, French financed films, Muni, Michel Piccoli, as the Marquis de Sade, Julien Bertheau, Delphine Seyrig, Francois Maistre and several others appear, adding to the feeling of connectedness between this and the two films to come. Co-scenarist Carriere portrays the Bishop Priscillian and Bunuel appears as the Pope. The two lead actors, Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzief, steal the show with superb naturalistic performances. Their implacability in the face of all these bizarre ideas and situations provides the emotional weight of the film.

In a video introduction to The Milky Way, Carriere, relates an anecdote which says much about Bunuel. It seems a friend who ran a theatre in Copenhagen told him that when he first showed The Milky Way, 30 or 40 Romani men, women and children came in a group to see it, the next day they came back, not entirely the same group, but a mix of new and repeat viewers of about the same size. They understood neither the French of the dialog nor the Danish of the subtitles. For eight days in a row they returned. This greatly intrigued the cinema manager and finally he told them they could enter free, which they did for that viewing, and never came back again. Carriere says he told Bunuel this story knowing nothing else about it. He listened, asked Carriere to tell the story again, which he did. He listened, then said and now we will never refer to this again because when you are lucky enough to encounter the real mystery, you must respect it.

Arriving on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, Pierre and Jean encounter a prostitute, Delphine Seyrig, who tells them the town is deserted. It seems the relics have turned out not to be St. james, but a headless body, some guy named Priscillian, who’d been the first heretic executed by the church. She tells them she wants them to give her a baby and leads the two into the woods. Two present day blind men encounter Jesus and his apostles in the woods and ask to be cured. The miracle is duly performed, but as the two follow along they come to a ditch which they probe with their staffs. Bunuel himself said he didn’t know if they were still blind but didn’t wish to appear ungrateful, or the use of the cane was so ingrained into them they continued out of habit. Once again the mystery must be respected. Perhaps for this same reason, Bunuel had a horror of the psychological analysis to which some critics, notably Pauline Kael, invariably subjected his work. It disrespected the mystery.

As expected with a Criterion release, everything about the package is first rate, an excellent print, re-worked and much more accurate subtitles than I remember, short films of commentary by notable critics and scholars ,and a 30 page booklet with essays by Carlos Fuentes and Mark Polizzotti, as well as an interview with Bunuel himself.

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Where can I find Bunuel's re-cut of Triumph of the Will?

ninjad — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 02:30:43 GMT

Is it out there somewhere? Does someone have it in their basement? What's going on with it?

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Favorite Bunuel film?

stevemobia — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 19:15:27 GMT

Mine is probably "Exterminating Angel" followed by "The Phantom of Liberty." Hmm, an angel following a phantom.

All Bunuel movies have there moments however. Of course, who could forget "Un Chen Andalou?"

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Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón

freels — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:36:55 GMT

Anyone see this:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0280507/

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Bunuel Films I Haven't Seen...

freels — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:25:09 GMT

The Milky Way (1969)
The Young One (1960)
Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959)
Death in the Garden (1956)
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955)
The River and Death (1955)
Cela s'appelle l'aurore (1955)
Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953)
Wuthering Heights (1953)
El Bruto (1952)
Robinson Crusoe (1952)
La Hija del engaño (1951)
Susana (1951)
A Woman Without Love (1951)
The Great Madcap (1949)
En el viejo Tampico (1947)

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Viridiana

gidouille — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:12:18 GMT

Criterion has announced they'll be releasing Viridiana on dvd in February.

http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=332&section=synopsis

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The Phantom of Liberty

gidouille — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 03:19:06 GMT

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.

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Buñuel movie night in SF?

pulchrasunt — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 18:36:51 GMT

I have a bunch of Buñuel on DVD and a projector and movie screen.

Anyone interested in a Buñuel movie night in the Bay Area?

I'm thinking a double feature: Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or?

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"The Reassuring Shock of the Early Buñuel"

Jonno — Sun, 25 Jan 2004 20:46:28 GMT

from the New York Times, 1/24/04:

* * * * *

The Reassuring Shock of the Early Buñuel
By A. O. SCOTT

Published: January 25, 2004

"ONCE upon a time" (or so the first title card declares), a man stood at the sink, stropping his straight razor, as clouds sliced across the full moon. And because this movie, in spite of being pulled nonsensically backward and forward by those arbitrary title cards, exists only in the present tense, what followed remains one of the most notoriously shocking images in the history of cinema. Nobody who has seen it has forgotten it, and many who have never seen it are nonetheless aware of it. The man, with studied casualness, applies his razor to the eyeball of a woman seated in front of a window. By means of a sleight of hand accomplished by one kind of cutting — the snipping and splicing of pieces of film to create the illusion of continuity — we see, in close-up, the results of another, more brutal kind. The eyeball (which belongs to a calf smuggled into the frame while we were looking at the moon) is neatly dissected, its inner matter squeezed out in a gelatinous glob.

The image, of course, is from "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), the 18-minute film directed by Luis Buñuel from a script he wrote with Salvador Dalí. The man with the razor is Buñuel himself, sharpening his weapons of sexual provocation, elegant visual aggression and mischievous humor for the assault on bourgeois propriety and narrative decorum he will carry on, with some interruptions and changes of scene, for another half-century.

"Un Chien Andalou" and its sequel, "L'Âge d'Or," both of which will be shown at Film Forum beginning on Friday ("L'Âge d'Or" in a clean new 35-millimeter print), have long since taken up residence in the pantheon of modernist aesthetic scandals. Like "The Rite of Spring," "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon," "Ulysses" and Henry Miller's twin "Tropics," these films have been sanctified for their sacrilege, as their initial aesthetic radicalism has become the guarantor of their ultimate cultural prestige. When "L'Âge d'Or" opened at Studio 28 in Paris in 1930, it provoked such intense hostility among right-wing religious and political groups that the police pulled it from the screen after less than two weeks. Buñuel himself, anticipating such a reaction, later claimed that he attended the premiere armed with rocks to hurl back at the audience, whose displeasure was clearly part of his intention. The most obvious incitements are a series of blasphemous images — sharp pokes in the eye of the Catholic church that had dominated Buñuel's provincial Spanish childhood. These include a klatch of skeletons in priestly garb, and the teasing insertion of an actor resembling Jesus into the orgiastic criminality of the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom." (The orgy itself, featuring eight captive teenagers and four "depraved women," is evoked only in voiceover.)

But the most overtly scandalous elements of Buñuel's early style have become, over time, the easiest to assimilate and the least costly to approve. Yes, there is occasionally a movie or other artwork that will ruffle religious sensitivities or inspire picket lines, but these ritualized culture-war skirmishes have all the spontaneity and unpredictability of Civil War re-enactments. To imagine the unhinged outrage of the squares — or, even better, the repressive fury of church, state and the ruling class — in the face of avant-garde art is, at this point, a nostalgic exercise in self-flattery. In his fight for imaginative liberty, Buñuel was perhaps more successful than he could have dreamed or would have admitted.

In Spain — where, as Buñuel once observed, the Middle Ages lasted well into the 20th century and the religious and social tyranny of fascism expired only in the 1970's — his exiled spirit has found a home in the work of Pedro Almodóvar, who began as a revolutionary and has since become an institution. The assault on bourgeois propriety, you might say, has become a cherished form of bourgeois propriety in its own right.

So if "L'Âge d'Or" was solely devoted to tweaking now-obsolescent mores (and habits of dress; you will see more tuxedos in this hourlong picture than in the seven hours of next month's Oscar broadcast), it would survive as little more than a historical curiosity. Instead, like other monuments of modernism, and like "Un Chien Andalou," its durability lies less in its challenge to social norms than in its formal extremism. Its power to shock may lie not so much in its profligate images as in the way they are arranged.

Henry Miller called "L'Âge d'Or" "the only film I know of which reveals the possibilities of the cinema," and this description retains a surprising aptness. To an extent unmatched even by his own later, longer work, Buñuel's early movies function according to dream logic, exploiting and subverting the stubborn linearity of film to create an oxymoronic atmosphere of calm terror, or rigorous anarchy. Because filmed images, like dream images, unfold before our eyes in chronological sequence, we assume that they are also linked by cause and effect, and thus part of what Miller wonderfully called "the whole glittering web of logic and idealism that seeks to mask from us the real nature of man."

In insisting that rationalism was an illusion, and a cinema could be erected, like the Imperial Rome of "L'Âge d'Or," on nonrational foundations, Buñuel laid out an artistic program as influential as it was doomed. Traces of his dream syntax show up everywhere, from Hitchcock to Bergman, from Mel Brooks to David Lynch, but the gleeful utopian promise of his purest, most passionate Surrealism remains just that — the opening salvo in a revolution that never quite took place.

The Golden Age of "L'Âge d'Or" thus remains permanently in the future, where it belongs, and the movie can still provoke, baffle and delight — not that this would have pleased its maker. "What I want is for you not to like the film," he once said, "to protest. I would be sorry if it pleased you." But now, almost 75 years later, "L'Âge d'Or" offers not only pleasure but comfort: it reassures us that, as long as we have eyes, we will still be susceptible to shock.

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Bunuel Filmography

Jonno — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 23:35:14 GMT

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800014173&cf=gen&intl=us

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