Huzzah!

I just solved a great mystery that might be useful to other posters here: misspell your profanity if you want your posts to actually show up! My soul got torn apart when a 2000 word thingamaboo on Luis Bunuel would just. not. post. Turns out inverting the “u” and the “c” in the one expletive I used in the whole thing solved the problem. Click here to view the newly visible post on Luis Bunuel.
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Okay, and if you’re too lazy to click, here is the whole damn thing reposted:

Luis Bunuel, gun

I’m surprised this blog entry hasn’t occurred sooner, as I impressed many of my film professors with detailed presentations concerning the work of Luis Bunuel (note to collegians seeking Film minors: pick an under-discussed master you love, then enrich and recycle your knowledge of him or her in class after class, as I was able to in doing Bunuel presentations or papers for French Cinema, History of Film, Single Camera Production, and even Comparative Literature). Bunuel is always worth writing about, as his life is fascinating, his work is timeless, the man is hilarious in a way no human being has ever been again so far. But why is he relevant to this blog? I’ll have to defer to a recent, long overdue fancy DVD release. Yes, this is a thin justification, but it has worked before.

Bunuel with Garcia Lorca in a plane.

Before we get to that ostensible reason for this post, let me answer the titular question. Luis Bunuel is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, born in the first year of said century, and a school chum of Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. With writing assistance from his chum Dali, he made a few of the most important silent films ever.

Bunuel portrait by Dali

Even as he broke away from his friendships with Garcia Lorca (who later up and disappeared) and Dali (who was, well, crazy, you know?) and his affiliation with the Surrealists (who were a temperamental bunch) and the Communists (who were less interested in Marx and more interested in political tyranny as time went by), Bunuel remained international cinema’s most accomplished and uncompromising surrealist up until his death in 1983. This was also the year he published his charming, profound memoir My Last Sigh, as told to his finest screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carriere. In his years, he earned a spot as one of the international film masters (and grew virtually side-by-side with the medium), but one does not hear him mentioned as frequently or fawnishly as contemporaries like Bergman, Fellini, Hitchcock or Renoir.

Simon Of The Desert

Recently, the Criterion Collection finally got around to putting Simon of the Desert onto a nice disc. This religious satire on the plight of the saint who lived on a pillar for god while satan, played by the gorgeous Sylvia Pinal, tried to tempt him, is a fine example of Bunuel’s religious cynicism and alternately gentle and vicious humor. Though only 45 minutes long (this was Bunuel’s final Mexican film and was either truncated for budgetary constraints or intended for a never-realized omnibus with other directors), it is an ample introduction to the style and skepticism of Bunuel.

Viridiana

He was among the boldest religious critics in the movies, a streak that also came up in Viridiana, his triumphant return to Spain after a long North American exile (in which he participated in orgies with Chaplin, among other things). Viridiana got him kicked out again, and Franco’s government attempted to destroy all physical remnants of the film, which Bunuel managed to smuggle out of Spain just in time to win Cannes. Take that, half-assed mid-twentieth-century Spanish fascism! Viridiana displayed a ruthlessness uncommon to the times, as Bunuel subjects his pious beautiful blonde heroine (Bunuel was at least as hard up as Hitchcock for talented blonde beauties) to fetishized religious rape by her uncle (frequent villainous Bunuel lead Fernando Rey, who also was the head of The French Connection) and then has her shunned by her convent, who blames her for the violation. When she is ironically deeded her rapist uncle’s estate, she opens it up to the local poor and devotes her life to service on their behalf, only to face further exploitation and assault from the needy. Perhaps the iconic image in Viridiana that pissed off the Catholic Spanish Fascists the most was when the poor are running wild in her absence and just happen to take a group picture where they frame themselves in the exact poses of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Anybody interested in Bunuel’s religious farces needs to see two more films from very different periods, the ’50s Mexican bumbling-Christ-figure odyssey Nazarin and the late-’60s homeless-road-movie/literary-evisceration-of-Catholic-dogma The Milky Way.

Un Chien Andalou (be a debaser)

Bunuel’s first gusts of directorial glory came from a writing collabo with his BFF at the time, Salvador Dali. 1928′s Un Chien Andalou is a landmark for experimental, short and silent film, as well as a favorite of the Pixies. The dynamic duo supposedly wrote straight from their dreams, with the only writing dictate being that one scene could not rationally follow another. The ants crawling out of a palm, the deer carcasses dragged from a piano, the beach buried couple, that infamous sliced eye…that’s entertainment! This was followed by the full-length fever dream that was L’Age D’Or, which kept the surrealist anarchy while stretching longer and inching closer to something that might be considered a narrative. There were still uncanny images by the ton (check the blingy priest skeletons at the outset), but Dali drifted off into his own orbit pretty early in the effort, freeing Bunuel to stamp his particular trademark on it. This meant sexual perversion and mockery of the bourgeoisie. The movie climaxes (in more than one sense) with a formally dressed man tearing a bedroom to pieces intercut with a beautiful woman fellatiating (fellating/sucking on) the toe of a religious statue.

Bunuel would return to the freewheeling surrealist gag carousel of these early films in 1974 with The Phantom of Liberty. This was a loosely linked series of surreal segments that wound up being a great influence on both absurd sketch comedy and later independent films following random characters such as Richard Linklater’s Austin landmark Slacker. The title was a twist on a famous quote demonizing “the spectre of Communism”, and made the Western democratic world as much a terrifying (if well-moneyed and oblivious) madhouse as impoverished Commie conditions. Politics were always a passionate target for Bunuel. A clear revolutionary sympathy bleeds through his gaze, but everybody comes up for mockery. In his world, the ideals that characters ostensibly define themselves through always lose to human passion and buffoonery. Nowhere is this better represented than in the wry/ruthless 1964 melodrama/farce Diary of a Chambermaid, starring Jeanne Moreau at her best and loveliest. She was the ambivalent beauty of the ’60s (her ravishing indecisiveness sure drove Jules and Jim crazy).

The Discreet Charm of the Bougeoisie (they really want to sit down and eat)

As you’ve probably gathered thusfar, the upper class in Europe was an endlessly fascinating subject of ridicule for Bunuel. The bourgeoisie was so charming in a discreet way to him that he named perhaps his most entertaining film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In this masterpiece, he has sadistic fun with a sextet of rich people by never allowing them to do the two things they want to, eat and fcuk. Early on, the obstacles seem realistic (scheduling mishaps, inconvenient visitors, etc.), but as the movie progresses Bunuel twists it into a surreal gauntlet of absurd situations and dreams within dreams. Somehow, this does not deter the classy/disgusting protagonists, even after they are gunned down. They just skip along, merry and oblivious, which I guess is their titular discreet charm. This is actually something of an inversion of his finest Mexican film (no small prize in a class that includes the 1950 powerhouse Los Olvidados, which was kind of like a dirty, unsavory, brutal, violent, remorseless variation/rebuttal to Italian Neorealism). The Exterminating Angel allowed it’s rich party to sit down and enjoy a sumptuous banquet. Then it would not let them leave. Refined civilization degenerates into savagery and chaos, and we have a rollicking night at the movies watching it.

Belle de Jour? Belle of all time!

Let’s see, anything else…oh yeah, sex! Bunuel was a filthy old man and a great director with a horny streak. We have already noticed that he tended to cram a lot of beautiful women and a lot of sex into his films, thematically, figuratively and literally. Not that Bunuel was ever purely prurient…there was always quite a bit going on around his obvious female foot fetish and photogenic casting of brilliant young actresses. Furthermore, he barely (pun intended upon retrospect) ever succumbed to outright nudity, preferring suggestion and psychology (and rapturous shots and set-pieces based around legs and footware).

Most notable are two classics from the late ’60s which constituted one of the best actor-director collaborations between one of the best actors and the best directors ever (we’re talking DeNiro-Scorcese, Lee-Washington level here, but sexier). Catherine Denueve is one of the most beautiful and masterful actresses ever to light up the celluloid, but nobody handled her better than Bunuel. Tristana might seem like one of Bunuel’s grand frustration jokes (and it is), taking his star and denying her of her million dollar blonde locks (Denueve is brunette in this one) as well as a leg (Denueve gets her leg amputated in this one). Never, however, has Denueve been so sexy and sly. What starts as a dirty wish fulfillment for Bunuel’s perpetually sleazy, rich and frustrated alter-ego Fernando Rey becomes a mordant script flip as Denueve gets herself physically disabled and relationship empowered, taking a stern upper hand in response to his shameless exploitation.

Before Tristana, Bunuel collaborated with Denueve on what may be the best erotic movie ever, with no nudity aside from some shrouded asscheeks and sporadic side-boob. That was probably the least tasteful introduction to Belle De Jour you are likely to come across, so please don’t let it dissuade you from watching it. This movie not only sensitively explores the contradictory impulses of a prim, initially virginal (not for long), decorative Parisian housewife who finds fulfillment and escape in voluntary service with a high-class brothel, but it is the subtlest sex comedy I have ever seen, constantly downplaying outrageous fantasies and scenarios with droll cutaways and heartfelt drama. In a decade that saw the flourishing of international cinema, had the whole game changed by those French critic/directors and their “New Wave”, and birthed New Hollywood, Belle De Jour is still one of the best of the ’60s.

Somehow, before his last sigh, Bunuel managed to cap his career off on a note that was simultaneously sexual, universal, emotional, rueful, and still kind of dirty and wrong. Of course he needed Fernando Rey for this. Like Stanley Kubrick with Eyes Wide Shut, Bunuel found the best way, in his seventies, to conclude his career was with a brilliant sexual frustration comedy. Behold That Obscure Object of Desire. Of course, in the story, Rey is an exploitative rich asshole using his power to manipulate a young beauty (and of course she winds up with the upper hand, though she doesn’t have to amputate another extremity for it like Tristana did). The comedy and pathos comes from telling the story from the heartbroken antogonist’s point of view, making Rey sympathetic and the young woman attractively monstrous despite his obvious depravity and her victimized circumstance.

As in all of Bunuel’s great works, conventional movie-watching emotional shortcuts are subverted and toyed with as cinematic manipulation is revealed for the grand illusion it is. Here, he has one of his greatest tricks up his sleeve for a grand exit. The woman is played by two very different actresses, and as they alternate scenes (even switching mid-scene in a climactic confrontation), the film and characters within it make no comment to explain this. In the end, human folly is mostly sexual, at least as Bunuel saw it. No matter how fortuitous and advantageous the circumstances, the fiery Spaniard tempting you can button up into a prim, inaccessible French beauty. Rather ironic, as Bunuel was a Spaniard shunned by his homeland who ended up rapturously devoured by France. His long film career ended with a violent bang. In real life, he deteriorated a little more and wrote a book with his friend. Surrealists never cared for consistency.