The immensity of Luis Buñuel’s influence on cinema cannot be over-emphasized. This effect is seen in both commercial and arthouse cinema, as well as genre fare. Some other filmmakers of comparable influence in the first half of the twentieth century would be Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, and Maya Deren. At the beginning of his career it is possible that Buñuel didn’t even realize the magnitude of his irreverent subject matter and narrative structure, which disregarded any kind of acceptable approach to religious propriety and bourgeois culture.
This fearless and defiant approach is specifically grounded in the Surrealist movement which he was a part of. Un Chien Andalou (1929, aka The Andalusian Dog), his sixteen-minute collaboration with Salvador Dalí, is still one of the most common movies found on Film 101 syllabi at colleges everywhere. This is a bit surprising, seeing as how the movie aspires to be incomprehensible. Spectators who are excited by Un Chien Andalou are those who want to be challenged by the films they see. Among the montage of imagery, we see an eyeball sliced open by a straight razor, ants crawling out of a hole in someone’s hand, a man dragging a piano, a dead reindeer, and some religious figures around, and a woman’s armpit hair disappearing, only to be found again as a man’s facial hair. This series of bizarre moments have dissolved into greater mainstream culture. In a recent episode of The Projection Booth podcast about L’Age d’Or Mike White mentioned that in the 1980’s he remembered seeing scenes of Un Chien Andalou used in a colorized promo on MTV.1 The 1929 film's combination of shocking imagery and unconventional editing was a clear influence on music video culture (not to mention The Pixies’ song “Debaser”), as well as so much more.
L’Age d’Or (1930, aka The Golden Age), the second and final collaboration between Buñuel and Dalí, expanded on the artistic assault of Un Chien Andalou. How many directors have you heard of who felt compelled to fill their pockets up with rocks on the night of a premiere as a defense against rioting audience members? People don’t act that way towards cinema any more (or if you have recent examples, let me know), although contemporary fandom is just another kind of madness.
A few months ago I was watching L’Age d’Or with a friend, and his eight-year-old son decided to sit down and watch some of it with us. During one scene, he asked, “Why is there a cow on the bed?” It was a damn good question, which we did not have a definitive answer for. In a number of other instances, he kept asking with increasing confusion, “What is happening??” Once again, we had no good answers, aside from a basic description of the characters on screen, and how the movie is supposed to be kind of like a dream. By the scene when the woman kisses the toes of a statue, the kid just began screaming. This completely valid reaction and reading of the film done by an eight-year-old is a worthy comparison to how audience members may have reacted upon first seeing L’Age d’Or over 90 years ago.
To quote Buñuel at length from his autobiography, My Last Sigh: “All of us were supporters of a certain concept of revolution, and although the surrealists didn’t consider themselves terrorists, they were constantly fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn’t guns, of course; it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny--in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself…”2
To varying degrees, Buñuel and the other surrealists were successful in exploding the social order. “Scandal” seems like a particularly capitalist phenomenon--or perhaps I am considering the huge amount of money brought in by sensational newspapers and websites. As Buñuel’s career continued, he began attacking the wealthy bourgeoisie and religious propriety in a way that used formal narrative more effectively, but which was still somehow perplexing and mystifying. While a silent era filmmaker like D.W. Griffith is often credited with standardizing editing structures, and creating a sense of cohesion in cinema, Buñuel tears all of that down by 1930, only to put the structures of cinema back together in a way that anticipates destruction at any moment.
The director’s Mexican period (mid-1930s to mid-60s) is probably the most underseen of his career. It is also the period that I know the least about. Some of the films made during this time were clearly studio jobs to bring in money, but many of them continued going back to the main themes in Buñuel’s work. Los Olvidados (1950, aka The Young and The Damned) remains one of the most brutal films ever made. It doesn’t have blood and guts, but rather a savage and nihilistic tone. The movie is about street kids in Mexico City who will do anything to survive. There are scenes in which crippled people are beaten, and the body of our young protagonist is thrown into a trash heap at the end. Los Olvidados is outrageous in its delivery of class inequality themes, perhaps because it is so truthful.
Full of dark humor, and dour examinations of hypocrisy, The Exterminating Angel (1962) is one of the director’s best films. The Mexican production about a bunch of rich people who find it impossible to leave a party, so stay in the apartment, trapped, is a clear companion piece to the later Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie (1972), which we will circle back around to. There is something almost supernatural about The Exterminating Angel, exemplified by all of the service workers in the house feeling compelled to escape before the imaginary prison bars descend to trap the idle rich. One of the many readings of the movie is as an indicator that so many crises experienced by the upper class are non-emergencies created by themselves.
Simon of the Desert (1965), Buñuel’s last Mexican production before moving on to a concluding French period, is one of the most direct attacks on religion, in particular Catholicism, in his career. Not since the audience was presented with Jesus Christ as a Sadean libertine at the end of L’Age d’Or, has the director spent so much time showing the contradictions and suffering involved in religious dedication. There is a sadism and masochism inherent in Catholicism and the guilt it inspires, which went on to find a more lush setting in the director’s next film, Belle de Jour (1967).
Belle de Jour continues to age like a luscious, French wine, and it is a comfort film for anyone who wishes to be swept away into a modern fairytale of debauchery and desire. It is a film that has such a major Buñuel mood and use of iconography, but it succeeds in achieving something beyond the director’s usual scope--this is achieved through the performance of Catherine Deneuve as Séverine, looking hypnotic (and sometimes hypnotized) in a wardrobe provided by Yves Saint-Laurent. While occasionally containing violence, Séverine’s dreams and fantasies have an ethereal and sublime nature that stick with the audience far longer than the film's running time. Religious themes stick to the background in Belle de Jour, while upper class opulence and sexual fetishism take the main stage. The film was released one year before 1968, a watershed year for the loosening of cinema censorship depicting sexuality in frank and graphic ways. That being said, Belle de Jour, in its teasing and understated way, is one of the sexiest films of all time. This is not necessarily about seeing the flesh of the performers, but more about costumes and objects gaining a sexual significance of their own in relation to the bodies on screen.
To quote Buñuel at length once more: “Men of my generation, particularly if they’re Spanish, suffer from a hereditary timidity where sex and women are concerned. Our sexual desire has to be seen as the product of centuries of repressive and emasculating Catholicism, whose many taboos--no sexual relations outside of marriage (not to mention within), no pictures or words that might suggest the sexual act, no matter how obliquely--have turned normal desire into something exceptionally violent. As you can imagine, when this desire manages to overcome the obstacles, the gratification is incomparable, since it’s always colored by the sweet secret sense of sin.”3
Apparently it takes someone with a highly repressed sexuality to make such a brilliant depiction of a person’s interior sexual fantasy world. Freely showing sexual acts in a documentary fashion is boring compared to the creativity involved in manifesting sexuality from a place of shame or guilt. Belle de Jour, which is about a rich, nervous housewife’s desire to be degraded and dominated in a brothel, could be written off as a kind of particularly hetero male fantasy, but that approach is a bit reductive. A more rewarding analysis of the picture designates it as a pro-kink film in which women with deviant desires can go about exploring them, gaining a sense of empowerment along the way. Buñuel and his surrealist brothers are not well remembered for their progressive stance on gender politics, but contemporary viewers of their artworks can interpret from them what we want. Buñuel’s dissatisfaction with society’s approach to sexuality allows room for many contemporary films and perspectives to grow from those roots.
The end of Buñuel’s career involves the fusing of class, religion, and sexuality into a package that is more intentionally humorous than most of the previous films. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie may be the most pure distillation of the director’s interests, personality, and visual style. While the guests in The Exterminating Angel go to a dinner party and find it impossible to leave afterwards, the band of rowdy rich people in Discreet Charm spend the whole film attempting to eat a meal, only to be met with some kind of interruption each time. The set up is all about the interruption or delay of essential functions like eating, sleeping, and sex. A memorable scene early in the picture involves a couple played by legendary French actors Delphine Seyrig and Jean-Pierre Cassel finding it impossible to have sex without interruption, continuously moving until they are outside the house. Both the sleeping and waking experiences of the characters are interrupted by dreams or the recounting of them. Discreet Charm can be considered a comment on the constantly changing path the flow of our lives take.
The influence of Bunuel’s cinema can be seen or felt in the work of so many filmmakers working more recently. David Lynch is the name that comes most easily to mind, with his unique repertoire of sex, violence, death, and dreams. A more recent example is the cinema of French director Bertrand Mandico, who fuses an undaunted approach to wild sexuality with specifically queer scenarios. Lately there has been a proliferation of films and TV shows about the exploitation of the working class, which are of varying quality. One thing is certain--they would all have benefitted from a more surreal approach to storytelling, if they had taken a hint from Uncle Luis. Next week I will examine Mark Mylod’s The Menu (2022) in order to see how the film fares in relation to earlier class-based surrealist cinema.
The Projection Booth. Episode 621: L’Age D’or (1930). https://www.projectionboothpodcast.com/2023/04/episode-621-lage-dor-1930.html
Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. p. 107.
Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. p. 48.