How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this predominantly French movement—which had started scarcely a decade earlier, in 1917—were pretty much already over. Thirty years after Benjamin’s pronouncement, the troublemakers of the Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, never missed a chance to mock what they perceived as the nearly extinct dinosaur of surrealism, with its aging spokesmen no longer so terribly shocking in their studied provocations. In that same period of the ’50s and well beyond, Salvador Dalí’s clownish embrace of magazine advertising, TV, and general media celebrity hastened the impression, in many people’s minds, that surrealism was a spent force, reduced to a bunch of tired clichés—just another ephemeral art-world or showbiz fad.
But
there has always been an unbeatable counterargument to any prognosis of
surrealism’s demise, and it can be summed up in a name: Spanish-born Luis
Buñuel (1900–1983). From his first short, the classic Un chien andalou (1929),
to his final feature, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Buñuel always
stayed true to those primary surrealist principles with which he most
identified: a spirit of revolt; the subversive power of passionate love, both
romantic and erotic; a belief in the creativity of the unconscious (dreams and
fantasies); a pronounced taste for black humor; and, last but never least, an
abiding contempt for institutional religion and its representatives.
Indeed,
if there is one motif above all others that characterizes Buñuel’s cinema, it
is surely the parade (again, from first film to last) of nuns, priests, and
even saints, presented as figures who are variously silly, pompous, repressive,
and sinister—sometimes all of those attributes at once.
In any
decent reckoning with Buñuel, cinema, and surrealism, we must take into account
not only his own dazzling career spanning half a century, but also the profound
marks it has left on the sensibility of subsequent major filmmakers. Figures
including Pedro Almodóvar, Walerian Borowczyk, David Lynch, Věra Chytilová,
David Cronenberg, Jan Švankmajer, Sara Driver, Arturo Ripstein, Alejandro
Jodorowsky, Jean-Claude Brisseau, and Raúl Ruiz have all absorbed different
aspects of the Master and reinterpreted his method in their own fashion.
However,
after so many appropriations and recyclings, we may today have a somewhat
skewed notion of Buñuel and his art. When we revisit his work, we discover not
a torrid, psychedelic, violently disjointed style—the type of thing young art
students always imagine surrealism to have been in its anarchic heyday—but the
exact opposite: an unnerving calmness, a directness and simplicity in the way
he staged the most outrageous situations and spun the most outlandish tales.
He
aimed, throughout his life, for an ever less adorned manner: little musical
underlining (when he does use music, it is always powerful); an extremely
controlled direction of actors (he collaborated with many great ones, from
Fernando Rey to Catherine Deneuve), with special attention paid to gesture and
outward appearance; no facile camera tricks or ostentatious displays of color
or design. Buñuel meticulously shaped his films as arrows designed to burrow
straight into the unconscious of spectators, without undue filters or
explanations.
According
to legendary Swiss critic and programmer Freddy Buache (1924–2019), friend of
Buñuel and author of an important 1970 book on him: “The true originality of
Buñuel’s cinema is that it slips into the mould of the most cliché-ridden type
of filmmaking, and then destroys it by bursting out from within.” This was
already true even in his wildest days of youth. Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or
(1930) are full of provocative, startling images (some of them devised by Dalí)
that play simultaneously on the registers of black comedy (dead animals in the
former) and scandalous liberation (love scenes in the latter). But Buñuel
almost always begins his scenes with a perfectly composed, elegant picture of
bourgeois respectability and refinement—which he then proceeds to dismantle.
Across his career, the outright iconoclasm of this procedure softens—but, with a
supreme sense of perversity, the uncanny sense of something not quite right
comes to inhabit every situation at its outset, and in its core.
Buñuel
reflected, in the course of a 1965 interview, on the need he felt to evolve
beyond that first, openly antagonistic phase of surrealism. The horrors of
twentieth-century history had, in his opinion, rendered the art movement’s
celebrated shock tactics redundant: “How is it possible to shock after the Nazi
mass murders and the atom bombs dropped on Japan?” But he went on to suggest:
“One has to modify one’s method of attack, although one’s aims remain
essentially the same—for the moral oppression has remained unchanged, it has
simply assumed another disguise. What I’m aiming to do in my films is to
disturb people and destroy the rules of a kind of conformism that wants
everyone to think they are living in the best of all possible worlds.”
L’âge
d’or was a movie that in its day—and as movie lore has often recounted—prompted
outraged spectators (especially those affiliated with far-right political
groups) to riot and tear up the cinema in which it was screening. André Breton,
surrealism’s chief spokesperson at the time, celebrated the “violent
liberation” that the film heralded, and its ultimate message of “a better life”
whose cornerstone is “LOVE” (the capitals are his). But Buñuel, while never
becoming disenchanted with such a fine surrealist credo, saw ruefully that this
better life never truly came into existence for the majority of people anywhere
in the world, despite the best efforts of a few feverishly intoxicated,
creative imaginations. The essential stumbling block, he realized, was that
deluded fantasy, held by most citizens, of existing “in the best of all
possible worlds.” It’s that perception, that internalized ideology, that needed
to be eroded by the powers of art—but it could only be done slowly and surely,
slyly. So, as his style became more direct, his profound “message” became more
indirect—and yet more pervasive in its effect on viewers, a seduction and a
slap contained in the same gesture.
Buñuel’s
trajectory can seem to us, in retrospect, like a starry one—few filmographies
can boast the level of sustained achievement that takes us from the veritable
surrealist manifesto of L’âge d’or to the corrosive social satire of Viridiana
(1961) and, for his penultimate work, the completely free “sketch comedy” of
The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Yet he did not always find it easy to maintain
the momentum of this career. Fifteen years separate the disquieting documentary
Land Without Bread (1932) from his first assignment in Mexico (where he
resettled), Gran Casino. Despite the international triumph in 1950 of Los
olivdados, a blending of surrealism with neorealism, Buñuel’s time as a
director-for-hire in the Mexican industry cast a shadow of decline over his
artistry.
As
always, Buñuel was candid about his fortunes and misfortunes. Of the musicals,
westerns, thrillers, melodramas, and romances he made during the 1950s, he admitted
there were “three or four frankly bad films,” but nonetheless insisted: “I
never infringed my moral code.” In retrospect, cinema critics and historians
see the output of those years in a more positive light. For what Buñuel learned
then was how to bring his surrealist impulses within the limits of traditional
genre and narrative.
Throughout
the 1950s and into the early ’60s, Buñuel also offers an early example, par
excellence, of what we today call the transnational filmmaker. By 1950 he had
already accumulated production experiences in Spain, France, Mexico, and even
the U.S., squirreled away doing odd jobs in various Hollywood studios. Robinson
Crusoe (1954) and Death in the Garden (1956) are both examples of coproduction
(of Mexico with, respectively, the U.S. and France), allowing Buñuel to work
with actors including Dan O’Herlihy and Simone Signoret—not to mention Michel
Piccoli, who would reappear in his later projects. Both these films place their
characters in natural surroundings (island, forest) and pitilessly weigh up
so-called civilized ethics (in all its racism and paternalism) against
fleeting, precarious experiences of freedom and self-knowledge.
The
opening years of the 1960s must have been a puzzling time for Buñuel. On the
one hand, still based largely in Mexico, he makes two of his greatest
masterpieces, Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel (1962). These films have
lost none of their explosive energy or dark wit. Viridiana is the most perfect
formulation of a story Buñuel loved to often tell: of a deluded person (Silvia
Pinal as the titular heroine) who thinks she is propagating “saintly,”
Christian goodness, all the while triggering social catastrophe around her, and
herself slipping into the darkest, amoral waters. The Exterminating Angel, a
project Buñuel had nurtured since the mid ’50s, is a surrealistic mind-game
crossed with a situation recalling Jean-Paul Sartre’s hellish No Exit: a large
party finds itself inexplicably trapped inside a room, unable to simply walk
out.
Yet
these films bore little relation to the nouvelle vague in France or other
burgeoning “new cinema” movements around the world in that era. Buñuel still
had his firm fans (including the great Mexican essayist and poet Octavio Paz)
but he was, in a superficial sense at least, no longer “fashionable.” By the
time he made his own first fully French production, Diary of a Chambermaid, in
1964 with Piccoli and Jeanne Moreau, he found himself dismissed by the likes of
Éric Rohmer in Cahiers du cinéma, painted as an artist who was repetitively and
wearily settling old scores from forty years previously. It remains his most
underrated film, veritably seething under its placid exterior.
In 1965,
the forty-five-minute Simon of the Desert—another of his blasphemous,
antireligious comedies, setting the code of ascetic denial against an array of
delicious, earthly pleasures—seemed to some at the time like a characteristic
postscript to a distinguished career. (Another faithful devotee, Brazilian
Glauber Rocha, can be glimpsed among the wild rockers in its final scene.) But,
as things happily turned out, Buñuel was on the cusp of a startling
renaissance. Partly due to a sympathetic producer (Serge Silberman) and
screenwriting collaborator (Jean-Claude Carrière), Buñuel relaunched his
career—at the age of sixty-seven!—with Belle de jour (1967). This portrait of a
demure housewife (Deneuve) who becomes a high-grade, much sought-after
prostitute in the daytime effortlessly blurs the line between fantasy and
reality, myth and mundanity. For the subsequent decade, it was one wonderful
film after another for Buñuel, made mostly in France—with a crucial trip back
to Spain for Tristana (1970), again starring Deneuve, a downbeat,
antipatriarchal parable that is, at heart, his angriest and bleakest testament.
In
truth, it wasn’t as if Buñuel in the later ’60s had really changed either his
style or his content. Just as he remained true to surrealism, he also doggedly stuck
to the inspiring, subversive literature he adored in his youth and long planned
to adapt: novels by Octave Mirbeau (Diary of a Chambermaid), Benito Pérez
Galdós (Tristana), and Pierre Loüys (The Woman and the Puppet, the source for
both That Obscure Object of Desire, and Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a
Woman in 1935). But, starting with Belle de jour, there was a productive
friction between the mannered surfaces of French high society and the
filmmaker’s ironic sensibility that generated new sparks—and certainly won him
a new, international audience.
The
Milky Way (1969)—yet another satirical attack on religion and its myths—announced
the tendency, prominent in Buñuel’s final decade of productivity, to use
episodic narrative structures. Anecdotes, dreams, and flashbacks are cleverly
strung together along some “spine” of a basic situation. The Discreet Charm of
the Bourgeoisie (1972)—in which a bunch of refined characters forever tramp
around looking for a good, uninterrupted meal—reverses the shut-in premise of
The Exterminating Angel. In either case, the result is the same: a slow descent
into uncivilized savagery, a surrender to animalistic drives, a gradual
stripping away of every social hypocrisy. And, meanwhile, the wider world is
overrun not by righteous revolutionaries but increasingly fanatical, insane,
murderous terrorists (and, in this, Buñuel was frighteningly prescient).
The
Phantom of Liberty furthered this sardonic operation of de-culturation: in one
of its episodes, elegant citizens gather together at a table to defecate, and
retire to their atomized bathroom cubicles in order to greedily devour food.
That Obscure Object concludes with a mysterious terrorist blast that caps off,
with an appropriately apocalyptic flourish, a withering comedy of manners about
the non-communication between modern women (the heroine is played—not that
every first-time viewer notices this—by two alternating actors, Carole Bouquet
and Ángela Molina) and old-fashioned men (incarnated once more by Fernando
Rey). That was also the end of Buñuel’s screen career. He did nurture
subsequent film projects, but decided to concentrate—with Carrière’s close
assistance—on the composition of his marvelous autobiography, My Last Sigh (1982).
One of its many delights is the revelation of the “ordinary,” even conservative
Buñuel—the faithful husband and devoted father, the guy who even enjoys talking
to exceptionally smart and enlightened priests—right alongside the forever
enraged and passionate surrealist. The line everyone quotes from this book
remains its best and greatest paradox: “Still an atheist . . . thank God!”
Buñuel
was a firm believer in the power of the unconscious mind—Carrière tells the tale
of how working in tandem with the director was often a matter of spontaneously
exercising the “muscle” of their imaginations—but he disallowed everything that
locked unconsciousness down to something systematic and static. Buñuel was a
unique mixture of pure artistic intuition and the most skilled filmmaking
craft—so skilled that he was able to keep making films well into the 1970s,
even as his eyesight was failing him. Buache summed up both Buñuel’s
personality and his approach to filmmaking perfectly: “The artist in him cannot
be separated from the man. He walks, laughs, and has a drink with friends in
just the same way as he conceives a scene, shoots it, and then fits it
organically into his storyline.”
He
tended to laugh at critical interpretations of his work. Although, as a
surrealist, he was no stranger to the Freudian tenets of psychoanalysis, he
especially mocked ultra-rational attempts to rigidly decipher the “symbolism”
of his images and scenes. Spiders, ants, endless roads, as well as all strange,
off-screen sounds of drums, machine gun fire, or buzzing insects . . . these
recurrent elements all resonated in the dramatic or comic context Buñuel gave
them, but they didn’t “mean” anything exact. As a true and eternal surrealist,
Buñuel believed in the poetic—not divine—mystery inherent in all things.
Luis
Buñuel: Eternal Surrealist. By Adrian
Martin. Criterion , January 10, 2020.
Luis
Buñuel was the greatest of all Spanish film-makers. He is also known as the
greatest of all Surrealist film-makers – someone who kept returning to dreams
and the unconscious, all the way from Un Chien Andalou, the silent avant-garde
shocker he made with Salvador Dalí, to Belle de Jour, in which sadomasochistic
fantasies lurk beneath Catherine Deneuve’s chic surface. It’s no wonder that in
critical studies of his films, the emphasis is on Freud as a ‘guide’ to
Buñuel’s greatness. But the influence of another thinker, Marx, was just as
important. Buñuel has five films in BBC Culture’s list of the 100 greatest
foreign-language films, a total matched only by Ingmar Bergman, and one quality
unites them all. However surreal they may be, they are informed by political
revolt and an acute feeling for class struggle, whether they were French,
Mexican or Spanish.
Truly a
child of the 20th Century, Luis Buñuel Portolés was born in 1900, the oldest
child in a prosperous Catholic family based in the Aragon region of Spain. He
first made his mark four years after he moved to Paris in 1925, when he joined
forces with Dalí to make Un Chien Andalou (1929). Buñuel and Dalí began
collaborating again on the hour-long L’Age d’Or (1930), but their political
differences were already driving them apart: Buñuel’s Marxism v Dalí’s
conservatism. Buñuel became the sole director of L’Age d’Or, a film which
ridiculed high society and religious hypocrisy. And after returning to Spain in
the early 1930s, he made a short documentary dealing with the extreme poverty
in a mountain village, Land Without Bread (1933).
When
Buñuel’s anti-Franco activities drove him into exile, he resettled in Mexico,
where leftist protest was even more apparent in his low-budget commercial
features. Los Olvidados, which ranked at number 80 in BBC Culture’s poll, was a
compassionate yet pessimistic Marxist depiction of abject poverty and teenage
crime in Mexico City that defied any notion of the poor as the ‘salt of the
earth’, while drawing powerfully on Freudian Surrealist imagery to illustrate
the tortured dreams and visions of Buñuel’s blighted characters. The other
major Mexican works of his that followed – including Mexican Bus Ride (1952),
Él (1953), Robinson Crusoe (1954), Nazarin (1959), The Young One (1960), and
The Exterminating Angel (1962) – all reflected these orientations in their
creepy visionary undercurrents and their sharp class distinctions.
Él, for
instance, was a black comedy focusing on a wealthy and paranoiacally jealous
newlywed. And Buñuel’s faithful yet personal adaptation of the famous Dafoe
novel, Robinson Crusoe, co-written by the blacklisted US screenwriter Hugo
Butler, made room for both class issues (in the hero’s interactions with
Friday) and surreal hallucinations. Another neglected jewel co-written by
Butler, The Young One made brilliant use of a setting in the American South to
chart the comic interactions between a black musician (Bernie Hamilton) in
flight from a rape charge and a randy beekeeper (Zachary Scott) in relation to
an innocent teenage girl (Key Meersman).
The
Exterminating Angel, number 67 in the poll, charted the even funnier
complications that ensue when a group of wealthy dinner guests inexplicably
find themselves unable to leave their host’s living room. During this same
period, Buñuel reflected on his status as an anti-Franco Spanish exile by
directing three French co-productions that dealt with issues arising from armed
struggle against right-wing dictatorships: Cela s’appelle l’aurore (1956), La
mort en ce jardin (1956), and Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959).
But the
undoubted masterpiece of this period – and arguably the greatest triumph of
Buñuel’s career – was Viridiana (1961), his first Spanish feature, in which
wealthy and impoverished characters were equally prominent and whose
Catholic/Surrealist imagery was epitomised by a switchblade knife in the shape
of a cross. (It ranked at number 48 in BBC Culture’s poll.) Developing the
theme of his earlier Nazarin (1959) (one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s favourite films)
about a despairing priest attempting to exercise charity in an imperfect world,
this is the tale of a former novice (Mexican actress Silvia Pinal) who jointly
inherits the property of her decadent uncle (Fernando Rey, who became a Buñuel
regular) along with his illegitimate son (Francisco Rabal, also the priest in
Nazarin), and invites a group of rural beggars to share her property, with
disastrous results.
Viridiana
caused an immense scandal after winning the top prize in Cannes and being
banned in Spain, and this led to the director’s triumphant return to Europe,
mostly to make French features. Two of these, Belle de Jour (1967) and The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), occupy 75th and 84th place respectively
in the poll, and the latter film won Buñuel his only Oscar. After reporters
informed him that it was nominated, he replied, “I've already paid the $25,000
they wanted. Americans may have their weaknesses, but they do keep their
promises.”
Aside
from Tristana (1970), his only purely Spanish feature apart from Viridiana, all
of Buñuel’s late films were co-written with a French screenwriter, Jean-Claude
Carrière.
Playing
with narrative form more radically (and surrealistically) than his Mexican and
Spanish work, these French films also harked back to the spirit of L’Age d’Or
by focusing on Buñuel’s own class and by favouring diverse forms of
discontinuity, such as narrative interruptions (in The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie and its 1974 follow-up, The Phantom of Liberty) and using two
actresses to play the same heroine in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
But the
revolutionary aspect was still there. The difference was that, in all of these
films, sexual politics figured as another form of class politics. (Even in That
Obscure Object... the two actresses playing the heroine belong to separate
classes, complicating the diverse ambiguities.)
Buñuel’s
increasing sympathy for his heroines seemed to start in the 1960s,
contradicting the macho aggression of his early work (in Un Chien Andalou he
appeared to slice a woman’s eyeball with a razor). Carrière has pointed out
that when they worked together on their scripts, he typically spoke for the
male characters and Buñuel spoke for the women – including the chambermaid
(Jeanne Moreau) in Diary of a Chambermaid, the title heroine (Catherine
Deneuve) of Belle de Jour, and Conchita (played alternately by Carole Bouquet
and Angela Molina) in That Obscure Object of Desire.
The last
film he directed before his retirement, That Obscure Object… actually
anticipates the #MeToo movement by recognising that male entitlements and class
entitlements usually turn out to be densely interwoven. Buñuel may have been a
child of the 20th Century, but his work remains timely and relevant in the
21st.
Why Luis
Buñuel ‘s revolutionary spirit is relevant today. By Jonathan Rosenbaum. BBC , November
2, 2018.
When
studying the great masters of cinema in school, Luis Buñuel is the easiest to
define. He’s the surrealist. Of course, that’s a simplistic summation of a
filmmaker whose half-century’s worth of work is quite diverse. Yes, much of it
is surreal, but not all of his films continued to follow the rule put forth
during the making, with Salvador Dali, of Un Chien Andalou (“no idea or image
that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be
accepted.”). There’s more to Buñuel than randomness.
With
this month being the 40th anniversary of his final film, That Obscure Object of
Desire, we have compiled tips and advice and beliefs about filmmaking that
Buñuel shared in interviews, writings on film theory, and even through one of
his movies.
Mystery
is Essential
Many
things turned Buñuel off, to where he would admit to walking out of movies that
didn’t follow his set of interests or beliefs. One of those beliefs is that
mystery is essential to all art, including film. In the 1977 book “Luis
Buñuel,” he’s quoted as saying so, and “if a work of art is clear, then my
interest in it ends.” In his 1959 essay “Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry,”
collected in the book “An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis
Buñuel,” the filmmaker stresses how movies of the time were missing that
necessary component:
“The element of mystery, essential to all
works of art, is generally lacking in films. Authors, directors, and producers
take great pains not to trouble our peace of mind by closing the marvelous
window of the screen to the liberating world of poetry. They would rather have
that screen reflect subjects that could be sequels to our everyday life, repeat
for the thousandth time the same drama, or make us forget the daily drudgery of
work.”
And
here’s another quote, which is found in the book “Objects of Desire:
Conversations with Luis Buñuel,” collecting interviews conducted by friends
José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent in the 1970s:
“Neorealism doesn’t interest me…because
reality is multiple and for different people it can have a hundred different
meanings. I want to have a total vision of reality to enter the marvelous world
of the unknown — mystery interest me, mystery is the essential element of every
work of art. A good film must have the ambivalence of two opposed and related
things.”
Film = A
Series of Shots
“If
everything is in the scenario, why bother making the film?”
That’s a
quote by Buñuel from Jean-Claude Carriere and Mary Ellen Mark’s report from the
set of Buñuel’s 1970 film Tristana in Show magazine (reprinted on Mark’s
website). It’s just one of the filmmaker’s many statements regarding film only
being the final entity, that is “a series of shot” or “the simultaneous
separation and ordering of the visual fragments contained amorphously in a
cinematic scenario,” as he writes in the essay “Decoupage, or Cinematic
Segmentation,” also collected in “”An Unspeakable Betrayal.” He further
explains:
“One might argue that a good film that is
well shot, with excellent camera angles and performances, would still seem
somewhat uncinematic as a whole if it lacked a good decoupage. It might make a
good album of animated photographs, but that is as far from the notion of film
as are the sounds of an orchestra tuning up from the symphony that
follows…Anyone can learn pretty well the basic techniques of cinematography,
but only the elect can compose a good film. Through segmentation, the script or
the written assemblage of visual ideas ceases to be literature and becomes
cinema. There the ideas of the filmmaker are defined, roughly subdivided, cut
up, regrouped, and organized.”
Work
Because You Love It
For this
tip, here’s a quote spoken by the character Don Lope (Fernando Rey) in
Tristana, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. It’s not exactly Buñuel’s
words, but in his 1982 autobiography “My Last Sigh,” he features the following
dialogue in support of his own point about salaried work being humiliating:
“Work’s a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with
the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor;
all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you
do because you like doing it, because you’ve heard the call, you’ve got a
vocation — that’s ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at
me, Saturno — I don’t work. And I don’t care if they hang me, I WON’T work! Yet
I’m alive! I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!”
Of
course, Buñuel often struggled financially, or he was able to lean on the
support of his mother and could spend periods of time doing what he loved best,
which was being idle. Still, he had to work sometimes and even had to do
paycheck films, as long as he could retain his integrity in such desperate
times. According to the film notes for his 1959 Mexican film Fever Mounts in El
Pao, Buñuel is quoted as saying, “[I] took everything that was offered to me,
as long as it wasn’t humiliating.”
Now for
a video of Buñuel enjoying some leisure time, making his signature dry martini:
YouTube
Dream
Obviously
one of Buñuel’s tips has to do with dreams and the subconscious, as they’re
integral to the concept of surrealism.
Also
from the essay “Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry,” in which he affirms the
similarity between a dark cinema and sleep but explains that not all movies
should be fantasy and escapism, comes this excerpt on one of the ways film is a
“weapon”:
“In the hands of a free spirit, the cinema
is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. It is the best instrument through which
to express the world of dreams, of emotions, of instinct. The mechanism that
produces cinematic images is, among all forms of human expression, that which
most closely resembles the mechanism of the human mind in the way it works, or
better yet, that which best imitates the workings of the mind during sleep. A
film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream…The cinema seems to have been
invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which reach so
deeply into poetry, yet it is almost never used toward that end.”
Hold
Back Fascism
Coming
from Spain, Buñuel was familiar with dictators and had to stay out of his
homeland because of one. So, he would have something to say on how art can
combat fascism with the “weapon” of cinema. He doesn’t actually mention film in
this quote from a 1973 New York Times Magazine profile, but it definitely
should be included:
“In any society, the artist has a
responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and writer or painter
cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity
alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with
their acts. The small difference is important. When power feels itself totally
justified and approved it immediately destroys whatever freedom we have left,
and that is Fascism.”
Listen
to Your Conscience
In the
below excerpt from the 1984 documentary The Life and Times of Don Luis Buñuel,
the filmmaker actually answers a request for advice to other filmmakers.
Similar to his tip to only work if you love what you’re doing, he says to only
make movies that fit your ideology, even if you’re starving:
YouTube
What
We’ve Learned
Buñuel
had plenty of cinema pet peeves (another: “the camera’s presence mustn’t be
felt; once the camera starts dancing and becomes the star of the picture, I
lose interest and leave the theatre”). But most of his beliefs about film can
make for helpful tips about what makes a good movie, how movies are tools for
personal and political effect, and how filmmakers should only make movies for
the right reasons. Really, all you have to do is dream, and always let your
conscience be your guide.
6
Filmmaking Tips From Luis Buñuel. By Christopher Campbell. Film School Rejects,
August 23, 2017
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