The Surrealist films Un Chien andalou (1928), LAge d’or (1930), and Las Hurdes (1932) established Bunuel’s distinctive personal vision, and most critics believed that he continued to express it in Mexico, Spain, and France. Bazin found Bunuel’s films deeply moralistic; for Truffaut, they exemplified rigorous scripting and a concern for entertainment; for Sarris, they embodied the mystery of a style without style; and for the critics of Positif, Bunuel remained the great, long-lived remnant of cinematic surrealism, attacking bourgeois values with images of savage beauty.
His Mexican films of the postwar decade showed that he could insert his personal obsessions into accessible comedies and melodramas. In Viridiana (Spain, 1961), the novitiate Viridiana attempts to establish her uncle’s farm as a Christian community, but her plans fall prey to the cynicism of her uncle’s son, Jorge, and to the rapacity of the beggars who swarm over the farm. Her ideals chastened, Viridiana joins Jorge and his mistress in a game of cards while a child tosses Viridiana’s crown of thorns onto a fire (19.1). The protagonist’s loss of innocence recalls that of the hero of Nazarin
(1958), trying vainly to bring grace to a fallen world. As Los Olvidados (1950) had put Bunuel back on the
19.2, left The dead Julian chortling under the bed: Pedro’s dream in Los Olvidados.
19.3, right Mort en ce jardin (1956): in the jungle heat, ants invade the Bible.
Map (p. 413), Viridiana, which won a major prize at Cannes, revived his fame during the 1960s—especially since he had made this blasphemous film under Francisco Franco’s very nose.
In the 1960s, Bunuel moved toward more distinctly modernist experiments that had been partially sketched in L’Age d’or. The Exterminating Angel (1962) inexplicably entraps partygoers in a house for days, their polite manners decaying under pressure. With Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) Bunuel began his “French phase,” in which major stars and the scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere became central to his work. As he had used the Mexican commercial cinema for his ends, so he began to exploit the conventions of the European art film: the mixture of fantasy and reality in Belle de jour (1967), the episodic narratives in The Milky Way (1969), the ambiguous, interwoven dreams of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and the device of using two actresses to portray the same character in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Some of the films became substantial successes on the art-house circuit, and Discreet Charm won an Academy Award. At the end of his life, the elderly anarchist became that rarity, a modernist filmmaker whom audiences found entertaining.
In both mass-market films and art films, Bunuel’s accessibility was partly due to the sobriety of his technique. Of the major auteurs, he had the least distinctive style. In the Mexican films, he adhered to the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema, including moderate deep focus and restrained camera movements. His third Mexican film, Los Olvidados (“The Young and Lost,” 1950), depicts juvenile delinquents in a poor neighborhood of Mexico City. Shot largely on location, the film announces in its opening that it is based strictly on facts. These elements encouraged many European critics to see the film as a Mexican version of neorealism. Yet Bunuel offered no warmhearted liberal optimism. Instead of the virtuous poor of The Bicycle Thief, he presented vicious youth gangs, unfeeling mothers, bitter vagrants.
Bunuel charged Italian Neorealism with lacking authentic “poetry.” In Los Olvidados, the poetry is often provided by disturbingly violent or erotic images. Neorealism never generated as unsettling and enigmatic a scene as Pedro’s dream, featuring floating chickens, images of his mother bringing him a slab of meat, and a shot of a murdered boy grinning and bleeding under the bed (19.2). His more self-consciously modernist films relied on simple staging, long takes, and panning movements to follow the actors.
Bunuel’s straightforward style serves to heighten haunting images that disturb received notions of religion and sexuality. In Un Chien andalou, Bunuel shows ants crawling out of a man’s hand; thirty years later, they are gnawing their way through a Bible (19.3). In Susana (1950), a spider scuttles across a cross-shaped shadow on the floor of a prison cell. Nazarin (1958), based on a classic novel, comments on the ineffectiveness of naive religious faith. The frigid housewife who becomes a prostitute in Belle de jour is visited by a Japanese client who shows her a box, from which issue buzzing sounds; the audience never learns what the box contains.
Bunuel gives obsessions to his characters and then insidiously invites the audience to share them. In The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de La Cruz (1955), the hero is shown as a young boy, staring at a music box (19.4); he comes to associate this with the death of his governess, shot by a stray bullet at the window (19.5). As a grown man, he rediscovers the music box (19.6). This stirs in him the desire to kill sexually alluring women. He never succeeds, but after he has practiced strangling a mannequin and drags it away, Bunuel calmly shows us the dummy’s fallen leg (19.7). We, not Archibaldo, make the association with the slain governess and find ourselves firmly within his morbid fantasy.
Bunuel’s modernism emerges as well in his experiments with narrative construction. The films are full of repetitions, digressions, and movements between reality and fantasy. (“Don’t worry if the movie’s too short,” he once told a producer. “I’ll just put in a dream.”3) His
19.4-19.7 Four shots from Archibaldo de La Cruz.
19.4
19.5
19.6
19.7
Plots depend particularly on outrageous delays. The Discreet Charm ofthe Bourgeoisie is virtually nothing but a series of interrupted dinners. The ostensible action, something about corrupt businessmen smuggling cocaine, is buried in a series of bourgeois rituals gone awry: encountering a restaurant’s staff gathered around the corpse of the manager, finding an entire army troop invading one’s parlor. The film’s surface consists of maddeningly banal conversations about tastes in food, drink, and decor. Whenever the story seems to have reached a climax, a character wakes up, and we realize that previous scenes—how many?—have been imaginary.
Most modernists attack narrative in order to turn the viewer’s attention to other matters, but Bunuel treats narrative frustration as itself the basis of pleasure. The very title of That Obscure Object of Desire alludes to the impossibility of satisfying one’s deepest wishes. Traveling on a train to Paris, the wealthy Fabert tells other passengers of his obsessive pursuit of the virginal Con-chita. He gives her money, clothes, even a house of her own, and yet each time he tries to seduce her she eludes him. When he pulls away, she returns to lure him on and humiliate him more brutally. Whenever Fabert pauses in his tale, the passengers urge him to continue; their avid curiosity makes them stand-ins for us. At the end of Fabert’s story, Conchita appears on the train, and the cycle of frustrated desire starts again. Obscure Object can be seen as a reflexive parable that makes cinematic narrative akin to sexual flirtation.
If the fun is in the waiting, not the ending, the Bunuel film will often stop arbitrarily. In Belle de jour, the supposedly crippled husband miraculously rises from his chair. In Discreet Charm, the Mirandan ambassador finally gets to eat a piece of leftover lamb from his refrigerator. And in the final scene of Bunuel’s last film, a terrorist bomb destroys the chic shopping arcade through which Fabert still pursues Conchita. Bunuel’s films at once criticize social conventions and play cunningly on those narrative conventions that maintain our fascination with storytelling.
World History
