Surreal thing

Luis Buñuel turns 100

by Chris Fujiwara

"I find all commemorative ceremonies false and dangerous," Luis Buñuel (1900-'83) wrote. "I see dignity only in oblivion." The international festival of attention that has descended on him during his centennial year would have embarrassed him. As Boston's contribution to the tributes, the Harvard Film Archive is doing a series that includes 10 Buñuel films and three documentaries about the director. This is not much next to the incredible series currently under way at the Museum of Modern Art -- all 32 of the films Buñuel directed, plus several for which he wrote scripts. But it is a good opportunity to reflect on his place today.

What has become of Buñuel? He himself gave part of the answer in 1980 when he discussed the legacy of the surrealist movement. "I sometimes say that surrealism triumphed in the inessential and failed in the essential. . . . The surrealist movement cared little about gloriously entering the histories of literature and painting. What it wished above all, an imperious and unrealizable wish, was to transform the world and change life. On this point -- the essential -- a quick look around us clearly shows our failure."

The surrealists hated the society in which they lived and fought it with everything they had -- above all with scandal. Buñuel was the group's most successful provocateur. During the opening run of L'âge d'or, in Paris in 1930, right-wing protesters threw bombs at the screen and slashed surrealist paintings on exhibit in the lobby. This first proof of the degree of outrage provoked by Buñuel's film was followed by a second: a police ban on public screenings of L'âge d'or.

The film (which will open the Harvard retrospective on December 15 at 7 p.m., on a bill with the 1929 Un chien andalou, by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí) has never recovered from these initial attacks. When we watch L'âge d'or, we are conscious of watching the myth of the film, and we prepare to see in it the film that it was or "must have been" in 1930. So L'âge d'or occupies a special place in film culture: a one-room museum with a permanent "off limits" sign on the door.

L'âge d'or's intensity of expression is absolute and direct, owing nothing to what is usually called visual style and everything to a formal rigor that excludes flourish and anecdote. It starts as a crude documentary about scorpions before shifting to a degree-zero narrative-film mode that, when you think about what Buñuel could have done had he been at all interested in making his mark as an "artist," is dazzling in its plainness. Even more than Un chien andalou, whose image of a razor slicing an eye was intended by Buñuel and Dalí as a means of putting the audience into a state of shock that would last for the duration of the film, L'âge d'or counts on putting the viewer into a state of restless receptiveness where he or she accepts every illogic and shares the emotions of the characters on screen (in particular, a man and a woman trying desperately to consummate their passion during a fancy-dress ball). Amour fou, violence, terror, and lassitude thus provide not only the content but also the form of the film.

Around 1955, André Breton acknowledged, "It's sad to say, my dear Luis, but scandal doesn't exist anymore." The space in which a L'âge d'or could be perceived as an action and a threat had changed. The status quo had learned to defuse by accommodating -- something that Buñuel had already got a taste of when Un chien andalou was well received (his objection that the film was "a desperate, a passionate appeal to murder" went unheeded). Art was more than ever a cordoned-off zone, its practitioners free to reflect and comment but powerless to change the windings of capital.

In this context, which we might call that of the era of co-optation, the middle and late work of Buñuel has great significance. The way he continued to affirm surrealist values is a lesson about the posterity of surrealism. He incorporated surrealism as personal morality.

Buñuel's work is a totality of his likes and dislikes, his beliefs, his values. Each film is a microcosm of this whole. The great pleasures of his extensive Mexican middle period (which the Harvard series skips over) lie in discovering -- interspersed with the "commercial" narratives that Buñuel always treats with casual humor -- ideas, images, and themes that belong to his universe. The journey films Mexican Bus Ride (1951) and Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953) are excursions into the irrational that hint at what his last films would fulfill in complete freedom.

The 1962 release of The Exterminating Angel (December 16 at 7 p.m.) was seen as marking Buñuel's return to surrealism after the compromises of the '50s. The story resumes the society-party situation of L'âge d'or and uses it, again, as a set-up for the disturbances of the irrational. Here the guests find that they have no will to leave the salon in which they have gathered after dinner. "It seems unbelievable -- or much too normal," someone says. The key to this shipwreck premise is that it allows Buñuel to fog our ability to distinguish the unbelievable from the normal; thus we come to recognize that the normal is already unbelievable. The film's repetitions (of meetings, movements, postures, lines of dialogue) are only slight exaggerations of everyday social interaction, and the loosenings of formality among the trapped characters can be seen as a time lapse of the liberalization of social customs in the West during the 20th century. And the premise gives Buñuel freedom to introduce elements that affirm his surrealist convictions: the amour fou couple who commit suicide, the toilet that is also a window to the marvelous.

With Belle de jour (1966; December 16 at 9 p.m.), a portrait of a wealthy married woman (Catherine Deneuve) who takes a part-time job in a brothel, Buñuel perfected his art. Shots fall into place as gently as leaves falling; camera movements are short and decisive -- for example the staggering track-in to Deneuve on the bed, transformed by sex, proudly refusing a servant's commiseration ("What do you know about it, Pallas?"). Belle de jour is a work of such composure that words like "elegant" belittle it: it's the work of an artist involved with his medium at the deepest level, and its emotional impact is more overwhelming at each viewing.

The Milky Way (1969; December 20 at 9 p.m.) inaugurates the final group of Buñuel masterworks that includes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972; December 22 at 7 p.m.), The Phantom of Liberty (1974; December 21 at 9 p.m.), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1978; December 22 at 9 p.m.). In The Milky Way, Buñuel follows a pair of modern-day pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela. Their voyage turns into an episodic history of heresy that encompasses various times and places. The loving depiction of ritual, the exact quotation from period texts, the amused portrayal of religious cranks all show that rather than being reflexively anticlerical, Buñuel gives the Church a dialectical role in his universe -- a tendency already clear in his final Mexican film, the triumphant miniature Simon of the Desert (1965; December 20 at 7 p.m.). What becomes more and more important in late Buñuel, starting with The Milky Way: the transitions between shots, between stories; the moral question of whether to go from A to B by moving the camera or by cutting; the poetic question of what word, image, or concept shall serve to link two scenes.

The acting in Buñuel's late films is uniformly superb (from the regulars like Fernando Rey, Michel Piccoli, and Milena Vukotic down to such bits as the "young pharmacist" who rises modestly to accept applause at a girls'-school ceremony in The Milky Way). The difference acting makes is apparent when you compare The Exterminating Angel with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In both films, several wealthy people find themselves subject to an inexplicable limitation: in Angel, they can't leave the room; in Charm, they can't get together for dinner. Whereas Angel feels like a B-movie because the actors are all doing types and never rise above the adequate (this is a property, not a failing, of the film), the characters in Charm are individuals -- suave, interesting, different. That only makes the more damning Buñuel's portrayal of their world as a modern, liberal society that still has a superstitious reverence for the army and the Church, and in which the police are still ready to strike at any moment and spirit people away to subterranean torture dungeons.

Among the documentaries in the series, Jorge Amat's The Paradoxes of Buñuel (1997; December 15 at 9 p.m. and 21 at 7 p.m.) has interviews with some of the director's regular collaborators, and it usefully structures Buñuel's work in terms of its persistent ambivalences (subversive/bourgeois, poetic/realistic, sadistic/sentimental). The most interesting-sounding documentary is Ramón Gieling's The Prisoners of Buñuel (2000; December 19 at 9 p.m.), a return to Spain's impoverished Las Hurdes region, where Buñuel made his relentless Las Hurdes (1932; December 19 at 7 p.m.). Gieling's film promises to be a timely test of Buñuel's continuing power to provoke.