This is the first of three posts exploring the extremes of
Luis Bunuel’s authorship, claiming that he takes control over the film world to
the point of personal manipulation and casts himself in the role of God in the
diegesis of his cinema. It was originally written as an undergraduate essay and
so is perhaps a little grandiose in its claims...
I. GENESIS
According to Auteur Theory, the form and content of a film
should be regarded as predominantly originating from the director. Though film
production is of course a collaborative process, and a myriad of contributions
from various parties is obvious, it is the director who has the final say in
how these contributions may be cohered and therefore is responsible for the
ultimate result. However, the theory goes beyond simply final say; the director
– if he is to be truly considered an Auteur, the author of the film – must also
bring a personal touch to it. A director such as Ron Howard, though clearly
gifted at the craft of filmmaking, cannot be considered an Auteur as he is
essentially invisible. On the other hand, we are never allowed to forget that
Quentin Tarantino is man behind the camera in his films. Along with other
famous examples, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel stands as a prime
example of Auteurism at work.
Bunuel’s cinema is peppered with his own private obsessions
and preoccupations, each film developing on the themes and issues of the last,
each one another chapter in the ongoing Book of Bunuel. Yet with Bunuel,
perhaps uniquely, this can be taken to an even further extreme. His films do
not just bear the mark of their director, their director actively moulds them. He aggressively takes part
in their unfolding stories, interfering with the diegesis and ‘playing God’
with the lives of his characters, often placing them in situations that they
would not normally be without his manipulation.
In Bunuel’s first two films – in collaboration with Salvador
Dali – Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, we can find examples of this
god-like control over his cinematic kingdom. The first film, less a debut than
a cinematic Big Bang, is an act of creation of something completely new out of
the ashes of the old. Playing with the cinematic conventions of Classical
Hollywood, which place great emphasis on continuity, Un Chien Andalou offers us up an alternative – a totally cinematic
universe dictated by the whims of medium and artist than by the replication of
the real world that we know. Opening with the cliché ‘Once Upon A Time...’, the
audience is lulled into a false sense of familiarity which is soon replaced by
a sense of apprehension as it is followed by a shot of Bunuel himself
sharpening a razor blade.
The sinister quality of the action aside, the significance
of Bunuel appearing within the opening few seconds of his first film is huge.
Much more than simply a Hitchcockian device of humorous self-insertion designed
to create a personality cult of the director, Bunuel’s appearance and
subsequent action is the act of creation itself. In the beginning was God, and
then He created the world. As the director moves over to a seated lady and
opens her eye with thumb and forefinger, the camera cuts into an extreme
close-up of an eye, just as it is sliced open by the razor. Here, we are being
allowed to witness the act of creation, to see God use His phallic implement of
the razor to slice open the eyes of the audience and allow his own distinctive
world of cinematic possibility to come pouring out onto the screen.
Un Chien Andalou
is much written about, but often it appears with the wrong frame of mind.
Gwynne Edwards tries to analyse the film in great detail but is unable to let
go of the traditional filmic conventions and presentations and thus almost
tries to justify the film as a ‘normal’ story being told unusually. He
discusses the characters’ “inner workings of mind exteriorised”[1] and
refers to the appearance of the strict doppelganger as “though the thoughts of
the young man are regressing in time”[2] –
implying that the double is only present as a symbolic expression of the mind
of the original.
This interpretation is too narrow for a film such as Un Chien Andalou or L’Age d’Or as it assumes that only the cinematic presentation of ideas is revolutionary,
not the filmic reality in which these ideas occur. We must view the film and
accept what is shown to us at face value, to see it as an entirely new kind of
cinema, not simply the old cinema dressed up in new techniques. On the BFI DVD
of the films, Robert Short states in the commentary that the film “substitutes
alternative patterns of ordering for the conventional ones that it subverts”[3] – but
this is more than simply editing or narrative patterns, it is the pattern of
reality as shaped by the cinema. We should study and understand these films in
the context of these new patterns and new diegetic worlds that they create.
Indeed, it is not just that Bunuel creates these cinematic
universes, but that he has an active part in their development, controlling and
manipulating events as he sees fit rather than allowing diegetic events to
unfold as they would have without him. In Un
Chien Andalou the central figure finds himself in two places at the same
time. While Edwards considers the second to be a symbolic doppelganger, we can
instead take him as a literal doubling-up of one character; time and space are
rearranged and reconstituted to suit Bunuel’s will. Likewise, in the opening of
L’Age d’Or we find a group of Bishops
sat praying on a rocky out-crop by the shore. Later in the film, a large crowd
of people in modern dress moor their boats and head to the spot where the
Bishops – identified as ‘the Majorcans’ – are now just skeletons sat upright in
their praying positions. The crowd offers their respect and then lays a
commemorative stone, reading ‘1930 AD. This stone, on the site where the
Majorcans died marks the founding of the city of Imperial Rome Rome
Temporally, these events are impossible to understand in
logical cause-and-effect terms and there is little to support reading the events
as being an expression of some subjective or symbolic state. The centre of the
Catholic Church is founded upon the final resting spot of a group of Catholic
Bishops – and this does not occur until as late as 1930, meaning that the
apparent ellipses between the commemorative stone and ‘modern Rome’ in fact
covers no time at all (indeed, one character is frogmarched off away from the
site of the skeletons and led through the streets of the city). The foundation
of Rome
Of course it is true that these first two films were –
technically – in collaboration with Salvador Dali. I say ‘technically’ as it is
generally accepted that Dali had little to do with L’Age d’Or beyond a few striking images that he would later
resurrect in his own surrealist paintings. Can Auteurism, in particular the
extreme variant that I am proposing here, accommodate collaboration? Can Bunuel
really be the omnipotent manipulative God of the diegesis if we cannot pinpoint
exactly which moment was Bunuel’s idea and what was Dali’s? My ‘get-out’ clause
is a simple one: Bunuel’s auteurism shifted from polytheism to monotheism
during the making of L’Age d’Or.
While the world of Un Chien Andalou
is in equal part the product of Bunuel and Dali’s collective imagination, when
they began to fall out during the production of L’Age d’Or Bunuel essentially triggered Ragnarok – a war between
the gods – and ousted Dali from the pantheon. The diegesis of the latter film
still displays hallmarks of its co-creator Dali, but the control of its places,
people and events belongs squarely to Bunuel.
The next post will turn its attention to the films that
Bunuel made in Mexico – in particular Nazarin
and The Exterminating Angel – to demonstrate
how the director manipulated the events of his films in a fashion that drew
attention to his role as omnipotent God.
- P. S.
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