The second part of my old undergraduate essay on the subject of the extremes of Luis Bunuel's auteurism
II. EXODUS
After his explosion into the world of film with
the radical surrealist pieces, Bunuel became considerably more subdued in the subsequent
decades. Due to the political and social upheavals that were happening in Spain
during the 30s, he moved to Mexico. Here he produced a multitude of films that
were well executed, worthy of critical praise and even bore a distinctive
Bunuelian mark, but which lacked the same degree of fierce individuality. In
films such as Los Olvidados, Wuthering Heights or The Young One he
allowed the stories of his films to unfold themselves, without his personal
metaphysical manipulation. However, he eventually reached a point in the latter
part of his 'Mexican period' where he returned to his role of diegetic
demiurge.
When viewing Bunuel's films as finite realities
that are completely under his control, an issue arises when looking at
adaptation. Nazarin is based upon the novel by Benito Perez Galdos and therefore – much as
with collaboration and Dali in the previous post – calls into question exactly
how much we can view the events of the story as products of Bunuel’s own
conscious interference.
Whereas
in Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or we can see how Bunuel creates
situations from nothing, arbitrarily calling into existence objects and moments
without rhyme or reason other than his (and Dali’s) personal whims, in Nazarin
the novel’s structure and cause-and-effect logic are maintained. The narrative
of a humble priest who finds himself embroiled in a series of encounters that
simultaneously emphasise his divinity and test his faith is altered by Bunuel
to emphasise a more cynical and cold worldview than Galdos presents. And so the
question becomes: are the characters at the mercy of the story (i.e.
Galdos) or God (i.e. Bunuel)? The story possesses a naturalistic tone;
the world in which the characters exist is one much like our own and we are
given, as in most films, that the characters lived their lives before the story
began and will continue to do so after the story is over. Events that occur are
therefore taken for granted as chance rather than events created by a conscious
will.
So how
might we explain the apparent miracles within the film? A little under halfway
through the film, Nazario is implored by a family to cure a sick child. He is
initially unwilling to help as they are venerating him as a kind of Christ-like
figure in what he views as highly undeserved and blasphemous praise. Eventually,
however, he relents and agrees to pray for the girl. As he kneels in prayer, he
accepts any obstacles that might be put in front of him as repayment for the
girl’s life. The following day, the girl has been cured.
We can
either view this as a coincidence, as a realist interpretation would have us
do, or we can interpret the event as a genuine miracle. If we take the latter
supposition, then we must acknowledge that God exists within the diegesis of
the film. When reading or watching the story of Faust, in order fully
appreciate its themes and ideas, we must accept – whatever our religious view –
that God and the Devil must at least exist within the world of the story. The
same is true here; we can see the role of God being played by Bunuel, allowing
him to both tell the story of Galdos’ novel and be personally
responsible for events. When Nazario accepts any obstacles that might be thrown
at him, it is as if Bunuel is listening to the prayer and answers with the
parade of humiliations that are to follow the character to the end of the film.
If
Bunuel used the story of Nazarin to place himself within a role that
allows him total control over the world of the film, then his intentions with The
Exterminating Angel must surely have been to see just how far he could
force his will upon the world. Traditional views of the film have placed it
next to L’Age d’Or as his great surrealist work, the biting satire of
bourgeois values and rituals. Several well-to-do members of the social elite
gather together in a mansion to dine and socialise but suddenly find that they
are unable to leave the drawing room. No explicit barrier impedes their exit;
they just simply cannot walk out of the room. As the hours, days and weeks
stretch on; the bourgeois sensibilities that they hold so dear begin to
disintegrate. The standard interpretation is that Bunuel is passing comment on
the upper class by showing an extreme example of social etiquette stifling
human nature. This, however, misses the key point: the characters use their
bourgeoisie values to justify to themselves that they shouldn’t leave, but they
are not trapped by their values but because of them – a punishment
sent by Bunuel.
It is
Bunuel who has forced this situation upon his victims (a far more suitable term
here than ‘characters’) in order, it seems, to scrutinise them. This point is
also relevant to Nazarin; Bunuel manipulates the situation, the external
circumstances in which the characters find themselves, but not the actual
characters. Nazario is never forced by the director to do anything that he
would not normally do. His response to the stimuli that Bunuel provides is
genuine, so too are the reactions of the dinner guests. Aside from their
inability to leave the room (the limitation imposed by him in order to create
the story), all of the characters behave in a way that is consistent and,
again, implies a life beyond the opening and closing of the tale. It is perhaps
because of this that the audience are not often aware of the conscious manipulation
at work. We take for granted the strange forcefield that surrounds the room as
our focus, like Bunuel’s, is on the people. We watch rats in a maze, completely
forgetting that someone has made the decision to build the maze and place rats
within it.
Bunuel’s
manipulation here extends beyond a control over space and into time as well. Repetition
plays a large part of the film’s discordance with traditional narrative.
Nobile, the dinner host, proposes a toast early on: “To the wonderful evening
given to us by Silvia with her magnificent virgin bride of Lammermoor”. The
toast is accepted by all and the guests continue with their small talk,
pleasantries and gossip. However, moments later, he proposes the same toast. This
second time he trails off and sits down as he notices that his guests are
ignoring him. The camera pans across the table to show the guests now looking
thoroughly bored and talking of other things.
When
relating this to the view that Bunuel keeps the ‘purity’ of his characters
intact, we must see this repeat not as the director forcing an unnatural action
upon Nobile, but as a temporal glitch. Nobile does not trail off because he
realises his repetition but because he realises that no-one is listening and he
feels embarrassed. In this sequence we have two juxtaposed moments of time;
Nobile’s pocket of time repeats, while the other pocket inhabited by his guests
has moved on. Indeed, the boredom on the faces of some of his guests implies
that an even greater period of time has passed than the audience is aware of.
The
grandest repetition of all, though, is the film’s finale. The characters find
themselves in the precisely the same positions they were in the first night
that they arrived, and are only able to escape once that have re-enacted that
fateful moment. The film’s climax has been described as “a pure element of
chance, an absurdly irrational coincidence of circumstances”[1], but
it is perhaps best conveyed by Silvia Pinal’s character in the film: “It’s like
a chess game. We have made a thousand moves. We’ve even moved the furniture
hundreds of times. Yet now everything is just as it was then...” Rather than
random chance bringing the characters to this conclusion, it is the inevitable
outcome of a game, a game being played by Bunuel. This is reminiscent of
Hitchcock’s use of characters, described by Thomas M. Leitch as “relatively
inexpressive game pieces that may have different values (as rooks and knights
differ from pawns)”[2].
But while Hitchcock often ruthlessly used his characters as devices for
furthering the plot, Bunuel has played a game with ‘real’ people, much like the
Gods of Olympus played with the fates of men.
The next
and final post will turn its attention to Bunuel’s most overt demonstrations of
the existence of God within his film-worlds, Simon Of The Desert and The
Milky Way
- P.S.
[1]
Edwards, 1982, p. 187
[2]
Leitch, Thomas M. – Find The Director And
Other Hitchcock Games, University Of Georgia Press, 1991, p. 223
