Luis Bunuel: Playing God

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.

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[1] Edwards, 1982, p. 187

[2] Leitch, Thomas M. – Find The Director And Other Hitchcock Games, University Of Georgia Press, 1991, p. 223

Luis Bunuel: Playing God

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’. We then cut to an aerial shot of Rome in all of its glory.

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 exists simultaneously as a past, present and future event. This destabilisation of the establishment of the Catholic religion is both a satirical comment being made by Bunuel outside of the diegesis, but also figures to ingrain him as a component within the diegesis; Bunuel-as-God exists in the story-world and this strange ouroborous-like faith that ‘begins once it has already existed’ functions as an appropriate form of worship for such a roguish deity.

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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[1] Edwards, Gwynne – The Discreet Art Of Luis Bunuel, Marion Boyars, 1982, p. 70

[2] Edwards, 1982, p. 52

[3] Short, 2004