Wednesday, 26 February 2014

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.


[1] Edwards, Gwynne – The Discreet Art Of Luis Bunuel, Marion Boyars, 1982, p. 70
[2] Edwards, 1982, p. 52
[3] Short, 2004