Luis Buñuel Unaffiliated and subversive

This year marks Luis Buñuel’s 125th birth anniversary. The Spanish film director was associated with the Surrealism Movement of the 1920s, that had a foothold in several other art forms as well.

Dada and Surrealism were ‘avant-garde’ movements. The term ‘avant-garde’, coming to signify the advanced socio-political as well as the aesthetic position to which the modern artist should aspire, which was primarily to oppose the bourgeoisie and its institutions. It did this largely through shock — Marcel Duchamp gained notoriety by exhibiting a urinal in a museum and titling it ‘Fountain’.

Buñuel’s first film in 1929, which he made with another surrealist Salvador Dali, called ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (Andalusian Dog, meaning himself) is shocking even today. He shows a man cutting a woman’s eyeball with a razor and this is cut to a more conventionally lovely image — a sliver of a cloud cutting across the moon.  

Buñuel’s connections with the Surrealist Movement did not last long but he remained true to its subversive tenets long after others like Dali became mannered — and celebrated by the same bourgeoisie they were against. Buñuel retained his acerbic mocking tone consistently his entire life and his targets were the upper classes, the Catholic Church, patriarchy and bourgeois convention. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Buñuel moved to Paris and after the war ended he could not return since he had been earmarked for murder by the right-wing Falange. He moved to Hollywood briefly and then worked successfully in Mexico, churning out ‘melodramas’ although his targets remained the same. ‘Susana’ (1951) would perhaps not even be accepted today — with political correctness tempering expression. 

In ‘Susana’, a beautiful young woman with a criminal background escapes from a reformatory (through divine intervention!), enters a landowning family and wreaks havoc through her sexual wiles, which awakens the hostility of the men towards each other. Seeing her dressed in a provocative way, the patriarch finds himself kissing his wife fervently, and she, quite surprised, asks why he is doing this! Eventually the femme fatale has to be escorted away by the police, a commentary on the power of feminine sexuality — needing state intervention to be contained!

Buñuel was as mordant a filmmaker as could ever be, but he often made himself deliberately misunderstood. ‘Nazarin’ (1959), about an ineffectual priest trying to live like Jesus but causing more harm than good, was praised by the Vatican and he was invited to Spain to make another film. This film, ‘Viridiana’, (1961) is about an earnest young woman who starts a shelter for beggars without realising the kind of humans she will be dealing with. One of them, with sores on his hands, dips them in the holy water in church so others can catch the same infection. At the culmination of ‘Viridiana’ is a banquet of beggars imitating ‘The Last Supper’ — with a lascivious blind beggar occupying the central position. ‘Viridiana’ was banned in several Catholic countries.     

Buñuel could frequently become realistic in his methods although it is an extreme kind of realism. ‘Las Hurdes’ (1933), a documentary he made in his surrealist period, deals with a poor area of Spain and includes the most horrific images — a donkey killed by bees; a child with sores in her mouth shown dying; a man whose hand is infected by a viper bite while clearing away bushes to cultivate land. ‘Los Olvidados’ (1950) is about slum children in Mexico City. But it is neither a document of poverty and delinquency, nor a collection of vignettes pertaining to the city’s poor. Rather than being a sad-eyed gaze at disadvantaged children, the children in it are no more innocent than the adults, perhaps even less so, as in the scene where they rob a legless man, lifting him out of his begging cart and leaving him flailing on the sidewalk.   

Many of Buñuel’s later films made in France are ‘surreal’ comedies but he had revealed this aspect of himself in Mexico. ‘The Exterminating Angel’ (1962) is about an upper-class dinner party attended by the city’s powerful elite who find it impossible to leave though they are not being prevented, and the servants have already left. When the influential and powerful have assembled thus, departing can be disadvantageous — for missing out — and that is what Buñuel is satirising.  

Buñuel continued making films like this even into his late 70s and his last three or four are among his funniest. ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ (1977) is his last film and is about a wealthy older man Mathieu (Fernando Rey) trying to seduce his maid Conchita but the girl finding adequate reasons for perpetually denying him what he craves. An aspect of the film is that Conchita is played by two different actors in different scenes — Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet. The women hardly look alike but they create the sense of a single woman given to unpredictability. Buñuel could have hit upon the idea by accident but mischievously retained it. 

Buñuel was audacious and it is a perhaps sad commentary on culture today that an incomparably inventive but also acerbic sensibility like Buñuel’s can hardly find a place in it, and it is well-meaning blandness that is eulogised. Luis Buñuel tried to shock, but today he might have been excluded from film festivals.    

(The author is a well-known film critic)