“For me, bourgeois morality is immorality that needs to be fought,” said Luis Buñuel.
Photo: New Visions Film Distribution
There are things I just don’t want to see. This includes the infamous scene from Luis Buñuel’s “The Andalusian Dog” from 1929, in which a razor cuts through a wide-open eye. Javier Espada also quotes this scene several times in his documentary – and whenever I suspect what’s coming next, I close my eyes. But usually I open it again at exactly the moment when something I absolutely didn’t want to see happens.
Buñuel celebrates the act of destruction in a strange way. That’s what’s shocking about surrealism and its nightmare reality. In the midst of a world in which images of death and destruction flood us and we inevitably become numb, this keeps alive the pain that violence causes. This is the birth of the “aesthetics of horror,” which arises from the heart of our everyday lives.
Luis Buñuel, born in 1900 in Calanda, Spain, was influenced by the dark Catholicism and the bigoted, bourgeois, small-town atmosphere of his hometown, which he hated. His father was a large landowner, but his intellectual horizons were small. This oppressive confinement, the stubbornness and the arrogance of the upper class of the Spanish provinces shaped Buñuel’s films for over half a century, until his death in 1983.
You don’t often see documentation as densely crafted as Javier Espada’s “Buñuel” anymore. Like Buñuel, Espada comes from Calanda; his birthplace, he says, was not far from the director’s. Buñuel’s “absent presence” exerted such a strong pull on him that he spent his life studying his biography and work, even directing the Buñuel Museum for 15 years. He says his years of research on Buñuel went into the film. Sounds dangerous, a film by experts for experts? No, fortunately it didn’t become that – although this type of film biography can’t be described as anything other than “compact”. A successful educational film on the subject of surrealism, with particular attention to Buñuel’s position in this and especially in “The Andalusian Dog” – and in it the aforementioned razor scene as an iconographic moment of the 20th century. Shouldn’t we ban razors or at least require some kind of weapons license for them, because – as can be seen here – they are undoubtedly dangerous? But art like Buñuel and the other surrealists favored should be just that: dangerous.
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The surrealism that Buñuel invented – together with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and André Breton (who then wrote a self-defeating “Manifesto of Surrealism”) – is of course not really new, but rather assembles certain existing ideas in a surprising way. This is the dream motif that has occupied the concept of reality. The technique of automatic writing (of the unconscious in the act of creation) is transferred here to film. Storytelling is a game with lots of paradoxes that have only one goal: to create a counterworld to the dominant world. The prevailing reason is actually pure unreason, the opposite of what it believes itself to be.
Javier Espada’s “Buñuel” is rich in documentary material that shows how radically the Surrealists used art to make the prevailing conditions dance. It’s an absurd game that’s liberating because it stops following false ideals. Buñuel put this in a formulation that has become legendary: “The world is becoming more and more absurd. Only I am still a Catholic and an atheist. Thank God.« This statement by the former Jesuit student and Parisian avant-garde artist is meant seriously, because he cannot be one (Catholic) without the other (atheist). An extremely fruitful contradiction from which he drew throughout his life.
The astonishing thing about Buñuel’s extensive film epic, which also extends across several social systems, is that it is at the same time of the highest philosophical standards and at times crude entertainment, often also black humor. “The Andalusian Dog” and the follow-up film “The Golden Age” (both with Salvador Dalí) are not cinematic treatises about Eros and Thanatos (life and death instinct according to Sigmund Freud) for a small minority, but always action-packed films for everyone who Show the catastrophe of ridiculous man in a world that is hostile to him. Buñuel does not exempt himself from this, does not sit in judgment on the hated creatures, but is trapped with them.
The gesture of the procession, which permeates Spanish culture influenced by Catholicism, can also be found in Buñuel’s films, only here with a blasphemous overtone. This is the case in “The Golden Age” (1930), in which a group of bishops turn into skeletons. Instead of the bishops, we now see bandits holding an orgy, in the style of de Sade. The last shot of the film shows a cross to which the scalps of the girls killed during sexual excess are nailed. You can imagine the scandal that the film caused, and not just in Spain. Buñuel says: “For me, bourgeois morality is immorality that has to be fought.” For him, this is aimed at the rotten foundations of bourgeois society, which, according to him, is a single edifice of lies. But the ostensibly socially critical gesture is avoided: everything here follows a purely associative logic of the images.
The modern hell that Buñuel shows again and again comes across as a party for the beautiful and rich. And yet there is always a hint of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” and Francisco de Goya’s “Caprichos”. Bad ideas like the ones an honest man has when he has bad dreams. “The Strangling Angel” (1962) and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) follow a similar experimental setup that is typical of Buñuel. It has something of the Last Supper of Jesus, or of Plato’s dialogues at banquets, in which the point is always that those who claim to be experts in a matter know the least about it.
The high society gathers, but there is apparently a curse on them. Like in “The Strangling Angel,” shot in black and white. After the opera, you meet in the luxurious private salon of one of the pillars of society; the cooks and waiters have prepared a dinner. But strangely enough, almost all of them quickly leave the stately property before the reception begins. Inside you’re in a great mood, you’re drinking, eating and playing music. At some point the first guests want to go home – but they can’t leave the room.
A claustrophobic scene. The trapped people finally begin to starve and thirst and attack each other. There are the first deaths – then suddenly the curse is lifted. The miraculously freed people attend a thanksgiving service – and the time freeze repeats itself, they remain imprisoned. And outside the church doors, a civil war is raging.
Buñuel becomes an apocalypticist for the bourgeoisie, with particular attention to Spanish Catholicism. This also dominates “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (already in color). Again we see the good company gathered around a table descending into chaos. This time, however, terror and submachine guns openly invade private salons. It is a farce, but one with inexplicable somnambulistic overtones.
The Spanish Civil War forced Buñuel out of the country and prevented further film shoots. He was currently in the USA, first in Hollywood, then in New York, where he was employed at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1946 he received an offer from Mexico to produce his films there in the future. He ended up making about 20 films in Mexico. But Buñuel couldn’t get away from his Spanish roots, as Javier Espada shows in his clever, perhaps a touch too didactic film. But the fact that he didn’t make the mistake of making a surrealist film about the surrealist Buñuel himself was probably the right decision.
Only in Spain did Buñuel find his opponents and the strength to take on them equally. His films all have the sharpness of razors – but never superficially, but rather in a mythical imagery turned into the absurd that does not become outdated.
»Buñuel – Filmmaker of Surrealism«: Spain 2021. Director and book: Javier Espada. 83 min. Cinema release: October 10th.
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