We live in increasingly surreal times, so for the next few weeks, we'll be looking at some of the great surrealist filmmakers of all time starting with the father of Cinematic Surrealism, Luis Buñuel. One of the leading figures of the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel was born in the Aragon region of Spain in February 1900 and became one of the most well-regarded, respected, and revered filmmakers of the 20th Century.
While attending the University of Madrid to study philosophy, Buñuel became friends with two other leading figures of surrealism, artist Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca. Buñuel would eventually make his first film, the legendary short Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog), with Dalí in 1929.The following year Buñuel made his first feature,L'Age d'Or, but suffered a falling out with Dalí thathenceforthkept the two men at odds with one another. This separation, however, allowed Buñuel to come into his own more fully without forever being associated with another artist.
Much like the notion of a comedian's comedian, Buñuel was a director's director, forever beloved and revered by film students and his peers for the absolute meticulousness of his craft. His films were extensions of his own inner life, with Buñuel able to express his thoughts, feelings, and emotions through his characters in a way many other directors envied. He made films all over the world, one of the few directors able to translate his own thoughts and ideas into a number of different languages and ethnicities, which is one of many reasons he's also one of the world's best known directors.Buñuel directed films in Spain, France, Mexico, Italy, and even one film—1960's The Young One—in English, though it was shot in Mexico with American actors.
Reverence for his work is evident everywhere from landing six of his features on Sight Sound's list of the 250 best films ever made to having schools and theaters all over the world named after him.Although so much of his work is enigmatic rather than straightforward, it hasmade him a crucial part of the cultural zeitgeist for nearly a hundred years now, thanks in no small part to his flagrant distrust of institutions like religion, the wealthy, and any form of authority. Many of his films feel as fresh in 2020 as they didfromthe 30sthrough the 70s, providing generations of angry young men and women with fodder for their own antiauthoritarian beliefs.
Sadly, only four of his films feature nudity, but thankfully they're all worth discussing. 13 of his films—from his first to his last—are available via The Criterion Channel and are all worthy of your time should you find yourself wanting to see more of his work. For our purposes, however, we'll be starting very near the end of his career and covering four of his final films, beginning with his final film made in Mexico...
Simón of the Desert (1965)
Religion was a frequent target of Buñuel's scorn and while he would really take Christianity to task with his 1969 film The Milky Way, this 45-minute film from four years earlier is no less derisive of religious faith. Upon returning to Spain in 1960, Buñuel made the film Viridiana, which caused outrage in his home country among the fervent Catholic leaders at the time, so he returned to Mexico two years later, once again an exile from his home land. He teamed with screenwriterJulio Alejandro to adapt his novelSimón del desierto, loosely based on the life of 5th Century Syrian saint Simeon Stylites.
Claudio Brook stars as the title character, the son of the aforementioned saint, who has spent the last6 years, 6 months, and6 days atop a 26-foot tall pillar in the desert praying for spiritual purification. He comes down off the pillar and is offered a new pillar by the townspeople, though first he wants to perform a miracle. To the astonishment of everyone, he restores an amputee's hands, but the former amputee uses his newly restored hands to slap his own child. Feeling he is not yet spiritually pure, he ascends the new pillar.
Once atop the new pillar, he begins shunning everyone who comes to see him, including his own mother. It's then that Satan comes to him in the guise of a beautiful woman (frequent Buñuel collaborator Silvia Pinal) who tempts him by flashing her breasts...
Unmoved by this display, Satan returns a second time disguised as Jesus, rejected once again by Simón, before finally emerging from a coffin, ascending the pillar, and vanishing with Simón. He and Satan then suddenly appear in amodern (for the period) nightclub where they watch people frantically dancing. This confuses and frightens Simón who asks to be taken home, only to be told by Satan that he can never go home again.It's a nasty little piece of work about the futility of faith alone and one that only further served to widen the divide between Buñuel and organized religion of any kind.
Belle de Jour (1967)
Arguably Buñuel's best known work is his first of two times working with French New Wave legend Catherine Deneuve, 1967'sBelle de Jour. Buñuel left Mexico for good after Simón, finding France a much more palatable place to produce films and all of his subsequent productions would have French investors. If the French New Wave opened the door for more sexually adventurous content, Belle de Jour blew that door off its hinges with its portrayal of sexual behaviors once thought too scandalous to even mention aloud.
Deneuve stars as disaffected housewife Séverine, who has become fed up with her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) and the utter lack of intimacy in their relationship. When an acquaintance makes a pass at her by telling her about a high-class brothel run byMadame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), Séverine first rejects the notion, but curiosity eventually drives her to seek it out. Madame Anaïs dubs her "Belle de Jour" and she soon becomes one of the most popular girls in the brothel. Doom and gloom await her, however, when she becomes involved with a manipulative and controlling mobster named Marcel (Pierre Cleménti), who provides plenty of excitement in her sex life, but also sets her on the path to destruction.
The film's utter downer of a third act is keeping with Buñuel's love of the so-called unhappy ending and forever changed Deneuve's image. Just three years earlier, she became a sensation as the virginal Genèvieve in Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but now she turned the corner hard into the world of the femme fatale and it defined her image for decades to come. Buñuel also, rather curiously, never shoots Deneuve in the nude. She either has her back to the camera or is covered by sheer cloth. Yes, you can see through the cloth, but maintaining even the slightest air of mystery in her sex appeal helped to make men only want her more...
The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
My own personal introduction to Buñuel came through his penultimate work, this elliptical and completely obtuse comedy that is quite possibly the worst possible entry point to his work. It's honestly a wonder I ever returned to his films, but I have since come to appreciate 1974's The Phantom of Liberty a great deal after gaining a more thorough knowledge of his filmography. The film doesn't have what one could call a plot by any conventional definition of the word, but it does have a through line and some very specific targets for its ire, whichare much more crucial to the work of a surrealist.
It's the individual moments in the film that add up to the experience, such as when a gaggle of well-to-do types are all seated on toilets while eating around a grand table and discussing, well, fecal matters. Dominatrices, nuns, inept police officers, and even an emu all come and go in the film, adding to the feel of experiencing a dream rather than real life. However, Buñuel grounds all of this in his utter disdain for the upper class and their increasingly oblivious exploitation of everyone and everything around them.
While not exactly a sequel to his prior film, 1972'sThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise, it continues many of the same themes that film was lampooning, with a substantially darker undercurrent. 36 minutes into the film, an aging aunt (Hélène Perdrière) brings her nephew to a hotel for sex. The aunt confesses to her nephew that she is a virgin and when the nephew pulls back the covers on the bed to reveal her naked body, he discovers that she has the body of a woman substantially younger—accomplished through the use of a body double and some ridiculous face coverings...
Late in the film, we begin following a police prefect who sees a woman at his bar that reminds him of his deceased sister—they're both played by the same actress, Adriana Asti. He has a flashback to his sister playing the piano naked, later receiving a phone call from him—remember, she's dead—and eventually discovering a phone in his sister's crypt, which has clearly been opened...
This is a film more to be experienced than watched, but more crucially, it is advanced level Buñuel. Don't dive right in to this one, or really any of his films from the 70s, which are his most oblique. However, I can promise that once you get around to it, it will befuddle, titillate, confuse, and bewilder you, and you'll love every minute of it.
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
We conclude with Buñuel's final film, one of his most enigmatic and acclaimed works starring Fernando Rey of The French Connection. as the aging but wealthy Mathieu, who falls for a young flamenco dancer named Conchita. Now, the film's conceit is rather complicated as Conchita is played by two different actresses—Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina—who differ in many ways physically. They switch off playing the role without any rhyme or reason, sometimes continuing a scene that the other started with no explanation whatsoever.
Long after Buñuel's death,Bill Krohn and Paul Duncan published Luis Buñuel: The Complete Films, in which they finally unmask the reason behind the director's decision to do so. According to the book, Buñuel had hired Last Tango in Paris' Maria Schneider to play Conchita, but afteronly three days of filming, he determined that she was not capable enough to play the role and he and his producer shut down production. The film was in serious danger of not being completed when Buñuel, in a brilliant moment of drunkenness, proposed to his producer that they cast two different women to play the role and switch them off at will, saving the production and giving us one of the strangest love stories ever told.
This conceit has obviously been cribbed by many other directors since then, but the notion of two different actresses playing one role in a film was revolutionary at the time. Critics became divided over Buñuel's intentions in doing so and the director remained elusive enough in the final years of his life to never offer up a full explanation for his use of this device. Nevertheless, it works incredibly well because, in my opinion, it shows that Mathieu has always viewed women as interchangeable. He may be smitten with Conchita, but at the end of the day, she's just another woman in a long line of women who he views as being inferior.
Buñuel's patented antiestablishment attitude is on display once more as the love story between Mathieu and Conchita is constantly being encroached upon by left-wing extremists who come in and out of the story to essentially upend the plot, eventually bringing their story a screeching halt in the final moments. The actresses have about equal screen time between them, though Àngela Molina is definitely the more exhibitionist of the two. 30 minutes into the film, Mathieu tracks Conchita to a club where she is dancing nude and we get some fantastic full frontal from Molina as she entertains the crowd...
Not to be outdone, Carole Bouquet has a couple of topless scenes in the flick, including the most notorious switch between her and Molina. 53 minutes in, Molina appears in a white dressing gown getting ready for bed. She heads into the bathroom, but it's Bouquet who comes out in the same gown, eventually lowering it to show her breasts, then showing them again when she and Rey lie in bed together...
Like so many other directors we have covered, Buñuel isn't everyone's cup of tea. Surrealism is something that most viewers either embrace or simply can't abide, and those looking for narrative consistency are going to find their patience tested again and again. However, those who get on his wavelength and attempt to experience these films rather than figure them out will find Buñuel an unqualified master of the craft. Heck, even those who don't like his films can't help but appreciate his shot compositions, mise-en-scène, and utter commitment to the absurd.
Check out the Other Directors in Our Ongoing "SKIN-depth Look”Series
Atom Egoyan |John Boorman|John Schlesinger|James Ivory|Alan Parker|Walter Hill|Tony Scott|Louis Malle|Mike Nichols|Allison Anders|Jonathan Demme|William Friedkin|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part One|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Two|Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Part Three|Federico Fellini|Philip Kaufman|Miloš Forman|Pedro Almodóvar: Part One|Pedro Almodóvar: Part Two|Blake Edwards|Catherine Breillat: Part One|Catherine Breillat: Part Two|Spike Lee|John Landis|David Cronenberg: Part One|David Cronenberg: Part Two|Ingmar Bergman|François Truffaut|Bernardo Bertolucci|Steven Soderbergh|Kathryn Bigelow|Oliver Stone|Roman Polanski|Nicolas Roeg|David Fincher|Francis Ford Coppola|Pier Paolo Pasolini|Ken Russell: Part One|Ken Russell: Part Two|Robert Altman:Part I|Robert Altman:Part II|Adrian Lyne|Martin Scorsese|Jane Campion|Park Chan-wook|Bob Fosse|Dario Argento|Wes Craven|Tobe Hooper|Todd Haynes|Danny Boyle|Stanley Kubrick|Paul Thomas Anderson|David Lynch|Brian De Palma|Paul Schrader|Paul Verhoeven
**Non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
