Luis Bunuel

New Readings

Peter William Evans, Isabel Santaolalla

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This text ranges widely over key films and moments from stages of Luis Bunuel's career. It locates and re-appraises Bunuel's films with particular emphasis on the national cinemas and varied cultures with which he was identified.

PART ONE

EARLY YEARS

1

Lost and Found: Buñuel, L’Âge d’or and Surrealism

Paul Hammond

Created with half an eye to getting them into the exclusive, explosive fraternity they craved, Un chien andalou (1929) achieved its aims and shortly after its premiere Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were invited to join the Surrealist Group. The movement they now pertained to, and which further empowered them, was, however, no metaphysical category called ‘Surrealism’, but a concrete entity engaging with its own aspirations as tempered by the times. Those shifting aspirations were hinted at by the substitution of one magazine, La Révolution surréaliste (1924–9), by another, Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (LSASDLR, 1930–3), in other words, by the gradual displacement of a post-Dadaist ultra-leftism whose creative axis was automatic writing and painting, dream description, hypnotic trance, psychosexual truth-telling and urban drifting, by a liaison with official communism (in the shape of the French Communist Party, the PCF), coupled with a systematisation of earlier discoveries, a materialist investigation of desire and irrational knowledge, and a de-alienated reconfiguring of the object world. This shift on the part of the brittle surrealist movement from marginal irresponsibility to instrumental responsibility can be seen as a changing, ‘superstructural’ response to the volatile political and social tensions of the Europe of those times, the Europe of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, with, to the East, the threat (or summons, depending on where you stood) that the evolving Russian Revolution posed to the status quo. Not only does the generalised economic collapse triggered by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 mark both the end of a tacit peace between waxing totalitarianisms and waning capitalisms, and a critical mid-point between one world war and the next; it also, and here we come back to Buñuel (and Dalí), separates the ambitions of one proto-surrealist film from those of a second, absolutely authentic one: L’Âge d’or (1930).

Buñuel’s first public outing as a bona fide surrealist is with his eyes shut in the famous Mark II group portrait Je ne vois pas la … cachée dans la fôret, published in the twelfth and final number of La Révolution surréaliste (15 December 1929). This montage – the three dots signify the self-effacing female nude in the Magritte oil the sixteen all-male, photo-booth ‘sleepers’ surround – is intercalated among replies to the enquiry ‘What kind of hope do you place in love?’ Buñuel’s response is no more exalted (and parrot-like) than other surrealist testimonies – and probably equally at odds with real, individual ‘love life’. His answer to one question, ‘Do you believe in the victory of sublime love over sordid life, or of sordid life over sublime love?’ possesses the ring of truth, however: ‘I don’t know,’ he said (Surrealist Group, 1929, p. 71). The same issue also featured the scenario of Un chien andalou, the film thus being claimed by the movement as its own.

More importantly, this terminal Révolution surréaliste kicked off with Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto’, the polemical text that marks the final end of the manic, millennial phase, limns in the whys and wherefores of the purging of the ranks – the Georges Bataille faction being the prime target – and announces the new ‘politically correct’ orientation of the movement. Prior to the manifesto being published in book form in June 1930, Buñuel was one of the signatories in March of a tract, ‘Second Insert for the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”’. Essentially a declaration of faith in Breton’s trajectory, the text argues for supplementing the social critique of Marx and Engels, ‘preserved by the world proletariat from the ravages of time’, with a symbolic recuperation of individual psychic energies that draws on psychoanalysis and spontaneous creativity (Surrealist Group, 1930a). The vicissitudes of this ideological caduceus – Surrealism’s maximum programme, and the key to its specificity – would define four years of fitful collaboration with the increasingly Stalinised and puritanical PCF. Of common accord as to strategy, but in disagreement over tactics, the PCF and the Surrealist Group had embarked on an inevitable collision course, the reef being the party’s suspicion of heretical high modernism in general, and of Freudian depth psychology in particular. Serving the revolution, then, could only be achieved by the Surrealist Group kow-towing to the party apparatus and emasculating itself. After much worrying at the issue of proletarian realism among the Left, the adoption of socialist realism as the official communist aesthetic in 1934 was completely at odds with the surrealist project. A year later this dialogue of the deaf was broken off for all time, with Breton et al. allying themselves with, and making the front running in, the anti-Stalinist opposition, from the Souvariniens and the Socialist Left to, finally, the Trotskyists.

Turning the clock back to 1930: by the time the Surrealist Group divulged their telegram to the Moscow International Union of Revolutionary Writers (the UIER), putting themselves, ‘should imperialism declare war on the Soviets’, at the orders of the Third International (and as if they were members of the PCF), Buñuel had shot and cut L’Âge d’or, shown it to his patrons, Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles, and left Paris for a month’s holiday in Spain – indeed, stills from the film appeared in the same issue of LSASDLR as the headlining telegram (Surrealist Group, 1930b, p. 1). We know that L’Âge d’or was a work of bricolage; that it grew segmentally from a twenty-minute short, a sort of sound remake of Un chien andalou, into a heterogeneous hour-long feature. (There are even a few lines of dialogue ‘left over’ from Un chien and used in its companion piece.) Aside from the febrile imagination of Buñuel – and of Dalí, who bombarded the director with ideas – assistant directors Jacques Brunius and Claude Heymann, hired for their experience of nascent sound cinema, helped the director compose his découpage. Among the players there were two who had made their own independent shorts: Gaston Modot and Pierre Prévert. Who knows what these and other collaborators – young and questing novices, in the main – may have offered the ductile Buñuel by way of ideas? Which begs the question: did the Surrealist Group proper put in its pennyworth, have its say? Éluard certainly warbled on the soundtrack, while Ernst snarled as a bandit (one day he would claim his 1930 collage novel Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel partly inspired the film). Are we to imagine that Buñuel and Dalí hearkened to the counsel of their comrades, and that they followed a preordained brief, that the Surrealist Group vetted the script, even? (Interestingly, Dalí would work on a didactic scenario between 1930 and 1932 about Surrealism and the unconscious, to have been made in collaboration with the group [Ades, 1982, pp. 198–91].) Is there a literal truth embedded in Buñuel’s remark that L’Âge d’or is ‘a clear, resolute film, without mystery. Zilch. Very Surrealist, of course, but there’s no mystery to it. My ideas are clearly visible. Not mine, the ideas of the Surrealist Group are perfectly visible’ (Aub, 1985, p. 134)?

Amour fou in L’Age d’or

Whatever the truth of the matter, the Surrealist Group themselves, sensing that the release of the film would be a major coup in publicity terms, presented their notions of its content in a tract prepared for the 28 November 1930 launch. Appearing in the Studio 28 souvenir programme, this broadside, ‘L’Âge d’or’, is a dense, often hermetic, Freudo-Marxist position paper that possesses little of the scatty brio of the movie, but does have the virtue of giving us an insight into how the Surrealist Group saw the film, and how they wished other people, especially the pro-communist intelligentsia, prone to dialectical subtleties, to see it (Surrealist Group, 1930c). A collage of thematic segments, the tract may be summarised thus: any artist (or film-maker) is the locus of instinctual conflict between the sex and the death drive, both of which are instincts of preservation. It is the artist’s duty to critically consider the sublimation of these drives, which affirm themselves as ‘amorous egoism’ and ‘passivity’ respectively. If we wish to go beyond mere self-preservation and to reinvent the world, the baleful equilibrium of the instincts has to be upset by privileging one antithetical pulsion over the other. Given its frenzied violence and revolutionary dynamism, amorous egoism (or mad love, as it would later be called) is best suited to achieving this. The immense system of myths subtending society must be destroyed, and although these myths – the Golden Age, for instance –may penetrate as deep as the unconscious, it is the provident lawlessness of unconscious mentation that, rendered as language, can accomplish this destruction. New myths are needed, moral allegories that blend conscious and unconscious expression. Buttressed only by the clergy and the police, contemporary capitalist society is disintegrating, and the anti-clericalism and call to revolt of L’Âge d’or is an ‘indispensable moral complement to the stock-market scare’ (Surrealist Group 1930c, p. 169). Buñuel’s film takes its place in the surrealist movie pantheon, alongside Mack Sennett, Clair and Picabia’s Entr’acte (1924), W. S. Van Dyke’s White Shadows of the South Seas (1928), early Chaplin, Battleship Potemkin (1925) and, of course, Un chien itself.

The hoped-for attention was not long in coming, six days in fact: the fascist riot of 3 December, plus the ensuing moral panic and the intervention of Police Prefect Chiappe and the Board of Censors saw to that. Although the film would be more or less buried for fifty years, the Surrealist Group had achieved its immediate aims – to be bloodied in the class war, and to prove its revolutionary worth to the PCF. The latter was no stranger to Chiappe, of course: at the slightest hint of social strife, this rabid anti-communist would round up the militants – 4,000 were taken into preventative custody before the 1929 May Day Parade – and imprison the Party’s leading lights (Cachin, Marty, Duclos and Vaillant-Couturier) for months at a time. Where cinema is concerned, Chiappe had ordered the closure, in October 1928, of ‘Les Amis de Spartacus’, a worker-oriented cineclub created fifteen months earlier by Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Léon Moussinac, Jean Lods, Francis Jourdain and Georges Marrane – all PCFers – after tumultuous showings of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. And Eisenstein in person had fared no better in Paris in February 1930 when, although the director was allowed to lecture, Chiappe had prohibited the projection of his new film The General Line (1929).

With the banning of Buñuel’s masterwork the Surrealist Group moved into action once again, publishing a further tract in early January 1931, ‘L’Affaire de “L’Âge d’or”’, which neatly encapsulates the ideological, and hands-on, warfare being waged between the French Left and Right (Surrealist Group, 1931a). Laid out in the double-column format of LSASDLR, the six-page polemic consists of four sides of text – an ‘Exposition of the facts’, ‘Programme extracts’, and a ‘Questionnaire’ in the main column, with ‘Press extracts’ running alongside – and two of captioned photographs. Since the facts are now the stuff of history and the programme extracts are drawn from the ‘L’Âge d’or’ broadside, I will concentrate on the press coverage, the questionnaire and the photos.

Taking the last first: eight photos, four to a side, provide the visual argument. On one page, a brace of stills from L’Âge d’or, the bishops squatting their islet outcrop, ‘restores’ the two images excised from the film on 5 December by order of Paul Ginisty of the Board of Censors. The live bishops are captioned with a quote from early Marx: ‘The criticism of heaven is transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics’ (Surrealist Group, 1931a, p. 113). The post-mortem bishops are accompanied by a citation from the French Romantic poet Maurice de Guérin: ‘There is no sweeter spectacle than the death throes of a priest.’ Below, a still of the diminutive governor (Llorens Artigas) and his towering wife (Mme Hugo) is insidiously paired with a press photo of Victor Emmanuel III and his spouse. The former bears the legend: ‘Apparently, this image from the film caused a protest to be made to the French Government by the Italian Ambassador, who feigned to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: A Desperate Call for Murder
• Introduction: Luis Buñuel – Twenty Years After
• Part One: Early Years
• Part Two: Mexico
• Part Three: Late BuÑuel
• Part Four: The BuÑuel World
• Filmography
• List of Illustrations
• Index
• eCopyright