World of Luis Bunuel

by Joan Mellen

With the release of films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, Luis Buñuel at last received the recognition from Americans that he had always had from Europeans and Latin Americans. This handsomely illustrated anthology presents an international cross-section of criticism and features several articles translated from Spanish and French for the first time. Represented here are such Buñuel aficionados as Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist; Tony Richardson, the British director; Henry Miller, who appreciated the films of Buñuel as long ago as the 1920s; Buñuel’s surrealist admirers in Paris, Ado Kyrou, Louis Seguin, and Marcel Martin; and American critics ranging from Pauline Kael to John Simon. There are several articles by Buñuel himself, and a Buñuel filmography. The book offers a penetrating look at the many Buñuels – surrealist, Marxist, Freudian, post-Freudian, anarchist, and rebel. It follows the master from his boyhood in the Basque provinces of Spain to his early filmmaking years in Paris and Mexico to his secure position at the time of publication as the master of the European film and “father” of such younger directors as Bernardo Bertolucci and Lina Wertmuller. “The work is commensurate with the standards already established by Joan Mellen for panache and timeliness. I find especially useful the translations from the special Buñuel issue of Cine Cubano and the back numbers of Positif, and the section from the neglected book by Carlos Rebolledo. In short, it is a very useful anthology.” – Michael Silverman, Director, Film Studies, Brown University.

Genres: Film

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Joan Mellen is the bestselling author of twenty books, including A Farewell to Justice, her biographical study of Jim Garrison s New Orleans investigation of the Kennedy assassination. She has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Baltimore Sun. Mellen is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

(from http://www.booksandbooks.com/book/978...)

Reviews

[Dany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bunuel once remarked, "I believe one must search for God in man."

"In a world as badly made as ours is," Bunuel has said, "there is only one road: rebellion."

"Once the camera starts dancing and becomes the star of the picture," Bunuel has declared, "I lose interest and leave the theatre."

Bunuel has written: "The camera is the eye of the marvelous. When the eye of-the cinema really sees, the whole world goes up in flames."

"The truth is that I've never chosen a subject first—charity, for example, or virginity, or cruelty—and then straitjacketed my characters with the problem. I have no previous answers. I look, and looking is a way of asking."

"I'm pessimistic; but I hope to be a good pessimist. In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them, the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important. When power feels itself totally justified and approved, it immediately destroys whatever freedoms we have left, and that is fascism. My ideas have not changed since I was 20. Basically, I agree with Engels: An artist describes real social relationships with the purpose of destroying the conventional ideas about those relationships, undermining bourgeois optimism and forcing the public to doubt the tenets of the established order. The final sense of my films is this: to repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of- all possible worlds. I guess that's all it amounts to. In any case, I believe that the class struggle is no longer the central social problem. The real issues are birth control and ecology. The real issue is survival."

He is fond of repeating, with the hint of a smile, the words of a Spanish scholar: "Everything that does not come out of tradition is plagiarism."

Sometimes he grows a mustache, "but never a beard, because I would look like Hemingway."

"It is absurd to pose a problem a priori and try to prove something in a film. It's not at all like a geometrical theorem or an algebraic equation. It's often said that my films are violent or destructive, and therefore immoral. Without wanting to defend my works on this particular point, I can tell you what my position is about morals in the cinema. I never place myself before a problem—say, charity, or virginity, or cruelty—and then organize my characters around it, while knowing all the answers in advance. To do so would seem like cheating."

"If a work of art is clear, then my interest in it ends . . . Mystery is the essential element of every work of art. . . ."

"Yes, I liked Bicycle Thieves, but even that, is it not a bit ... a bit literary as it sees the world?" He had not heard of Max Ophuls. He had just been to see Limelight and asked me what I thought of it. I told him how much I disliked it and he agreed. "It is self-pitying, sentimental! That is what I have all my life wanted to attack, to fight, sentimentality, the values of the bourgeois . . . There is only one man I have ever admired . . . that is Fabre, the man who wrote about ants. You see, I would rather watch a snake than a bourgeois or a Holly- wood producer."

"The thought that continues guiding me today is the same that guided me at the age of twenty-five. It is an idea of Engels. The artist describes authentic social relations with the object of destroying the conventional ideals of these relationships, of creating a crisis in the optimism of the bourgeois world and compelling the public to doubt the perennial existence of the established order. That is the ultimate meaning of all my films: to say time and again, in case someone forgets or believes otherwise, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I don't know what more I can do."

"It is quite true that in the beginning, caught up by necessity, I was forced to make cheap films. But I never made a film which went against my conscience or my convictions. I have never made a superficial, uninteresting film.”

"We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I would like to continue to make films which, apart from entertaining the audience, convey to people the absolute certainty of this idea. In making such films I believe that my intentions would be highly constructive. Today movies, including the so-called neo-realistic, do not make it clear that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.
How is it possible to hope for an improvement in the audiences—and consequently in the producers—when consistently we are told in these films, including even the most insipid comedies, that our social institutions, our concepts of country, religion, love, etc., are, while perhaps imperfect, unique and necessary? The true "opium of the audience" is conformity."

"I am against conventional morals, traditional phantasms, sentimentalism and all that moral un- cleanliness that sentimentalism introduces into society. . . . Bourgeois morality is for me immoral, and to be fought. The morality founded on our most unjust social institutions, like religion, patriotism, the family, culture: briefly, what are called the 'pillars of society'."

"On the screen time and space become flexible; they expand and contract at will. Chronological order and the relative value of duration no longer correspond to reality."

"Surrealism has taught me that life has a moral significance that man cannot afford to ignore. Through surrealism I also discovered for the first time that man is not free. I used to believe our freedom was unlimited, but I have found in surrealism, a discipline that must be followed. This has been one of the great lessons in my life, a marvelous and poetic step."

"It is mystery that interests me. Mystery is the essential element in any work of art."

"We used violence as a weapon against the establishment," Bunuel remembers. "Now society itself has become so violent that it is hard to use violence to make an artistic comment."

"In the hands of a free spirit," Luis Bunuel told an audience in 1953,"the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon."

"The private story, the individual drama, cannot in my view interest anyone worthy of living in his times. ... I do not consider man in isolation, as a particular case, but in his relationship to other men."

"Surrealism taught me that man is never free yet fights for what he can never be," Bunuel has said, "that is tragic."