Eight-eight years ago a 17-minute short film directed by a Spanish novice named Luis Buñuel and written by a promising young surrealist artist called Salvador Dali premiered at a packed Parisian theater. Although the venue was known for its outlandish offerings, the audience was not prepared to witness what has since been considered the most disturbing 17 minutes in film history.
A series of unrelated moving images started to flow haphazardly on screen: a crawling hand with a hole full of ants; a transvestite on a bicycle; a man pulling a piano loaded with a donkey on top of a living, a man heading towards a woman he s about to murder; and, the most famous and shocking of all, a man cutting a woman s eye out with a razor.
The film was called An Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and for the next 58 years, Buñuel, one of the five greatest non-American filmmakers in history, would continue to shock, offend and dazzle his faithful admirers and fiercest foes alike.
Cervantes, The Spanish Culture Center in Egypt continues its impressive film series that started last month with a retrospective of Pedro Almodóvar’s work with a tribute to cinema s most controversial filmmaker this month.
Born to a land-owning bourgeois family in 1990, Buñuel was educated at a Catholic Jesuit school and moved to Madrid in 1917, indulging in the culture scene with thinkers, poets, painters and tramps. After experimenting with different art forms, he was eventually won over by cinema after watching some of D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstien s astonishing silent films.
Fascinated by the pornographic novels of Marquis de Sade and Freud s writing about dreams and the subconscious, Buñuel set out to make two more films in his homeland with a clear objective to shock, disgust and unsettle the reserved members of his social class before being banished to Mexico till the end of his life.
When shown in 1930, Buñuel’s second movie L age d or (The Age of Gold) saw members of an ultra conservative party tearing the screen apart and rioting in the streets.
Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), which was screened last Wednesday, was the film that led to his exile. Buñuel s only documentary is a portrait of the poor, forgotten region Las Hurdes of Spain. The region was largely cut off from the rest of the country and its residents lived in complete poverty, leading a primitive lifestyle. The geographical conditions of the area were so stern that even basic survival essentials like water and bread were rare.
In Las Hurdes, Buñuel examined the functions and rules that govern the term vérité when he pushed some goats off a mountain while spreading honey over a donkey in order to film it being stung to death by bees. He wanted to demonstrate the horrors inflicted upon these residents. But does delivering a certain message justify such a manipulative, radical technique? The question remains as perplexing as it did in 1933.
But Las Hurdes wasn t a film through which Buñuel expressed compassion for the poor; Buñuel was too angry and too cynical to convey any sympathy for anyone. The film was simply a tool to illustrate the failings of the authoritarian government, disclosing an aspect of the country the world hadn’t seen before.
His hate for Spain’s double standards was one of the fundamental elements film scholar Dominique Russell called Buñuel s unholy trinity (bourgeois complacency, religious hypocrisy, and patriarchal authority) upon which all of his works were constructed.
After settling in Mexico, he started working within the Mexican studio system producing commercial comedies and melodramas. Yet, Buñuel still managed to make astounding works like Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), which earned him the best director prize at Cannes in 1950.
In 1961, he was invited back to his home country by the Franco regime to improve the dictator s image to the world. Buñuel s last visit to Spain produced Viridiana, the highlight of the current series.
The film tells the tale of Viridiana, a nun who visits Don Jaime, her late aunt s husband and benefactor, one last time before she takes her final vows. Viridiana reminds Don Jaime of his wife and soon attempts to convince her to marry him. When a repulsed Viridiana rejects his offer, he drugs her, tries to rape her and hangs himself after writing a will bequeathing his manor to their son. Forced to stay, Viridiana shelters a bunch of beggars, but her kindness is met with derision resulting in one of the most devastating, outrageous and offensive climaxes the silver screen has ever seen, not to mention the blasphemy.
Buñuel was one of the Catholic Church s biggest enemies. He was a self-proclaimed atheist who famously said Thank God I m an atheist, yet continued to use Catholic symbolism in almost every film he made. Viridiana is the key to understanding Buñuel’s oeuvre. The film went won the Palm d or at Cannes before being banned by Spain and the Catholic Church (is still banned by the church till this very day).
By the end of the 60s his commercial and critical reputation soared even higher with the postmodernist cine d art of the French pictures like Journal d une femme de chamber (Diary of a Chambermaid) and, most notoriously, his first collaboration with France’s legendary leading lady Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour. The film, which revolved around a rich, bored, sexually repressed wife who turns into prostitution by night, was one of the most explicit films at that time.
One of his most celebrated movies of his last cinematic period is Tristana; his second, and last, film with Deneuve which concludes this month s series.
Tristana contains the hallmarks of Buñuel s best works (insects, amputated body members, dreams/nightmares sequences and his never-ending fetish with women s legs) but with less subtlety this time.
The female figure has always been a projection of the male desire in the Spanish master’s movies. No one knows for sure why he decides to grant his female protagonists the upper hand in his last movies but some critics have assumed that Buñuel might have wanted to see his oppressed characters finally triumph over their tormenters.
Buñuel managed to roll one final masterpiece among his exceptional surreal last films in the shape of the brilliantly funny Oscar winning Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois) in 1972.
Ironically, Buñuel spent his last days in a Mexican convent, living the life of a monk as a born-again Christian.
Expect to be entertained by the savage poetry of this great offender.
“Viridiana will be screened at Cervantes Institute, Wednesday March 28. 20 Boulos Hanna St., DokkiTel: (02) 3370845
