THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY
LUIS BUNUEL IS one of the world's most famous directors and indisputably an "auteur." That is, Bunuel had certain themes and a consistent way of expressing those themes throughout his career from his notorious silent films, Un Chien Andalou and L'age d'Or to his late masterpieces, which includes The Phantom of Liberty.One of Bunuel's themes is anarchy. For Bunuel loathed institutions, especially the church. He famously said, "Thank God I'm still an atheist," though he later insisted he believed in God but not in the church.
Bunuel's imagination was often pornographic, yet he looked upon sex with as much suspicion as he viewed the church. Perhaps because sex is in an uneasy alliance with repression. That is, all sex is infected by social values since we are all social animals.
Sado-masochism is an example, which, though apparently escaping from the repressive constraints of normal heterosexual relationships in fact reflects those constraints in the dominant-submissive patterns of sex play. In the same way homosexual couples may mirror the dominant-submissive pattern of the heterosexual couple.
These themes appear in this week's film, The Phantom of Liberty (1974), Bunuel's next to last film. Liberty is a phantom (=ghost, illusion) because we are social creatures even when we rebel against society. Therefore, like it or not, we mirror the society we rebel against. This is as true of political parties as it is of the war of the generations: youth replaces old prejudices with new ones.
In Bunuel's films opposites meet in a surreal marriage, which, nonetheless, is the real world! This can be seen in The Phantom of Liberty, where institutional wisdom can decide a child is absent even though present; where a doctor insults a patient by being courteous; where a sniper is sentenced to death and promptly released and celebrated; where humans want to enter animal cages; where monks play cards while bidding in religious imagery; where tourist post cards are considered obscene; and where relieving oneself on toilets is a social act while eating is a private and dirty act. For who is to say that masticating food is less repulsive than relieving oneself on a toilet?
By undercutting normal narrative closure in each scene, Bunuel makes the point that life is random and arbitrary. Narrative closure is a logical sequence of action or character.
Thus a motive or action of a character in one scene is "answered" in another. So it makes sense in a cause-effect way we're used to.
For example, monks who bring in a statue of St. Joseph should be spiritual people, but in Bunuel's film the next scene shows them bidding at cards in religious images. What happened to their religious sense?
Bunuel is saying it's aribtrary. Rather, religion only reflects the secular world. In the same way the sex play of the sadomasochist needs the church's monks to increase sexual excitement.
A tank searches for foxes. Where's the logic of an army tank searching for foxes, especially when there are no foxes? And what do foxes represent anyway?
Why does a sniper shoot down people? And why is he sentenced to death but promptly released to give autographs?
Each sequence of actions is not logical in the ordinary sense. Yet this is not just Bunuel, but real life.
The surreal is in fact the real. That's why Bunuel uses hard-edged deep-focus compositions, to link the surreal with the real instead of coding it as dream imagery as in the classical (Hollywood) cinema. In the Hollywood cinema, the dream is safely kept at a distance. We know it's a dream. In Bunuel's film we never figure it out. Except that life is unreal whether a dream or not.
What is more unreal than liberty, since the free person is always enslaved by social ideals? That's why the revolutionaries of today (Mao and Castro are two examples) become the dictators of tomorrow. The rebellious student today becomes the tyrannical teacher tomorrow.
But if Bunuel's scenes lack closure, his film has a strong sense of closure. Henri's dream of an ostrich is at the end a real ostrich, since we see the ostrich through an objective lens so there can be no dispute.
Even so: notice the shallow focus of the ostrich shot. Perhaps Bunuel wished to save money by not showing a crowd of revolutionaries behind the ostrich. That's one explanation.
But the shallow focus also teases the viewer: where is the ostrich? Is it a diegetic ostrich (part of the plot)? Or an extradiegetic ostrich (part of the narration, perhaps a symbolic insert?)
That would insure closure. More obviously, Bunuel's film begins and ends with the same cry of "Down with liberty" and the sound effects of bullets and church bells, as if the two were married in a permanent bond: institutions (church) and rebellion against those institutions (bullets) are linked together in a continual drama of futility, because each can only mirror the other. Revolutionaries (bullets) rebel against institutions (church bells) only to build new institutions.
Only the animals are free. But even the ostrich looks confused by the world around him.
The Phantom of Liberty is a good place to study promotion (advertising) too. Compare the two posters for the film. One of them promotes the film as a sex film ("kinky comedy"), the other as a political satire with the US Statue of Liberty in the design (with a wilting torch) blending with an ostrich's posterior.
Promotion is important for a film and marketing studies are usually done to see how best to sell a film. Titanic was a good example. It seems to have flopped as an epic until it was marketed as a romantic film, highlighting Leonardo DiCaprio, as in the iconic image of the Jack and Rose stretching arms. Then the film caught the public's imagination.
Of course promotion would be tailored to different markets. A promotion that succeeds in Europe might fail in America or in different parts of America. Some movies that flop as "religious epics" succeed if they foreground the sinful sex rather than the sinless heroes!
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