Dream Politics
Luis Buñuel's best two films are back in circulation. His 1930 L'ˆge d'Or has finally come out on DVD, and his 1950 Los Olvidados is being revived at Film Forum. Buñuel was known as the bad boy of European and Mexican cinema, but these are Hellboy days. Can we still grasp his complexity?
But going back to Buñuel's films is an adventure-and a necessary one. It now has the ironic effect of investigating forgotten taboos or rediscovering the moral roots that today's worst hits have severed. Buñuel's shocking gags and clever narrative disruptions remind us of how civilized and Christian-based we still are despite a culture designed to convince us we aren't. Last year's most fractious movie controversies pitted believers against non-believers, intelligence against faith. Both holy and secular arrogance-positions that Buñuel was concerned with and gave distinctive comic treatment-were traduced; the so-called issues were made ugly. And the movie climate was poisoned.
Meanwhile, Surrealist anarchy has itself been subverted by commercialism. It's no longer the province of the Left. That's an unexpected fact of recent film history. Look at the fake-progressive, pseudo-subversive movies that are out there-Elektra, Maria Full of Grace, Assault on Precinct 13, The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby. All chicly irreligious, they represent the opposite of moving forward. These films lack the honest assessment of characters acknowledging moral choice that made L'ˆge d'Or and Los Olvidados-the masterworks of an old communist atheist-so powerful.
In this unscrupulous atmosphere, Buñuel's films acquire value beyond their sacrilegious jests and anti-clerical motifs. Seeing L'ˆge d'Or and Los Olvidados today, one understands that his longtime beef throughout the 20th century was with mankind's foolishness, which hid behind piety as well as lust. Buñuel mocked both, but it's easy to disregard the extent of his emotional disdain (especially in an intellectual environment where religious faith is scoffed at). It's also a mistake to dismiss Buñuel's vision as cruel when it is actually cleanly detached. He thought about spirituality and society more clearly than the makers of the above-mentioned films.
Both L'ˆge d'Or and Los Olvidados look at mankind's abundant moral contradictions. In scholar Robert Short's excellent commentary track for L'ˆge d'Or, Buñuel's perspective is described as an adumbration of Freud and Marx's world views-combined (and designed) to reveal the cracks in bourgeois life. The trivial fantasies in movies like Elektra and Assault on Precinct 13 and The Aviator avoid looking at human contradictions. Instead, they substitute a specious disregard for old-time morality, thus leaving the audience with nihilism. However, the anger and pity that rise from the abuse and futility seen in Los Olvidados (which means "The Forgotten Ones") are too strong to be called unconsidered or dispassionate. Buñuel wasn't being fashionable; his response to this rotten world was one of feeling.
Buñuel's reputation has been one of hipster intransigence for too long. Los Olvidados is an impassioned cry about the social deprivation suffered by urban youth. We must remember that the Surrealists claimed social concern and moral superiority; they weren't simply making "art." (They were anti-art in a way that Lars Von Trier doesn't care to think about.) Buñuel's slum story was not only tougher than the nearly similar one Vittorio De Sica told in Shoe-Shine, but the addition of Surrealist tropes (such as the dream sequences that imbued political reality with the otherworldly) made his social tragedy differently disturbing. When Jaibo, the worst of the gang youth, lies in the street, his final thoughts symbolized by a wild dog galloping through a film noir void, Buñuel mixes pity and disdain. Such an image belongs uniquely to post-war consciousness; it refutes social worker niceties and yet its teeth remain in anyone who has seen it.
Los Olvidados is horrific neorealism. (It was the beginning of Buñuel's great Mexican period-his best.) The important youth movies that followed it (Fellini's I Vitelloni, Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, Ray's Aparajito, Scorsese's Mean Streets) also ignored it; probably because its Surrealist critique was too harsh to sustain-or live with. As a result Los Olvidados is not thought of in the same "humanist" terms. But it should be. What Buñuel knew about mankind's cruelty is also universal. He intensifies youth fantasy (and the appalled onlookers' perspective) so that we don't need the mawkish self-pity of Million Dollar Baby, the useless escapism of Finding Neverland or the trivial comic book Manichean approach of Hellboy or Elektra.
L'ˆge d'Or remains confounding because it also remains fresh. In 1930 France (after the success of his first film Un Chien Andalou, made with Salvador Dali) Buñuel was re-creating cinema even as he was challenging its early narrative conventions. L'ˆge d'Or starts as a documentary about scorpions, then shifts into "objectivity" about the unconscious feelings of a pair of lovers (Gaston Modot and Lya Lys) kept apart by an uptight society that adheres to rules it never thinks through. This Surrealist treatise isn't only about liberation but is an example of it. The great pleasure of watching it (and re-watching it) comes from the freedom in the narrative. At one time it was considered "dream-like," today it seems quintessentially cinematic. Dream logic becomes social perception; that, in turn, becomes critique. The scene where Lya Lys, missing her lover's affection, spies a cow on her bed is perplexing. But it perplexes to amuse, amuses to provoke-and then stimulates thought.
So much of Buñuel's radicalism has been beyond the scope of mainstream filmmakers that L'ˆge d'Or's most famous sequences still have the capacity to stun. That's because Buñuel was giving moral hegemony its due. His intellectual rigor is respectful, not condescending. The sequence where Modot throws objects out a window itemizes ideological debris: he discards a burning tree, a prelate, an easel, a toy giraffe that crashes into the sea and feathers. It's a puzzle and a poem.
L'ˆge d'Or is a triumph of associative editing-metaphors clash and forbidden behavior erupts unbidden. Commentator Short gives the best descriptive yet of the film's final blasphemous sequence: "The implications of doubling Our Savior with a serial killer are dizzying. It takes provocation to the limit but there's yet another twist in store." Dizzying-a rare and deserved superlative.