Monday, April 8, 2019

Los tallos amargos (1956) at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

Los tallos amargos (1956), directed by Fernando Ayala

Los tallos amargos was hiding in plain sight in a private collector’s home in Buenos Aires, when Fernando Martín Peña, an Argentine film historian and curator at MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – arranged with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation to have it restored. With the foundation providing the funds and the UCLA Film & Television Archive doing the lab work, the film got an unexpected new life in 2016, when, among other U.S. screenings, it became part of a six-film series at the Museum of Modern Art: “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”.   It should be noted, too, that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association also contributed to its restoration. Los tallos amargos is a knockout film, and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles is proud to show it as part of the 2019 Last Remaining Seats program of the LA Conservancy. The film screens on Saturday, June 8, at 2pm, at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

In 1954, journalist Adolfo Jasca submitted his novel “Los tallos amargos” [The Bitter Stems] to the prestigious literary contest of the publishing house Emecé, which gave it the first prize and recommended its publication.  The novel captured the atmosphere of the newspaper world in the Buenos Aires of the 1950s as the background for a story involving a reporter, Alfredo Gasper; a Lithuanian refugee, Paar Liudas; and the journalism school by mail they concoct that leads to a seemingly perfect crime. The novel unfolded as a porteño update of Crime and Punishment. The essentials of the story were transferred to the film version of the same title, two years later, even though Liudas became a Hungarian exile.  The film was a box-office success and earned top prizes from the Argentine critics association, for best film and best direction, in 1957. 

Fernando Ayala
Made as an independent production, and released through Artistas Argentinos Asociados, it was the second picture directed by Fernando Ayala (1920-1997), a filmmaker whose long career began at the end of the classic studio system and became emblematic of the new Argentine auteur cinema in the 1960s.  With Héctor Olivera, Ayala founded Aries Cinematográfica, a production and distribution company relevant until the late 1990s, which combined commercial fare with titles that provided an astute critique of social and political issues, grounded in real-life situations recognizable by Argentine audiences.  Always engaging, Ayala’s filmography is a road map to understand modern Argentina’s permanent state of turmoil, with its cycles of boom and bust, and its impact on the middle class. Among his most renowned titles are: El jefe (1958), Paula cautiva (1963), La fiaca (1969), La guita (1970), Plata dulce (1982) and El arreglo (1983).

Los tallos amargos belongs to the visual style we now call noir– a term coined by French critics to describe the style and content of American crime films made in the forties and fifties.  Interestingly, U.S. and European filmmakers like John Huston, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles, among others, working in the Hollywood system, did not describe their work using this term. Films like The Maltese FalconPhantom LadyThe Woman in the WindowCaught,Laura, Double Indemnity and The Lady from Shanghai reflected a sensibility, a mood, a visual flair, that showcased psychological narratives where the action “however violent or fast-paced was less significant than faces, gestures, words, than the truth of the characters”, as New Yorker critic Richard Brody noted when reviewing two noir retrospectives in 2014. French critics had observed this prevalence of psychological narrative over action, and borrowed the term noir– black –from the title of a collection crime fiction to describe these stylish Hollywood black and white dramas of the forties and fifties.

Ensayo de un crimen (1955) by Luis Buñuel
Even if it is problematic to think of noir as a well-defined genre – like westerns, comedies or musicals – since it is primarily a visual style, determined by particular circumstances and heavily rooted in German Expressionism and a pessimistic worldview, the term has gained purchase, albeit as a “peculiar genre”, in Brody’s words. It has become a standard shortcut to group crime titles, in a large or narrow sense, where character studies are the focus of the films. In the case of Mexican cinema, Luis Buñuel’s Él (1953) and Ensayo de un crimen(1955) fit the description.  When proposing an evaluation of Latin American crime cinema, MOMA entitled its two landmark retrospectives in 2015 and 2016,  “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age” and  “Death is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. 

If Buñuel did not think of his psychological studies of perverted masculinities in terms of a homegrown form of noir, neither did a young Fernando Ayala when he transferred the postwar paranoia of the literary original to Buenos Aires locations and studio sets rendered in the noir palette.  He was an avid moviegoer well versed in genre conventions, and European and American styles; and he had finished his first film film, Ayer fue primavera(1955), a romantic drama reconstructed from flashbacks.

Carlos Cores
Los tallos amargos showcases the increasing paranoia of the protagonist Alfredo Gasper (starring Carlos Cores, 1923-2000, a major star since the 1940s), the Argentine-born son of a German WWI military, with a tormented personality, while portraying Liudas, the Hungarian refugee (Vassili Lambrinos, 1926-2017, a dancer and choreographer born in Egypt) in ambiguous terms, thanks to the clever use of interlocking flashbacks. He is seen as refracted by the protagonist, and later as remembered by his son Jarvis (Pablo Moret). 

In staging the story as an atmospheric crime film, or “policial”, Ayala was ably supported by cinematographer Ricardo Younis (1918-2011), who also had a long and distinguished career in the Argentine film industry.  The reviews of this restored version of Los tallos amargos note that in a 2000 survey the American Cinematographer lists the picture as one the Best Shot Films between 1950 and 1997.  (Beware of the substandard copies of the film found in YouTube!). 

The dream sequence at the beginning of the film is an excellent instance of cinematography and mise-en-scène rendering the protagonist’s fragile ego; it is a visual forecast of Gasper’s unraveling, which unfolds like clockwork as a result of a fateful decision. The budding romance of Gasper’s sister Esther (Gilda Lousek, an upcoming actress with a long career in film and television) and Liuda’s son Jarvis serves as a counterpoint: it restores the moral order at the end of the film, not without irony.   The seeds that have germinated – the “stems” of the original Spanish title -  bring new life, but they carry the weight (“bitter”) of the past.

Rooted in a time and place, Los tallos amargos is a gripping film shaped by the noir conventions of the time. To better grasp what it brought to Argentine cinema in the 1950s, I would like to suggest an analogy with the stunning Argentine neo-noir Relatos salvajes(2014), directed by Daniel Szifrón, sixty years after the Ayala film. Its style and subject matter embody the Argentine zeitgeist of today.


List of sources

Brody, Richard, “Film Noir: The Elusive Genre”. The New Yorker, July 23, 2014. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

“Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. Program Notes, Museum of Modern Art, February 10-16, 2016. https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616

Green Quintana, Roberto, “El vampire negro/Los tallos amargos”. Program Notes, “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”. UCLA Film and Television Archive series, Fall 2017. https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2017/10/28/vampiro-negro-tallos-amargos

Krieger, Clara and Alejandra Portela, Eds, Cine Latinoamericano I: Diccionario de realizadores. Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Jilguero, 1997.

Lerman, Gabriel, “La HFPA ayuda a restaurar una obra maestra del cine latinoamericano”. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, February 10, 2016. https://www.goldenglobes.com/articles/la-hfpa-ayuda-restaurar-una-obra-maestra-del-cine-latinoamericano

Manrupe, Raúl, and María Alejandra Portela, Un diccionario de filmes argentinos. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1995.

Nick Pinkerton, “Dead Can Dance”.  Artforum, February 10, 2016. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064


Wednesday, March 27, 2019

CSUN Cinematheque Spring 2019 Latin Auteur series: "The Official Story" (1985), by Luis Puenzo

At the core of La Historia Oficial lies a political melodrama.  Directed by Luis Puenzo, who ran a successful production company making commercials in the 1980s, the film was a critical success in Argentina and abroad, as well as a box-office smash in the domestic market: the top-grossing picture of 1985, and the second highest of 1986.  La Historia Oficial had a theatrical release in major European countries and in the United States.  It garnered national and international prizes, including an Academy award for best foreign picture in 1986, and the Cannes award for best actress to Norma Aleandro.

The film has come to represent in the minds of Argentine and foreign scholars the way the military regime of 1976-1983 operated against leftist guerrilla groups in the 1970s. Now a part of the Argentine imaginary, La Historia Oficial is seen as a document, albeit fictionalized, on how the relatives of those kidnapped were left to cope with the disappearance of their loved ones.

The film describes the process of political awareness undergone by Alicia Marnet de Ibáñez (Norma Aleandro), a high-school history history teacher married to Roberto Ibáñez (Héctor Alterio), a businessman who has prospered through his ties to the military and foreign investors. The couple has a five-year-old adopted girl, Gaby (Analía Castro), whose birthday they are about to celebrate when the film opens. In the eyes of their family and friends, the Ibáñez are a happy couple. However, through a series of shattering personal events starting in March 1983, at the beginning of the school year (the opening sequence), nine months after the military defeat in the Malvinas/Falkland war, Alicia becomes aware of the military dictatorship’s kidnapping of alleged terrorists, and suspects that their adopted daughter might be the child of a missing couple. Her search for the truth leads her to contact an organization striving to reunite children of the desaparecidos with their grandparents. Alicia believes that Sara Reballo (Chela Ruiz), a working-class woman, is the little girl’s grandmother. The marriage collapses as a result of Alicia’s quest, since Roberto is forced to acknowledge that he has indeed obtained the girl illegally through his connections with the regime.  The last months of the military in power also halt Roberto’s business dealings. The couple part and the future of Gaby remains uncertain in the film’s open ending.

The pursuit of the protagonist is punctuated by a visual pattern of slamming doors, heavy with symbolism. In the loudest slam, marking the climax of film, Roberto brutally closes the bedroom door on his wife’s finger. At the end of her journey, Alicia is made to suffer vicariously the fate of those fellow citizen humiliated and tortured by the Robertos of the regime. She leaves the family home by firmly closing the front door.

La Historia Oficial has been analyzed as a persuasive emotional account of how an important segment of the population suffered from moral and political blindness during the military rule of 1976-1983. The protagonist’s myopia to the events of those years has been justified as a plot device to make the story unfold as an Oedipus narrative: the need to find the truth sets in motion a chain of fateful events. Even more, the protagonist’s passive role in accepting a newborn baby received under suspicious circumstances, without asking questions, has been glossed over or explained as the plausible reaction of a sterile woman anxious to become a mother. Her journey towards moral enlightenment becomes credible only if Alicia’s unrealistic unawareness of the sociopolitical context and her disconcerting ignorance about the origin of Roberto’s wealth and the child are accepted by the viewer.

As in classical tragedy, this quest for truth is punctuated by moments of critical recognition, anagnorisis, that bring about a change of course in the action, peripeteia. These scenes offer the three finest melodramatic peaks of the picture: Alicia’s friend Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe) describes her torture and rape; Gaby’s presumed grandmother recalls the circumstances of Gaby’s parents’ disappearance; Alicia confronts her husband in the climax scene, no holds barred.  

For an Argentine audience, the narrative strategy of the film is clearly perceived from the opening shot, with the singing of the Argentine national anthem. From the onset, there is a metaphoric link between a family torn asunder by the consequences of an immoral act - the fraudulent appropriation of a child - and the political scene between 1976 and 1983, when the armed forces violated constitutional rights to destroy the militant left. In the film, the personal is political, and the microhistory – the emotional breakdown of a family with links to the regime – mirrors the bigger canvas – the collapse of the military dictatorship.

The well-known Argentine children’s song “En el país de Nomeacuerdo, doy tres pasitos y me pierdo” (“In the land of I- don’t -remember I take a step and I’m lost”), by singer composer María Elena Walsh, becomes a leitmotif with unambiguous metaphorical meaning. It is heard non-diegetically, sung or hummed at several key points in the story, punctuatint the final image of the film, Gaby sitting alone on a rocking chair while the camera pulls away and the credits roll on.

Besides the portrayal of the military by allusion and metaphor, the film also takes a direct look at those members of the upper-class profiting form their links to the military.  It is the film’s weakest plot thread, since it relies on stereotypes and clichés, with these scenes staged as sleek commercials for luxury products.

Truth and memory, the two themes interwoven through La Historia Oficial, are sides of the same coin. They are embedded in the title of the film, and by the end, they have given a new meaning to the protagonist’s role as a history teacher. When the credits roll, Greek tragedy has stretched a hand to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: Alicia’s emotional and moral journey through a land where memory is flimsy and history distorted has made her a heroine in full melodramatic mode. The heightened emotional, visual, and stylistic language of the film has been able to convey and articulate the moral dilemmas Alicia has had to navigate. In 1985, La Historia Oficial told Argentines this was their trip too.

When the film opened in the US, it received good critical notices. Roger Ebert wrote that “The Official Story is part polemic, part thriller, part tragedy. It belongs on the list with films like Z,Missing, and El Norte, which examine the human aspects of political unrest. It is a movie that asks some very hard questions. Should Alicia search for the real mother of her daughter? Is her own love no less real? What would be “best” for the little girl? (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-official-story-1985)

On its 30thanniversary, La historia oficialwas restored in 4K based on the original negative, in a project funded by Argentine Film Institute, and shown as part of the Classics section of the Cannes film festival in 2015.

The screening tonight at the CSUN Cinematheque brings to a young college audience, the opportunity to see a landmark in the history of Argentine cinema.

For an interesting perspective on teaching La Historia Oficialto US students, see the experiences of Prof. Nicolas Poppe at Middlebury College: http://www.thecine-files.com/teaching-la-historia-oficial/, published in 2015.


Wednesday, March 13, 2019

CSUN Cinematheque Spring 2019 Latin Auteur series: Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962)

 “A religious education and surrealism have marked me for life.”     
 ~Luis Buñuel

Un chien andalou (1929)
A man sharpens a razor and slits the eyeball of a young woman; a bomb, planted by the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, explodes in Paris. These two scenes—aiming at the jugular of the spectator—open in 1928 and close in 1977 the film career of Luis Buñuel, iconoclast supreme. The work of this Spanish director—32 films in 50 years—marks one of the most provocative uses of cinema to effect a mordant critique of social mores and conventions. Also, in his life and films, Buñuel never stopped wrestling with God and lashing at the Catholic Church. Even though he renounced Catholicism, it remained the hinge of his life and work. 

Anticlerical and blasphemous in a Spanish way, Buñuel used to joke: “I’m an atheist, thank God.” But some of his later works seem to affirm Him by showing the failures of Christian figures, as in Nazarín (1959), Viridiana (1961), and (Simon del desierto, 1965), or in discussing in an original way the dogmas of the Catholic Church, notably The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée, 1969). In its celebration of the centennial of cinema in 1995, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications included Nazarín—a bold choice—among the 15 films in world cinema praised for their religious values.

The philosophical dictum, “I am myself and my circumstance” (Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia), of José Ortega y Gasset, the formidable Spanish intellectual whom Buñuel met in Madrid in the 20s, is especially applicable to the filmmaker. It is impossible to understand Buñuel and his cinema without taking into account the circumstances of his life and background, such as his identity as a Spaniard, the Catholicism into which he was born, his crisis of faith in his early youth, and his adoption of surrealism as a vehicle to channel his artistic impulses.

Early Influences

Buñuel was born in Calanda in the province of Teruel in the region of Aragon in Northeast Spain, on February 22, 1900. His father, Leonardo Buñuel, made a fortune in Cuba before the Spanish-American War and returned to his home village to marry Maria Portolés, a young woman of standing and property. They had a happy marriage blessed by seven children, of whom Luis was the oldest.

He received the religious and intellectual upbringing typical of the affluent and conservative upper class in the provincial capital of Zaragoza at the turn of the century. He was educated in a Jesuit school from 1907 to 1915, a complex experience that would mark him for life. His relationship with the Jesuits oscillated violently between love and reproach, gratitude and ferocious critique. Later, Buñuel’s films would reflect these ambivalent feelings.

He spent his university years in Madrid, where, besides earning a degree in history in 1924, he participated in the lively atmosphere of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a remarkable institution that gathered a number of painters, poets, artists, and intellectuals, later known as the Generation of 1927. Buñuel made formative friendships with Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Ramon Gómez de la Serna, Dámaso Alonso, and other notable figures who wanted to modernize Spanish culture.

Portrait of Buñuel by Salvador Dalí
In 1925, Buñuel moved to Paris, where he not only discovered his vocation as a filmmaker but also immersed himself in the cultural zeitgeist of the city, dada and surrealism. After an apprenticeship under director Jean Epstein and with funds from his mother and the collaboration of Dalí, Buñuel made an experimental short, An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1928). Its plot, which unfolded like a dream, excluded all narrative sense and avoided logical associations. It was intended to shock and still shocks today. In the film, a man played by Buñuel slits a woman’s eyeball (a dead calf was used); another man drags two Marist brothers, a piano, and a dead donkey with a rope; and ants crawl out of a hole in a hand. Two years later, with some involvement from Dalí and financed by French aristocrats, patrons of the avant-garde art scene, Buñuel made the surrealist classic, The Golden Age (L’ âge d’or, 1930), a savage attack on middle-class morality, the Church, and the bourgeois establishment. It was a succès de scandale of epic proportions, which culminated with the banning of the film in France until the early 80s.

After visiting Hollywood for a few months—invited by a French MGM representative who thought the Spaniard’s iconoclastic furor could be harnessed to the studio system—Buñuel worked in Paris dubbing films for Paramount and in Madrid as executive producer of commercial pictures. In 1932, a year after the fall of the Spanish monarchy, Buñuel directed a landmark documentary, Land without Bread (Las Hurdes, 1932), which the Republican government quickly banned. This sociopolitical documentary, played to the music of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, explores the horrific backwardness and subhuman living conditions of an isolated area in the mountains south of Salamanca. Part tragedy, part hallucination, this chronicle is another surrealist call against the established order, mainly the Church and private property. The images still haunt: a donkey killed by bees; hungry, sick, and dead children; and cretins as a result of inbreeding. An example of la España negra (the dark side of Spain), which was painted by Velázquez, Ribera, and Goya and described in picaresque novels, is Buñuel’s Land Without Bread. It introduced a recurring Buñuelian theme with eschatological implications: Material and moral poverty—indeed evil—cannot be redeemed, and human existence under these conditions is hell.

A Filmmaker Exiled

A supporter of the Republic during the bloody Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, Buñuel worked in various propaganda capacities in Spain and France, as well as briefly in Hollywood as technical adviser on portrayals of the Republican cause. After the victory of the nationals and General Francisco Franco, Buñuel became a political exile. With his wife, Jeanne Rucar, and their two small children, he moved first to Los Angeles and then to New York, where between 1939 and 1943 the filmmaker was hired by the Museum of Modern Art to prepare propaganda films for the U.S. Allies.

Pressure resulting from the publication in 1942 of Dalí’s self-serving autobiography, in which he denied his participation in The Golden Age and called Buñuel an atheist, forced the filmmaker to resign. Despite working again in Hollywood for two years dubbing and supervising foreign versions of American films for Warner Bros., Buñuel did not have any directorial opportunities. So in 1946 he accepted an offer to direct a film in Mexico—his first film in over a decade—and settled there until his death in 1983.

After learning to adapt to the budget and time constraints of the Mexican film industry, Buñuel directed 20 of his 32 films. His is an interesting, varied, and immensely entertaining body of work, with a surrealist touch present even in the most hackneyed assignments. Buñuel’s pictures also develop the two themes of his first three experimental works: the clash between desire and social convention; and his subversive critique of the effects of family, culture, state, and religion on an individual. These two themes are the basis for the psychological dramas This Strange Passion(Él, 1952) and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen, 1955), studies of the abnormal sexual behavior of the Spanish hidalgo, or gentleman of Christian virtue.

Abismos de pasión (1953) surrealistically reworks Wuthering Heights, where sexual passion is laced with necrophilic longings and entomological pursuits. Mexican Bus Ride (Subida al cielo, 1951) and Illusion Travels by Streetcar (La ilusión viaja en tranvía, 1953) are allegories about life, birth, love, and desire, unfolding in the enclosed traveling worlds of public transportation. The French-language co-productions Cela s’appelle l’aurore (1956), Death in this Garden (La mort on ce jardin, 1956), and Republic of Sin (La fièvre monte à El Pao, 1960) constitute an underrated political triptych about the moral choices of individuals living in right-wing authoritarian states, metaphors for the Franco regime and Latin American dictatorships. The targets are, unsurprisingly, the army, the police, the conniving bourgeoisie, and a Church that operates under the wings of the powerful.

Buñuel directed two U.S.-Mexican co-productions in English during this period: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) and The Young One (1961). His touch is noticeable in the Defoe classic: a surrealistic dream sequence; metaphysical discussions between Crusoe and Friday about God, free will, and predestination; and the idea that God becomes a useless hypothesis when man is placed in extreme situations. In The Young One, the filmmaker shows another isolated world, centered on the relationship between a virginal adolescent brought up outside of conventional society and three men—a white bigoted gamekeeper, a fugitive black musician, and a reverend who means well but has no moral authority.

Three films were made with complete artistic freedom and stand out during the Mexican period: The Young and the Damned (Los Olvidados, 1950), Nazarín(1959), and The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador, 1962). They are vintage Buñuel in their view of the human condition, and the relationships among man and God, and other men.

The Young and the Damned chronicles in documentary style a social and individual tragedy with a solution left to the “progressive forces of society,” says the opening narrator. The film is Land without Bread transposed to the slums of Mexico City, where tough street children, growing without love and shelter, live and die without redemption. Unlike Shoeshine (1946) and other works of Italian neorealism that may have passing similarities with Buñuel’s film, Los Olvidados does not vie for an emotional connection with the audience. It is a clinical look at the lumpen proletariat, cruel people hardened by a life in hell. It is in the tradition of the Spanish picaresque novel; the blind beggar in Los Olvidados is a direct descendant of the blind man in the classic El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Like in many other Buñuel films, the brutality of life is conveyed on a metaphorical level, with the use of insects and animals—in this case, hens, doves, dogs—to parallel human behavior. A vivid surrealistic dream sequence, where a boy striving to emerge from a sea of evil cannot get food or love from his mother, encapsulates the pessimism of the film. Los Olvidados brought Buñuel back to the international film scene as an artistic force to reckon with.

Nazarín cannot be fully grasped without seeing that it is intended as a parallel to the life, passion, and death of Christ, minus the Resurrection. Based on a 1895 novel by Benito Perez Galdós, Spain’s Dickens, the film traces the radical commitment with which Father Nazario, a priest played by Francisco Rabal, lives the Gospel. Nazario, a modern reincarnation of Don Quixote, wants to do good but fails egregiously. Similar to Cervantes’s novel, Nazarín charts not only the failure of a committed Christian to effect change in an imperfect world but also the priest’s disenchantment with these ideals. Or so it seems, because the ending is ambiguous enough to encompass the Vatican’s praise as well as film critics who note that the priest has actually lost his faith. Buñuel later addresses the collapse of faith in a religious figure—and its replacement by a sense of fraternal solidarity—in Viridiana and Simon of the Desert, two works with explicitly religious themes.

The Exterminating Angel—an ingenious reworking of L’âge d’or using a circular plot structure—is a surrealist parable about the collapse of culture and ensuing descent into barbarism. For unknown reasons, a representative group of the Mexican upper class cannot leave the mansion where they have enjoyed a post-opera supper. Days go by, social conventions are shed, and civilized manners are replaced by bestial behavior. One day, however, the spell is inexplicably broken. But after a Te Deum in the cathedral, the guests find themselves unable to leave the building. In the closing shot, a flock of sheep stampedes into the church.

The Return to Spain

Thirty years after Land without Bread, Buñuel returned to Franco’s Spain to make a film under the auspices of the Ministry of Information, whose censorship board approved the project. Viridiana tells the story of an innocent novice who leaves the convent before making her vows. Viridiana, like Nazario, wants to do good, and after the suicide of her uncle and tutor—an hidalgo who attempted to seduce her—she invites twelve beggars to share her country estate. But the beggars—ugly, evil people, blind men, lepers, and prostitutes—take over the house one day and rape Viridiana. To the sound of Handel’s Hallelujah, Buñuel stages an orgy that culminates around a dinner table, parodying Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Sobered by the futility of her work of mercy, Viridiana forgoes convent life and finds solace in the company of her cousin and his servant-lover. Like Nazario, and as ambiguously, she has abandoned her ideals. A work of maturity and rebellion against the Spain of Buñuel’s childhood and adolescence, Viridiana raised a storm when L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, denounced it as blasphemous.

Simón del desierto (1965)
Simon of the Desert is about the unproductive isolation of a fourth-century hermit saint, who lives on top of a column and is tested by the Devil in the shape of a seductive woman, with whom he goes to a New York discotheque. It was the director’s last Mexican picture, which was released unfinished for lack of funds.

New, Old Themes

Buñuel’s last seven films were made for a French producer, with great creative freedom. He continued dynamiting the world of his youth and its contemporary manifestations. Diary of a Chambermaid (Le journal d’une femme de chambre, 1964), with Jeanne Moreau, portrays a hypocritical French provincial milieu in the 1930s. Belle de Jour (1967), his greatest international success, is a merciless critique of upper-class alienation through his portrayal of a bored housewife, played by Catherine Deneuve, who can only get sexual satisfaction working afternoons as a prostitute. The thin line separating reality and fantasy, marked by the sound of bells, has completely disappeared by the end of the film—tricks of an old surrealist.

Tristana (1970), another devastating critique of Spanish provincial society in the 1930s, returns to the recurring Buñuelian situation of an older man—an hidalgo played by Fernando Rey—corrupting a young innocent woman (Catherine Deneuve) under his tutelage.

The Milky Way (1969), an original time-travel road movie of Spanish ancestry centered on the theological adventures of two present-day French pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela, has elicited opposite reactions. For some, it is a profoundly religious film that invites the secular man to reflect about transcendence. For others, it is a surrealistic and subversive view of dogmas upheld by the Church and the heresies she has fought, like the dual nature of Christ, the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, free will, and predestination.

The surrealist comedies The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (Le fantôme de la liberté, 1974) are hilarious companion pieces that, like The Golden Age and The Exterminating Angel, satirize old Buñuel staples: bourgeois manners, the crushing of desire, and the absurdity of social conventions. The films are made up of unconventionally linked vignettes, including stories within stories, dreams, and fantasies that culminate in the violent, metaphorical destruction of the bourgeois order.

In the ingenious That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir, 1977), Buñuel illustrates for the last time Freud’s vexing question: What does the woman want? An aging Gallic hidalgo (Fernando Rey) becomes obsessed by an elusive Andalusian beauty, played by two very different actresses, the earthy Angela Molina and the icy Carole Bouquet. The film is a long flashback during which the jilted suitor tells his fellow train travelers the Buñuelian vicissitudes of the courtship.

The Church’s Influence

This study of Buñuel is part of the Crisis magazine series on directors whose films reflect a Catholic understanding of the human condition. Filmmakers discussed so far are John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Borzage, Francis Coppola, and Wim Wenders. In spite of their differences in style and themes, these directors share a Catholic common ground to show how their characters deal with life on screen: The human drama is played out in terms of sin and redemption, evil and grace, love, and solidarity. Where does Buñuel, the fervent iconoclast, fit? What is the viewer to make of this will to destroy and liberate, at the heart of his work? How can Christian believers engage in a dialogue with films that challenge their faith and posit the radical loneliness of man in an essentially evil world? In other words, how do we understand Buñuel?

The filmmaker’s autobiography, My Last Sigh(1982), written in collaboration with his longtime screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, provides a point of departure, because Buñuel discusses quite candidly the main forces that shape his work: a life-long rebellion against the 19th-century Spanish bourgeoisie, early religious faith, eroticism and “a perfect conscience of death,” and the lasting effect of his crisis of faith.

The crisis of faith was perhaps unavoidable: Buñuel’s appetite for knowledge and experience could not be contained by an upbringing that seemed to distrust the profane world. This conflict is the primal situation reworked in NazarínViridiana, and Simon of the Desert and to a lesser extent in The Adventures of Robinson CrusoeDeath in This Garden (Father Lizzardi), and Republic of Sin (Vázquez). In these films, a single-minded protagonist, physically or mentally outside of the world (the seculum), sees his ideals tested—with tragic results—when entering the world. The inner turmoil of the spiritual crisis is never revealed, only its devastating effects.

This traumatic crisis liquidated Buñuel’s belief in God and turned him into a militant atheist, with the combative zeal—ironically—of a disciple of St. Ignatius. The crisis also led to another paradox, duly noted by his biographer Francisco Aranda in Luis Buñuel: a Critical Biography (1985): Although the filmmaker abandoned Catholic theology and morality, he still operated from a Catholic mindset, albeit secularized. “I am not ‘one of the flock,’ but how can I deny that I have been marked culturally, spiritually, by the Catholic religion?” Buñuel told two Mexican film critics in a book-length interview, Objects of Desire (1992).

The Last Supper parody in Viridiana (1961)
This paradox is reflected in Buñuel’s cinema, especially in the treatment of evil. His approach to evil and sin lacks the theological dimension found implicit, for example, in the work of Hitchcock and Ford. For both of them, there is a moral structure outside man’s desires, a universe disrupted by sin and redeemed by love. Buñuel’s is not an amoral universe. There is right and wrong, but evil is no mystery. It is just an anthropological given with social, not theological, consequences. Since there is no sin in a Christian sense—the breakup of man’s friendship with God—there is no need for redemption outside of man. “We have to look for God in man,” he commented to a French magazine before the filming of Viridiana.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie  (1972)
The theological consequences of this turn from God to man are reflected in the Buñuelian universe. Faith, hope, and love—the three theological virtues—are laicized and shorn of the transcendental dimension they have, for example, in Ford and Wender’s later films. The dialectic of sin/redemption ceases to operate, and the notion that we are members of one body is replaced by that of the radical loneliness of each individual. In Buñuel’s films, theology becomes pure anthropology, and sin is a social contravention that can be expunged by dynamiting—guerrilla style— institutions like the Church that tell men they are more than human. In this sense, the incisive caricatures of unctuous, mundane, and greedy priests seek to uncover the hypocrisy of an institution, which, in his view, uses the Gospel to achieve a secular agenda. This type of priest—memorably crucified in ÈlNazarín, and Tristana—is so recurrent that it must come from Buñuel’s own experience.

Manuel Alcalá observes that even though the notions of hell and eternal damnation—which so fired the vivid imagination of young Buñuel—have also been stripped of any theological implication, they figure prominently in his cinema. What are Land without BreadThe Young and the Damned, and The Exterminating Angelif not visual renderings of infernal situations, whose tragedy lies in their lack of hope?

Buñuel had a life-long interest in insects,
first seen in Un chien andalou (1929)
The use of black humor and surrealist absurdity cannot temper the tone of restrained pessimism that pervades the sum of Buñuel’s work. Even the happy endings of minor films, like the Mexican comedies and melodramas, clamor for subversive readings. Love is mostly confined to an eroticism that can never be satisfied. There is no distinction between normal and abnormal forms of sexual love. Neither is matrimonial love a healing force. Paradoxically, a man with a long, stable marriage like the filmmaker’s has given the cinema a catalog of bizarre sexual behavior, which in part explains the popularity of his films to this day.

Buñuel’s work is that of a vehement guerrilla fighter, along the lines of an anticlericalism frozen in time, unable or unwilling to see the profound changes that took place in the Church during his lifetime. In the tradition of the Spanish moralist, Buñuel sees that “we do not live in the best of worlds,” but he doesn’t know where a better one is, or how to achieve it. In the process of bombing the Catholic Church, this militant nonbeliever has given us some very intensely religious films. À tout seigneur, tout honneur.
__________________

I published this article in the November 1999 issue of Crisis magazine, with the title "Luis Buñuel's Quarrel with the Church". It was the basis for my introduction to The Exterminating Angel, at the Cal State Northridge Cinematheque, on March 13, 2019.  As an overall view of Buñuel's work, it provides a useful approach.

The original article can be accessed at:  https://www.crisismagazine.com/1999/luis-bunuels-quarrel-with-the-church

Living and teaching film history and esthetics in Los Angeles, I am moved by this photo of Buñuel in Hollywood. Contrarian that he was, he wryly noted:  "Nothing would disgust me more morally than winning an Oscar".   
George Cukor gave a luncheon in honor of Buñuel
when he came to Los Angeles in 1974.
Attendees were William Wyler, Robert Wise, Billy Wilder,
Alfred Hitchcock, Rouben Mamoulian, among others.
 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1973) won the Oscar
for Best Foreign Film

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Gems at the 69th Berlinale: "Fourteen" and "Photograph"

Some films hit you like a machine gun, as is the case of  two knock-out Chinese titles, So Long, My Son, directed by Wang Xiaoshuai (it should win the Golden Bear) and The Shadow Play, by Lou Ye, both graduates of the Beijing Film Academy. Others are a slow burn, hidden gems that can get lost in the shuffle of a festival premiering 124 new films this year. It is always a combination of tips, luck, hunch and opportunity that brings you to works that could get lost in the fog.  A festival has a paralyzing built-in anxiety, difficult to tame but overridden when one stumbles upon pearls like Fourteen, directed by Dan Sallitt, who attended the Film Critical Studies program  at UCLA in the 1970s, and Photograph, by Ritsh Batra (The Lunch Box, 2013).



Tallie Medel (left) and Norma Kuhling (right)
as friends since middle school who live in Brooklyn
Very different in genre, mise-en-scène and approach to narrative, both films deal with emotional turmoil, in friendship and love, very effectively conveyed by tight screenplays and assured direction.  From the opening sequences – all dialogue, no action, long takes, stationary camera - Fourteen feels like a French film by Rohmer and Pialat, spoken in English and set in Brooklyn. (It's an eerie feeling). Unhurriedly, it comes into focus as the record of a friendship since middle school and over a decade between two girls from affluent Westchester county, New York, who struggle in the city as young adults – the stuff of mumblecore films and cable series like Girls, made by directors a generation younger than Dan Sallitt.  What is gripping is that the various dramatic peaks of these lives are off screen, alluded to or cleverly explained by the indirect mean of a bedtime story.  

Writer, director, producer and editor Dan Sallitt
at the Delphi Palast, Berlin
Like Pavel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, the passage of time is not marked by visual flourishes or explicitly telegraphed to the viewers through dialogue. Fourteen requires full attention because these two friends – one sensible (Tallie Medel), the other high strung (Norma Kuhling) – are chiseled with the care a goldsmith gives to intricate details. You blink and you miss them.  Sallitt, who wrote, directed, produced and edited the film over 18 months, makes the point eloquently with the almost four-minute high angle long shot above a suburban train station where seemingly nothing happens.  The long take functions to make the viewer take stock of where the story is at – not to enhance its upheavals as in the recent Roma.  Fourteen places itself in the opposite spectrum of melodrama, and by eschewing almost all context and backstory, except for two dramatic peaks, creates a space where the nature of this friendship, human and universal, can be savored, understood and mourned. The Delphi Palast, where the last screening took place, was full – all 800 seats taken - but you could hear a pin drop.  Dan Sallitt came for a lovely Q&A with the audience of mostly young Berliner. I approached him at the end and introduced myself as a fellow UCLA graduate. He remembered my husband Jonathan Kuntz, his fellow mate, fondly, and he graciously posed for a photo with me.

 In the case of Photograph, the emotional turmoil is romantic in nature, and vividly set against the sprawling background of Mumbai, the third protagonist of this story. Unlike Fourteen, Photograph feeds off a strong context: social, economic, religious and geographic differences in modern India make the potential relationship between a street photographer (Nawasuddin Siddiqui), Hindi, and a middle-class university student (Sanya Malhotra), Muslin, an impossible dream.  The way out of this conundrum is tell the story as a fairy tale, otherwise it would plunge into neorealist waters, or become  the social thesis drama it obviously doesn’t want to be.  The fairy tale structure makes it a whimsical confection, one that delights in winking an eye to Bollywood popular culture by having the protagonists a few times to a local movie house, where we can only listen to the song-and-dance numbers.  This interplay between what is seen and what is implied – the city and the unspoken differences of its inhabitants - is interesting to watch; the open end it proposes may be the only optimistic way out.  Photograph works as a believable story because, like Fourteen, it hinges in the tight direction of the actors, without a hint of improvisation, keeping realism at bay.  The goal is restraint, going for small gestures to convey meaning, like the shy and tenderly mismatched attempts to hold hands at the end of the film.

Photograph will be streamed by Amazon Prime soon, and Fourteen is looking for distribution.